Episodes
Wednesday Oct 25, 2023
”Perspectives For a Culture in Crisis:” The Soul of the Soul - Game Changers
Wednesday Oct 25, 2023
Wednesday Oct 25, 2023
We quite naturally and quite appropriately presume that to live in the world, we must understand the world. We know quite well that to navigate this complicated and frequently fragile existence of ours, as well as have any hope of emerging on top in some form or another, we must understand what we’re navigating. If we don’t understand the terrain around us, and if we’re not acutely aware of the nuances both large and small that cut across it we risk not only being irreparably lost, but we also risk being destroyed in being lost. Such a perspective is certainly sound.
However, we feel that we must do far more than just understand the world that we live in. Knowledge is information, but it is not necessarily transformation. In reality, having knowledge alone is to live as nothing more than an alien with knowledge. Yet, to keep up with the world, or to get to a place where the world has to keep up with us, we have to be far more than aliens. We must throw off that which is alien and become more of that which is the world. Subsequently, our lives are bent and spent on becoming what’s around us, rather than becoming what’s within us.
What Is Within Us?
Whatever’s within us, whatever it is that we are at our core, whatever that is often takes a backseat to what we feel we should become. What we should become, or so we think, is a spitting image of the world. We rigorously cultivate this image, assuming that such an image most effectively fits the world and therefore can most effectively navigate the world. Therefore, we become what we see around us, rather than becoming what’s within us. Subsequently, what’s within us eventually becomes lost to us.
Nonetheless, there are those people who plumb the depths of their souls and press into the innermost caverns of their hearts. There are those most robust adventurers who realize that the greatest adventures of all don’t lie without, rather they lay within. There are those who have come to the priceless realization that to effectively navigate the world is not to become the world, but to become the fullest self living in the world. And these are the world-changers that we would be wise to admire, and to which we would be equally wise to aspire.
The Thoughtful Rebels
I have been munificently impacted by many such thoughtful rebels. I have seen the many who build inward-out, rather than outward-in. There are those who daily stand in the gap and create the space for others to find out who they are so they’re not told who they are. There are many who have challenged the norms, rejected the trends, stood firm when others fled, and held the line on an intruding world so that those around them could be in the world, but not of the world. There are those wisely rogue people who run against the world in order to change the world.
The Game Changers
And these are the game-changers who were birthed by those who themselves first changed the game. These are the movers and the shakers that walked in the footsteps of others who were constantly moving things and shaking what was left. These are astutely discerning people who understood the world, but differentiated themselves sufficiently from the world so as to not be shackled by norms, swayed by trends, bullied by fads, baffled by the mediocrity, and capsized by the ever-changing currents of culture, societal expectations and politics.
Many of these game-changers were game-changers because of others who refused to let them be anything else. I applaud those bold people, the fearless people, the sacrificial people who refused to bend to culture or trends so that they’re friends and children might grow into who they are, verses turning into what the world is. I can count innumerable men and women who created the space and ran interference at great cost to themselves to guide others who knew who they were, verses being children who were trying to figure out who the world was telling them that they are.
So who will we be? How will we live out our lives? Will we be what the world demands we be, or will we be what our soul invites us to be? And in making those decisions, will we look beyond ourselves to create a space for others to do the same?
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Friday Oct 20, 2023
”Perspectives For a Culture in Crisis:” I Believe - What I Want to Believe
Friday Oct 20, 2023
Friday Oct 20, 2023
We always have, and we always will have the intrinsic need to believe in something. Life is a journey whose demands will always exceed whatever personal assets we might possess in an attempt to meet those demands. Life always has and life always will require more of me than I have within myself to give it. All of my accumulated resources meticulously gathered and shrewdly coordinated in the most strategic manner possible will always fall achingly short of meeting even the most primitive and pared down demands of living life. And because that’s the case, I’ve got no alternative but to extend myself outside of myself and believe in things that are bigger than me. I not only need to believe, I want to believe.
I want to believe, especially in a world that seems to be falling apart in places that I never believed it would fall apart. In the midst of all of the unnerving unraveling that I am helpless to stop, there are things I’d like to believe to calm my heart and steady my soul. There’s some sustaining and comforting beliefs that I doggedly want to hold onto that provide me a sense of desperately needed peace in the tumultuous storms that seem to be roaring across the landscape of our culture. I want to believe.
Yet, peace is not enough. To believe in something that can bring me peace, but whose power and reach ends at peace is simply not enough. I need more than that. I need something that can do more than just weather the storms of life and bring me out on the other side with as few bruises as possible. I want to believe in things that have relentlessly stood the test of time, every time, throughout all of time. I want to believe in things that won’t fall to the abject recklessness of our times, this time or any time. But far more than that, I want to believe in things that can handily wrestle any storm into full submission. And I want to dare to believe in things that are so pristinely confident and courageously authentic that they could keep the next storm from ever daring to roll across the landscape of our culture again if we all simply chose to believe in those things. I want to believe.
I want to believe in things that have the breathtaking power and the unobstructed reach to reconstruct and reclaim whatever’s left when the storm is over. I want to believe that storms are part of life and that they come into the sinful and fallen world that we live in as a natural part of our fallen existence. But far beyond that, I want to believe in things powerful enough and audacious enough to transform the wreckage of the storm right in the middle of the very storm itself. I want to believe in things that can reconstruct and reclaim in a manner that handily resurrects implausible beauty out of what seems to be unredeemable carnage. I want to believe that no storm ever conceived can come close to having the force or the power to dislodge or destroy the things that I believe in. I want to believe in believing because if I can’t believe in something, what do I have?
What I’d Like to Believe
I Want to Believe That Mankind is Inherently Good
In the storms, I’d like to believe that mankind is inherently good. I want to believe that even though mankind can act in gruesome ways that push the edge of evil out to appalling places and reign destruction in ways previously unfathomable, that even then there is still some thread of something good weaving itself undaunted through the core of our core. I want to believe that we’re lost, that we’re drowning in greed and selfishness, and that we’ve taken to treacherous paths that descend to gaping depths of great atrocity. But I want to believe that those things don’t define us. Despite our frequently heinous behaviors, I want to believe that we’re better than that because I want to believe that there is no point that we could ever reach from which we cannot be redeemed. I want to believe that mankind is inherently good despite all the apparently inherent evil that would scream otherwise. I want to believe that there is enough good in all of us to be marvelously good if we’re daring enough to ruthlessly rid ourselves of everything that keeps us from being marvelous. I want to believe this.
I Want to Believe That a Single Voice for Good is Never Too Small
I want to believe that a single voice for good has a vibrant tenor, a wholly unsullied tone, a dynamically firm volume, and a magnetic quality about it that it will always be heard above, and around, and beyond any chorus of evil despite how loud it might be. I want to believe that voices for good always have an undeniable and unapproachable genuineness about them that renders all fraudulent voices completely exposed and entirely drown out. Too often it seems that a single voice for good is quickly submerged under the surging tsunami other voices which are anything but good. Evil and treachery seem to be boisterous and arrogant, bellowing with an unashamed narcissistic quality that aims to quash any voice with even the remotest hint of good in it. I want to believe that a voice for good will incessantly rise above the most bellicose volume that evil can produce, and that it will always render evil frustrated in its inability to drown out a single voice for good. I want to believe that single voice can do exactly that. I want to believe this.
I Want to Believe That Good is Eternal and Evil is Temporal
I want to believe that evil is not part of what this was originally all about. I want to believe that evil was not an original component of creation as it was sketched out on the original drawing board innumerable eons ago. I want to believe that evil is an infestation that wormed its way into our existence and as such can be eradicated because it is an infestation, and only an infestation. I want to believe that it is a cancerous plague that has no claim of originality in the original design. I want to believe that evil is a temporary foe that lives on a short leash of time, and that every battle finds that leash shortened one more constricting link. I want to believe that good will ultimately exterminate evil in a manner so complete that every battle will be forever laid to rest, and that the memory of those battles will likewise be laid to rest, and that good itself will be able to securely rest for the rest of eternity. I want to believe this.
I Want to Believe That God Uses Evil to Advance Good
I want to believe that God will not be thwarted by the greatest exploits that evil can conjure up. I want to believe that evil will always find itself obliterated by its own evil as God seizes it, shapes it into invincible good, and then sends it hurtling right back into the heart of the very evil from which it came. I want to believe that the greater the treachery and the more profound the wickedness, the more substance God has to mold good from. That in the hands of God, everything vile is the raw material from which He can forge something astonishingly marvelous. And that everything foul provides the very flames within which these good and great things are forged. I want to believe that in the firing, that which God has forged becomes something so hardened that the most intense fires of evil itself cannot even remotely singe it. I want to believe that as evil escalates in intensity, it only creates a greater abundance of raw material from which good is forged, fired, and fired against evil. I want to believe this.
I Want to Believe that Believing is Not Childish
Believing is not childish nor is it naïve. It’s not some escapist refuge where the weak flee in the face of the daunting cultural upheavals that now beset our culture and hound those of us who believe. Believing will make us a ready target for those who don’t believe, and it will draw skeptics and naysayers to us as bees to honey. Believing means that we invest in what we can’t see, we hand ourselves over to that which we can’t control, and we cast our lot with the eternal verses the less demanding demands of the temporal. Belief is not for the frail or faint-hearted as belief will demand belief of us, which is a demand far beyond most anything else in our lives. And because of those realities, I want to believe.
Believing is being courageous enough to relentlessly hold onto the truth even when the derogatory actions of everything around us would attempt to entirely discredit the truth, smear the truth, and completely supplant it with falsehoods dressed in the look-a-like garments of truth. By making the uncompromising commitment to stand on our beliefs, we declare that the truth on which we have chosen to stand is nothing of unreliable myth or childish fantasy. And that will certainly draw the ire of many. Believing is standing on the truth even when everything else around us has fallen into cinders and ash, and the truth on which we’re precariously standing continues to be pounded by everything that hates the very truth that we’re standing on. And for all of those reasons, I want to believe.
I Want to Believe in God
Believing is costly. Believing is sacrificial. Believing is what the majority of the world doesn’t have the guts to do, but it is the only thing to do. I want to believe this. And of all the things that I want to believe, I want to believe in God above and beyond all of them. To believe in God in the face of everything that would tell us not to believe is the highest calling of mankind, and the greatest feat of our existence. To believe in God is to extend ourselves beyond our finite existence and cast our belief out into the unfathomable reaches of the infinite. To believe in God is to stake our lives on something that the world declares as a mistake. But to believe in God is to wager everything on the person who created everything, and no mistake could ever arise out of that. Without God, I don’t have the capacity to believe in anything else anyway as everything emerges from Him. And so, I want to believe in God, I want to believe in every one of His promises, and I want to believe in all of the things that He allows me to believe in. I want to believe. With all my heart I want to believe. And I want you to believe as well.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Wednesday Oct 18, 2023
Wednesday Oct 18, 2023
I am only one. That’s all I am. I am only one and I will always be only one. I was born as one, I will live as one, and on the day of my death I will die as one. In this journey that we all call life, I am and will always be completely restricted and wholly limited to being one and only one. And all of those daunting realities strike me as miserably pathetic and colossally discouraging. Sadly, I am only one.
I am only one in a mammoth sea of surging and foaming humanity within which my main and often single goal is simply to survive. The winds will blow and the tides will roll in whatever way they spuriously and often callously choose to blow and roll. And whatever choice they make will dictate the ways that I will go because I’m far too small to swim against them, and far too weak to even dare chart a different course from theirs. I am only one, and being one doesn’t appear to be enough.
I am only one, and because I am, even the reality of my existence is of little note. In the span of this minute, or this hour, or this day, or in the span of history itself my existence will not only be largely disregarded, it won’t even register enough to acknowledge that I was here in the first place. Even the briefest notation that I have made or will make on the pages of history will be entirely lost in the seemingly infinite volumes of tightly written copy that stretch from mankind’s earliest moments to his eventual demise because I am only one.
Living as Being Only One
And so, because I am only one, I relegate myself to being only one. And in relegating myself to being one and only one, I unwittingly embrace the limitations that I perceive are part and parcel of being one and only one. I suit-up in the pathetic apparel of powerlessness, I chart a path of capitulation that’s dictated by the insensitive winds and tides of life, and I bow to the lamentable goal of surrender because I figure that that’s about as good as it gets. And then in some sort of tense angst, I hunker down and wait for whatever’s going to happen to me, letting my mind spin in wild gyrations as I frantically attempt to figure out how I’m going to deal with whatever’s going to happen when it eventually happens.
What Does Being One Really Mean?
What will I do with the fact that I am only one? I am only one in a world that’s spiraling. I am only one in a world that’s rapidly redressing itself in garments that are far from the ethics, morals and values within which it was clothed at birth. I am only one in a culture that’s lost its moorings and is finding itself on a dangerously churning sea that the culture has cleverly labeled “progressive thinking” or “cutting-edge” or “liberal thinking” in order to avoid the implications of living on such perilous seas. I am only one in a world driven by the insatiable gluttony of selfishness rather than the spirited nourishment that comes from selfless living and self-effacing choices. I am only one in all of that.
But I Am One
But I am one, and that is infinitely better than being “none.” I am one, which puts me on equal footing with everyone else. Every single person in human history who impacted history in ways either large or small faced the same exact dilemma that I am faced with: they were “one” and no more than one. I am only one, but I do not stand as empty or hollow or void. Quite the opposite. This “one” that I am comes tightly packaged with innumerable gifts, talents and abilities that stand at the ready. I am only one, but that “one” that I am is entirely and irrevocably different from any other “one” that has ever lived in the entire expanse of human history. I am only one, but I have inspiring dreams and vitally rich visions for life that are unlike those held by anyone else. I am only one, but I have unbridled access to everyone other “one” around me. Oh yes, I am only one, but I am “one.”
The Opportunity in Being “One”
I am unbelievably privileged to be one, particularly the “one” that I am. I don’t think I’d really want it any other way. But I only get one shot at being “one.” I get this one single, sole opportunity to take this “one” that I am and use it to make a difference in all the other “ones” around me. I have the privilege of impacting the “ones” around me, who will in turn impact other “one’s,” who will in turn impact yet other “ones” . . . and on it goes. I can be one person who impacts the world “one” person at a time, and in doing so I can potentially impact all of the “ones” in all of the world. That’s not a bad deal. So, I’d be wise to take advantage of this one and only one shot I get at this.
It might be wise to consider that I am only one, yet I live in a world of “ones.” That means that I am uniquely suited to impact other “ones” like me. I am what they are. They are what I am. We are all the same. And because that’s the case I have the unique advantage of speaking into their lives because I’m living out their lives, and they’re living out mine. Our existence is shared, our experiences are similar, our joys are pretty much the same and our pain is familiar to all of us. We walk through the same life, with the same experiences and the same challenges. As one and only one person, I am perfectly suited to speak directly into the lives of all the other “one’s” around me. So, why don’t I?
The Fears of Being “One”
The Fear of Not Being Enough
I think that we fear that being “one” is not being enough. Being one is too often seen as being inadequate. The world out there is not some massive mass of people. It is a collection of individuals. By and large, those individuals experience life pretty much the same way that we do. The world is a collection of “ones.” It’s a collection of people that are each one individual just like we are one person. While being “one” makes us perfectly suited to impact all the other “ones” around us, we fear that being one is not enough.
The Fear that We Can’t Be Loud Enough
I also think that we fear that our single voice is not loud enough. We don’t have the volume to be heard over the raucous, roar and interminable noise in our world. We can’t possibly scream loud enough or long enough to be heard in the ruckus and racket that defines the world around us. So our voices are drowned out. Yet, we need to remember that we’re not speaking to the world around us. We’re speaking to the “ones” around us. And because that’s the case, we’re plenty loud enough.
The Fear of Being Rejected
I think that maybe our greatest fear is that we will be heard, and that in being heard we’ll be rejected or discounted or blown-off. It seems that our single biggest fear is rejection. What if we’re heard and in the hearing, we’re labeled as stupid, naïve or ignorant? What if we’re heard and then we’re slapped with accusations of being politically incorrect, culturally ill-informed, or being something of a faith-based moron? What if we take a stand? What if we refuse to compromise? What if we speak against the toxicity that’s seeping into the lives around us? What if what we’re saying isn’t popular or trendy or politically correct?
The Opportunity of Being “One”
I am only one in a mammoth sea of surging and foaming humanity within which my main and often single goal is simply to survive. But I am one, and my oneness is sufficient to forgo surviving and embrace living. The winds will blow and the tides will roll in whatever way they spuriously and often callously choose to blow and roll. And whatever choice they make does not have to dictate the ways that I will go because I am one, and because I am I can swim against them, and dare to chart a different course from theirs. I am only one, and being one is enough.
I am only one, and because I am, the reality of my existence can change the reality of everyone around me. In the span of this minute, or this hour, or this day, or in the span of history itself my existence can be noted, and because I am one it can register enough to acknowledge that I was here. The briefest notations that I have made or will make on the pages of history will add moving lines of inspiration in the seemingly infinite volumes of tightly written copy that stretch from mankind’s earliest moments to his eventual demise because I am “one.”
You have one chance at being “one.” You have been granted one life to touch the other “ones” around you. Being one is being enough. Life’s about being intentional about being the best “one” that you can be, and intentionally touching all the other “ones” around you in a manner that transforms them “one” at a time. In transforming the “ones” in our world we will eventually transform our world. So, go be the “one” that you are. Step up in a world that’s spiraling, confront a culture that has redressed itself, and seize the tattered lines of a nation that has lost its moorings. Be the “one” that you were designed to be and change the world by being that “one.”
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Friday Oct 13, 2023
”Perspectives For a Culture in Crisis:” A Noble Calling - A Noble Response
Friday Oct 13, 2023
Friday Oct 13, 2023
At times, the innumerable dialogues regarding the state of our nation appear to be less dialogues and more something akin to agenda mongering and rights crusading. It seems that we have hijacked the solemn rights and sacred liberties afforded us and have forced them into servitude around our ego-centric agendas and myopic special interests. The altar of self is where nations perish. And on that altar we have too often found ourselves tediously picking apart the fabric of liberty and meticulously editing the founding principles of this nation so that we might justify those agendas and rationalize those interests in the name of the very freedom we are abusing.
In response to these actions, leaders and heralds of debatable origins spout bold platitudes and chart even bolder courses that often have little substance and are void of the balance achieved through the merging of wisdom seasoned by time, the vision gifted through deep struggle, and the astuteness afforded by heritage. It seems that we are adrift on the tides of whimsy instead of the currents of calling, and that the sails borne by this ship of state are too often driven by the fickle winds of politically-correct agendas and bane opportunists instead of buoyed firm by the hard-core values born of faith and legacy.
And has the insanity of such realities been adopted as our norm? Has our identity as a proud people become the mess that we’ve permitted it to become? Is this who we are, and are we satisfied with those who of their limited vision and selfish notions run on anemic platforms that perpetuate this very mentality while at the very same time saying those platforms do not? And in the mess of it all, have we chosen to follow those who talk about what has perished with themselves having little to no idea of what has actually perished?
A Longing Undefined
There seems to be a longing born of a great absence. And there is likewise a passionate searching arising from that absence that appears to be seizing this nation today. In a malaise spawned of comfort we have increasingly distanced ourselves from the founding principles of our nation, yet we have not distanced ourselves so far that we fail to feel the bruising impact of this profound absence. And it is within this perplexing state that the soul of an entire nation of people are finding themselves plagued by a sense that something has perished that should never have perished. And in this, there is an ever-stirring sense that it is somehow our solemn duty to find this thing that has perished and restore it so that this cherished nation might rise to heights that excel those summited at even at its most glorious moments.
The Core Challenge
While it may appear simplistic, I would suggest that we begin with something simply powerful. I would suggest that this grand undertaking might begin by reclaiming two simple yet potently unifying principles upon which this nation was rigorously founded.
First, I would suggest that freedom that is not exercised for the common good is freedom absconded and assaulted. Freedom exercised for self is nothing more than greed in disguise, for to hoard assets of any kind is to simultaneously move someone else somewhere else into a deeper state of impoverishment. And to create scandalous agendas driven by self-interest is to sequester others with the shackles of our unrestrained ambitions. Therefore, freedom rightly exercised on behalf of the person standing next to us is impoverishment decisively crushed under the heels of liberty, and spurious agendas wholly exposed under the piercing light of principle. And when these things transpire, freedom is free to be free. And nothing man can devise can stand in the way of that.
Second, I would further suggest that morals abandoned as a means of granting ourselves permission that these morals would not have granted us is freedom traded for license. Such a trade-off is nothing less than cultural suicide. Freedom is never license, and we would be wise to understand that the distinction between the two is so utterly profound that they cannot exist in proximity to one another. Rather, freedom is the manifestation of a deeply held confidence that if we are afforded choice, mankind is innately principled by morals and sufficiently sacrificial in nature due to an adherence to these morals that we will fight all lesser impulses and consistently choose with selfless integrity. Without these timeless morals, decay and anarchy will be our lot. With them, the impossible will be our servant.
A Noble Calling
It is my belief that we are a far greater people than we have chosen to become. I would stand by the conviction that we are not what we have fallen to, and inherently we know this. And in the carnage of freedoms abused and morals abandoned there yet lies tremendous potential. And that potential lies not in legislative bodies, or towering institutions, or stirring platitudes, or political platforms of any design.
Rather, this potential resides in each of us. For great nations are built on individual people all of type and sort who seize the principles of freedom for all, who zealously hold to timeless morals despite the cost, and who join with other like-minded people in an indomitable march of mankind that nothing in all of mankind can stand against. It is the common man and the common woman who intentionally lives out these principles in their sphere of influence, whether that be large or small, that changes lives, awakens nations, and alters history.
May we all take such stands. And as a result, may there emerge a ground swell of epic restoration unprecedented that sweeps our hearts, seizes our souls, and restores the greatness that has been the enduring hallmark of this great nation.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Wednesday Oct 11, 2023
Wednesday Oct 11, 2023
The majesty of our humanity and the capabilities laid out within us are nothing short of marvelous; so much so that we are barely cognizant of it. All of us run thick with untapped potential. We are rich with possibility and formidably equipped to tease the cusp of the impossible and to overcome it in the teasing. The essence of our being is immense beyond words and the breadth of it eclipses any syntax to frame it all. Despite the incomprehensible complexity of it all, the entirety of this essence is precisely consolidated and ingeniously joined so that the full measure of it might be released without any of it wasted or missed in the releasing. We are crafted to enhance all that exists around us and to make everything immeasurably more than what is. We are marvelous in ways so grand that such marvel escapes us although it resides right within each of us. Indeed, we are created in just this way.
This potential is not something of muse, as we might presume it to be since we tend to see so little of it. It’s not some hollow ideal that is more the trappings of some imaginative author who spins such ideas because they don’t have the courage to face the realities of who or what we really are. This is not about some feeble attempt to bolster our belief in ourselves as we watch the worst of ourselves create a world that we’re turning into the worst of itself. This potential is real. Very real. It may visit us rarely as it is much easier to access the lesser side of ourselves. But, it is real and it is always waiting.
Playground Feuds and Turf Wars
We have misplaced the majesty of our humanity in the lesser battles that we readily (and rather ignorantly) join. We cast ourselves as heroes selflessly battling for the soul of a community, a family or a nation when in fact we are engaged in playgrounds feuds of no greater importance than those played out on elementary playgrounds. We lay claim to some turf, which is less about what the turf might actually be and more about the fact that it’s turf (whatever it might be). We see ourselves on some colossal pilgrimage born of calling or destiny or the rallying of the masses against some great evil, however we have justified it. It must be pointed out that at times the pilgrimages are in fact colossal and of significant importance, but too many times what’s colossal is the appetite of our egos verses the worthiness of the venture. And so, too often we engage in these dirty little mongering turf wars that are more the stuff of mud-slinging than anything that might raise up humanity or change the course of history itself.
We wallow in the bane of blustering banter and then we gorge it fat on reckless arguments whose goal is to win, with us long having forgotten what exactly it is that we’re trying to win. Everything becomes a tit-for-tat circus of push and shove that might be attributed to two toddlers fighting over a toy that neither of them really wants in the first place. The focus becomes on finding some weakness, some point of hidden vulnerability, some crack in the proverbial armor that we can exploit in the pursuit of pursuing. We want to posture ourselves as some sort of valiant and sturdy victor, and if perchance we fall to the throes of defeat we then position ourselves as the victimized victim whose defeat clearly illustrates the impenetrable validity of their cause. And in the depravity and insanity of all of this we have misplaced the majesty of our humanity and we have wholly abandoned our calling.
To Reclaim Our Majesty
Might it be time to be accountable to who we’ve become so that we can make ourselves accountable to what we can be? Are we willing to divest ourselves of all the lesser things that we have elevated as greater things and engage in both a pointed and painful evaluation of who we’ve become? And once we’ve done that, are we brave enough to look at the damage that we’re incurred in the becoming? Can we relinquish our claim to whatever bit of turf we’ve claimed and lay our playground feuds to rest in deference to a cause far greater than the tiny space that we occupy? Can we shake ourselves out of ourselves sufficiently to wake up to the far greater things that lay ‘round about us? Can we begin to see others as less enemies and more people whose differing views may inform our own? At what point we will understand that partnership and camaraderie must be preserved even when differences of beliefs or opinions would do their level best to blast us into warring camps? When will we forfeit what we’ve become in order to become something so vastly superior to what we’ve become?
It’s not that such a shift is impossible (despite the fact that the behaviors exhibited in our world might suggest otherwise). But in the face of the reckless insanity all around us, will we dare to dare? Will we raise ourselves up to embrace the fullness of our humanity? Will we cast off the scourge of selfish agendas and the saber-rattling born of insatiable egos? Will we be what we’ve chosen not to be at whatever cost we might pay to do so, recognizing that the cost of not doing so is far, far greater? Will we shed all that we’ve become to become all that we can be? In essence, will we reclaim the majesty of our humanity as it was created and tenderly fashioned to be?
I Believe
I am utterly confident in our ability to do all of those things. I have great hope in humanity. I have even greater hope in the God that bestowed us with abilities that in fact mirrored His own. And for that reason, I have a pervading and insatiable hope. Though some might say so, I do not believe that kind of hope to be misplaced. I believe in us; in you and me. I believe that we have not done well, but I believe we can yet do very well. I believe in something better. I believe that we can join together in a mutual assault on the mounting challenges in our world instead of engaging in mounting assaults on each other. I believe, and I hope that everyone of us might join me in that belief. And in that joining might we rigorously inventory how we can be different. And then let us go and begin the process of making things different. Let us reclaim the majesty of our humanity in the care of humanity.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Finally, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Tuesday Oct 10, 2023
Podcast Short: We Are More - Understanding Our Capacity
Tuesday Oct 10, 2023
Tuesday Oct 10, 2023
We Are More - Understanding Our Capacity
“Whatever you see within yourself, let it be the whole of yourself. For too often we have been brutalized by our own sense of inadequacy and we’ve been held hostage to the lesser choices born of such a debilitating sense of self. Know this, that latent within you there lies more than ample resources begging to be called forth to smash the chains forged of such an incapacitating sense of self. And it is my prayer that you would press against everything within you that would hold you back, and that you would raise whatever voice you have and extend that call.”
You are more than you realize. A lot more. You’ve probably heard that before, and if you haven’t, you’re long overdue. You are more than you realize. But the thing is, we don’t feel that we are ‘more.’ If anything, the things that happened to us would suggest the opposite…that we’re less than what we hoped we were (and probably a whole lot less). Whether that’s failure (in any of the million different ways that we fail), or ridicule, or jobs lost, or relationships that blew up, or dreams that went up in smoke, or friends that walked away, or opportunities that drifted away, or family members who were critical to the point that we wished they went away…or whatever it might be. The statement that “we are more than we realize” just doesn’t seem to fit this stuff.
In my recent book, “The Self That I Long to Believe In,” I wrote this:
“The majesty of our humanity and the capabilities laid out within us are nothing short of marvelous; so much so that we are barely cognizant of it. That in and of itself may be why we don’t recognize them and therefore don’t believe that they exist. All of us run deep with untapped potential that is rustling just under the surface of our lives waiting to be unleashed.”
We are ‘more.’ Our circumstances don’t have the power to refute that or change that. For sure, our circumstances can lead us to believe that we’re not ‘more,’ and they can be very convincing in doing that. Our circumstances can also lead us to believe that we’re a whole lot less than we thought ourselves to be, and those circumstances can be incredibly convincing as well. But our capacity exceeds the failures that we experience and the criticisms that are thrown in our faces. Our abilities are not defined by what people have said, or the choices that we have made. Our abilities exceed all of those. They are greater than the limits of our imaginations, and they are not limited by people or choices that have proven to be less than imaginative.
That “more” will always be there whether you use it or not. It sits at the ready whether we recognize it or not. We are ‘more.’ That’s not the issue. The issue is will we understand that we are ‘more,’ and will we allow that ‘more’ begin to shape us into ‘more.’
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Tuesday Oct 03, 2023
Podcast Short: Integrity - To Understand and Live It
Tuesday Oct 03, 2023
Tuesday Oct 03, 2023
Integrity - To Understand and Live It
Integrity. You’ve heard that “Integrity is doing the right when nobody’s watching.” It’s not about being a crowd pleaser, or working to get some sort of edge. It’s not agenda driven, other than we do the right thing for no other reason than it’s the right thing…and that’s not an agenda. That’s a conviction. It’s not about the cost of doing the right thing, or the long-term effects, or the short-term effects, or whether it will be popular or not so popular. It’s not about the response of a person, or an organization, or a certain cultural group, or some philosophical leaning, or anything like that at all. It’s doing the right thing for no other reason than it’s the right thing. That’s it.
Now, a lot of people ask what the right thing is. And in our culture, the right thing is too often based on the wrong criteria (or at least a terribly skewed one). In the culture today, the right thing is typically based on its level of acceptance, whether that’s in our social group, or among our co-workers, or in some organization that we’ve aligned ourselves with, or it fits the current cultural climate. Is it politically-correct, or tolerant, or does it embrace diversity (whatever that might be at any given moment). Often it’s these criteria that define something as the right thing. But the right thing is never defined by whether it adheres to an agenda or not, and it’s not driven by whether it happens to be popular or vogue or trendy. The right thing will always be bigger than any of that, and it will never succumb to any of our puny definitions and our fleeting agendas.
So, what is the right thing anyway? Well, here’s an idea that’s probably not all that popular or vogue or trendy. But here’s an idea. Jesus put it this way. He said, “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
Now, maybe you’re not a religious person, or maybe you’re not really a people person, or maybe you’re not either of these. However, the principle is basically the same…am I acting out of love? Love is not tolerance. Love is not permissive. Love is not about diversity. It’s not about embracing some cultural ethic because it liberates people to chase what (in the end) is going to destroy them. It’s not about liberty defined as permission to indulge in behaviors that will do nothing but indulge us to our own demise. Love isn’t about any of that.
It’s about understanding that there are an immovable set of ethics, morals and values that in the current culture have been labeled as constraining, antiquated, irrelevant, out-moded, or any other number of other definitions that have been assigned to them. And love understands that we can incessantly label these ethics, morals and values in these ways, but those labels won’t change the fact that what these ethics, morals and values are trying to protect us from remains unchanged. Love will not give ourselves permission to destroy ourselves, even though we give ourselves permission to do that. Love understands that in the scope of this existence there are principles that if ignored or defied will send us to our own destruction. And while our culture would ignore such truths, love with not. And it is this stubborn refusal to ignore these truths, and to commit to abide by them regardless of the cost that are the hallmarks of this thing that we call ‘integrity.’ Integrity is the refusal not to love, despite whatever that might cost us. Be advised, being a person of integrity comes a great price. But the price of not being a person of integrity is infinitely greater.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Friday Sep 29, 2023
Being a Lamp That’s Lit
Friday Sep 29, 2023
Friday Sep 29, 2023
Jesus calls us to be the "light of the world." The fact is, we are all lamps. We all have the capability to cast light into a darkened world. And furthermore, we can actually cast a compelling and far-reaching light if we choose to.
But even though we are a lamp with great potential, is that lamp ever lit? Are our lives ever really bright and casting something hopeful into the darkness around us. Yes, we are all lamps. But few of us are lit. And the question is, "Are you a lamp that's lit?" The answer to that question will have immense bearing on your life and the lives of those around you.
Discover additional podcasts as well other resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.
Tuesday Sep 26, 2023
Podcast Short: Thinking It’s Over When It’s Not
Tuesday Sep 26, 2023
Tuesday Sep 26, 2023
Thinking It's Over When It's Not
It’s over…we tell ourselves. It’s over. Whatever it might be (or might have been) it’s gone and there’s no getting it back. The loss is too big. The obstacles are too daunting. Things have changed so much that whatever we lost no longer has a place in the current reality that we’re living in. We’re one person (just one person) trapped in a downward spiral that’s far more powerful than all of us put together. The glass isn’t half empty. The fact is, there is no glass. We can’t pick up where we left off because where we left off...left. It’s over…so we think.
In processing all of this for myself, I wrote this quote:
“The last time I saw it, its hull was crushed and it laid helpless against the incessant swells that rolled up upon the shallows within which it laid canted and broken. Yet, in the hands of a seasoned sailor who saw potential in the carnage, it was hauled out the swells, lovingly repaired, and the next year it pushed out past the swells that had held it helpless and it sailed again. And although our hulls are crushed beyond hope of repair and we find ourselves helplessly awash in the incessant swells of our sin, with God we too can sail again.”
Sometimes things are ‘over’ only because we believe them to be over. We’ve been told that they’re over. Or everyone around us says that they’re over. Or the cultural climate seems to say that they’re over. Or those without vision have never realized that they lost anything because they never saw what they had in the first place, so they tell us that nothing’s over because nothing was lost to begin with. Or people have chosen to believe that they’re over because that’s easier than hoping that they’re not. We don’t want to look the fool and try to save something that’s no longer there to save, so we tell ourselves and those around us that it’s over…so we think. But we can sail again.
Is something really over? Have we actually lost something that we can’t reclaim? Is it gone forever? Or, is that what we’ve chosen to believe. It’s my sense that most things aren’t over (at all). Rather, it’s our belief that they are (which is a ‘belief,’ but not necessarily a ‘reality’). It’s more our attitude, or our fears, or our unwillingness to challenge popular thinking, or our unwillingness to risk grabbing hold of a vision, or a lack of belief in ourselves, or more importantly, a lack of belief in God. In the Bible, Jesus said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” Do you get that? Do you understand what that opens up? Do you understand that our perception that something is over does not take into account that with God, nothing is over? That our families, our communities, our dreams, our relationships, our nation can sail again? That there are always possibilities, even when all we see are massive impossibilities? That what we feel we have to walk away from are things that have a ton of possibilities still living and breathing within them? Is something really over? Really? You might want to think about that because you’d be amazed at all of the things that can sail again.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Friday Sep 22, 2023
Uniqueness - Not as License
Friday Sep 22, 2023
Friday Sep 22, 2023
Sometimes fully being oneself in plain sight can be viewed as rather weird or downright odd. Sometimes our uniqueness is labeled as strange, bizarre, quirky or slightly peculiar. ‘Different’ in a culture of uniformity is too frequently labeled as eccentric, curious, “out there,” slightly unconventional, eerie, a tad bit unorthodox, or being something akin to being a dork. Our uniqueness can have dramatic social implications, causing us to be the outsider, the alien, the cultural misfit or just so plain weird that we’re a social phenomenon entirely unto ourselves with no place within which to fit at all; being relegated to the outcast.
These kinds of conclusions are quickly drawn and judgments are carelessly rendered rather than seeing uniqueness as potentially fresh, distinctive, or entirely singular. Far too often uniqueness is directly correlated with weirdness, dumping it into an entirely negative and typically unredeemable social sideshow. Uniqueness is pathetically reduced to oddity.It is then seen as entertaining because face it, “odd” is entertaining. The throngs of society curiously mill about these sideshows seeking some form of entertainment or amusement at the ignorant expense of the miracle of uniqueness. If you happen to have had the misfortune of having been dumped in some sort of sideshow because of your uniqueness, you’re seen as a permanent resident unless you reinvent yourself and sacrifice your uniqueness as part of that reinvention. The cost to do that is astronomical and deadening.
The Loss of Rendering Conclusions and Judgments
These various labels that we apply to others or have applied to us create a sharp and tainting distinctiveness that separates and excludes, rather than incorporates and includes. The profound asset of our uniqueness becomes a crippling liability. We have these various labels dogmatically slapped on our foreheads in exceedingly bold type with the whole of our person then being identified based on whatever’s been scrawled on the label and slapped on our foreheads. Following the brutality and ignorance of uniqueness branded as oddity, or worse yet as a deficit, we are forever relegated to the sideshow of life. The richness of our uniqueness is then lost to us, and lost to a world wallowing in stereotypes. In such a“lose-lose” situation, we are all diminished in ways that we may never make up.
Rightly Exercising Our Uniqueness
In a culture that embraces tolerance and diversity, let’s make one point very clear. Being unique is not about taking license by being oneself and using it as a stage to elicit attention, or make some sort of controversial cultural statement, or use it as a pedestal to flaunt immoral behavior, or generate some sort of shock factor in those who are watching us be “us.” Simply put, possession of uniqueness does not include permission to use that uniqueness with impunity to create something that we’re not in order to fulfill a personal agenda or fuel a social mission of some sort. Our uniqueness is not a lifeless stool to be snatched up and errantly or thoughtlessly used in the service of whatever cause we choose to use it in. Being authentically oneself is much more responsible and careful than that.
Being oneself is about embracing a deep respect for the stunning and entirely vibrant uniqueness of all of creation; a uniqueness that has been carefully crafted, unapologetically exercised and fully manifest in each and every one of us. It’s respecting that uniqueness within us not as license to be itself at the cost of everyone else around it, but something that builds upon everything else around it. It is not a pedestal to demand tolerance of the aberrant behaviors that we take license to construct from of our uniqueness. Rather it’s a place where we bow in some soulful combination of deep appreciation and mind-boggling awe as we look to carefully unearth who and what we are without twisting or tainting who we are in the process. It’s has nothing to do with revisionist mentalities or self-decreed permission where we seize our uniqueness, plop it as some lump of clay on a potter’s wheel and methodically shape it to our designs or our likening without regard for what it really is. Uniqueness used in these ways will cease to be unique.
Uniqueness Gone Bad
The uniqueness of our individuality under the total control of the individual is likely to be driven by selfish and self-centered agendas that will make us unique, but uniquely troubled, dysfunctional, disoriented and distorted. The power of uniqueness in the hands of limited people with unlimited parameters is dangerous indeed. In a culture of self-determination, personal rights and the territorial thumping of our chests to declare that we’re the masters of our own fates we take license with our uniqueness that is not necessarily ours to take. The cultural mindset of brazen independence creates a misguided sense that we are indeed of our own making, and that if we don’t shape who we are in whatever image we’ve determined that to be, we will have completely squandered our lives.
Uniqueness Well Handled
It seems that our uniqueness is not something to be shaped by us, but understood by us. It’s not to be engineered by us, but explored by us. It’s not to be created by us, but cultivated by us. We do not set its agenda; rather we discern it so that we know enough of it to know the agenda it has set for us. Our uniqueness is a precious gift that’s designed to be understood so that we can participate in making it the most that it can be, not shaping it into what we want it to be.
Our uniqueness holds within it the clues and the resources that tell us who we are, why we’re here and what we’re supposed to do with this gift called life.Our uniqueness is most effectively nurtured and cultivated within moral and ethical parameters that don’t inhibit that individuality as the culture assumes, but rather creates a place for us to maximize that individuality. Moral and ethical parameters keep our uniqueness pure, supple and free from all the things that would tarnish it and ultimately destroy it. Uniqueness is a priceless gift that is as fragile as fine china, as tough as fired steel, and as broadly expansive as the creative genius of God. It is a gift beyond our ability to handle, but not beyond our ability to surrender to something greater than us so that it will eventually become something greater than us. Uniqueness surrendered and lived out in the enabling power and protective place of moral principles and ethical standards paves the way for that uniqueness to rise to unparalleled heights, to be more than we can think or imagine, and to grow far beyond the horizons of any vision we could craft for it.
You are unique . . . that’s already an established reality. Amazingly, you are one of a kind. You’ve got one and only one shot at life. So, what are you going to do with the immense gift of your uniqueness? You will kill it or cultivate it. What will you do? Consider it.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Read the rest of this entry »Thursday Sep 21, 2023
Thursday Sep 21, 2023
The front porch was the door to the world “out there.” As a kid, it was the stepping off point to the world that never forced us to step off. It was the place through which the outside world would come into mine; monitored and managed in a way that didn’t make the world safe, but that pared and neutered it sufficiently to make it safe whenever it was granted entrance. As a kid, other than it being huge, I didn’t know everything that was out beyond the oak planks and cement steps. What I knew however was that the front porch would unflinchingly manage its entrance into my life.
It was a rarely used place because I found the solace of home much better than the turmoil of a world I didn’t understand. The front porch was that first step out into that world; the threshold to whatever was out there. I suppose it was something akin to witnessing terribly frightening realities from a vantage point of absolute safety; vulnerability rendered neutral either by safety or the sturdy knowledge that safety breeched would not be unsafe at all on the porch.
That’s what made it the safest place of all. It was the stepping off point to a big world that I knew little of. It seemed like the portal from the safety and embracing warmth of my world to whatever lay out there; fixed and firm but never naïve. In the child of my mind, the front porch edged right up to the world, but it held me perfectly safe and completely secure all the while. It provided me a front row seat as the happiness and horror of life paraded by, holding me, it seemed, entirely in perfect peace. I loved the front porch.
George Moore astutely pointed out that "a man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it." Somehow I knew that I would someday step off the front porch and go out there into whatever the world was, and that the journey would eventually return me to this place. But for now, it was a magical and certain haven on the sidelines of life.
Fall always graced the front porch with vibrantly colored leaves from the massive maples that lined the street as mammoth sentries. Hardwood behemoths, they would rain color; drops of searing reds falling in torrents when the wind blew firm. Blown onto the front porch the spun in royal red eddies; dancing with abandon as the wind courted them with a mix of tease and intention.
The turn of the season always invited me to the front porch to watch fall hand itself off to winter. You could watch it all safely from the front porch, as you could watch anything. It was, it seemed, somehow the best of all worlds.
With three or four bulbous pumpkins, several stalks of dried corn cinched tight with flax cords, a ragged bale of hay and a handful of incandescent leaves as trimming, we would dress the front porch for fall. It became a stage of sorts from which we would celebrate the departure of fall; pulling onto the front porch all the assorted things that symbolized the season. It was all staged right there on the oak tongue and groove flooring. We said goodbye from the safety of that place, acknowledging a passing from the kind distance that the front porch afforded us.
Adulthood and Distance Gone
They were other dying eyes the weekend my Mom died; one pair so much younger and entirely unexpected. I met them on the front porch. It’s not a long front porch, other than being long with the kind of miles that memories pave; lined generously with so much of my childhood. If memories were to define its breadth, it would stretch beyond any home to contain it. The tongue and groove flooring is yet firm, having welcomed and ushered feet both wandering and intentional to a sturdy oak door for nearly one hundred years. Friends, visitors and strangers have all crossed its planking in order to engage the family within; that defining portal to the world out there.
How do you grasp a place framed by towering pines and muscular maples whose width and breath hem you in above and around? Beyond the reach of their canopies, a sweeping lawn paints a tender, green expanse mottled with the glory of fall scattered about in leaves of gold, explosive red and scintillating orange. Out past the fringes of its grassy mantel stand more forest behemoths that seem to challenge the enormity of the sky itself. The old porch is surrounded by a mantel of nature’s best.
How do you engage a place that sits back just far enough from a sleepy street to muse as the world goes by while finding ample space between you and it? What do you do with hedges, thickets and sweeping canopies thick with the chatter and chorus of birds singing out of the sheer rapture of living? What do you do with squirrels that skirt precariously on thin limbs as if taking no notice of the peril they place themselves at, leaping vast expanses of air from one forest behemoth to another? What do you do when life affords you just such a place?
But what do you do with it when you’ve engaged the sordid world out there in ways entirely unimagined by the childlike mind that staged fall on its expanse? What do you do when it seems no longer a portal because you’ve stepped out so far beyond it that you can never again step back to the other side of it; even when in your most dire moments you desperately wish that you could do so? What do you do with something that provided the most gracious and sacrificial protection imaginable but whose role seems to have been long terminated by time, circumstance and this mysterious thing we call adulthood? What do you do?
If something this grand and yet this quiet is afforded you, then I would presume that you needed it. If you don’t think that you needed it, there’s a good chance that you’re oblivious to your own needs or you’re oblivious to the provision God affords us in our times of need. David sings, “The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer, my rock, in whom I take refuge” (Psalm 18:2, New International Version). Weave the metaphors and realities of our rock, fortress and deliverer together and we have an impenetrable place of deep and certain refuge. We all need such a place for such times as those that were about to befall me. We need a front porch.
Permanent Provision for Grief
Is there always a front porch of some sort or other? Can there be a consistent place of unexplainable solitude that provides us a place of refuge? Can God carve out this kind of oasis in the midst of the most searing grief, an oasis that does not remove us from our grief but gives us complete sanctuary in it; that lets life move and circle all around us but provides us tranquility in it? More than that, do we need a place of such solitude and security that allows us to invite grief right into the middle of it, knowing that this place is so secure that nothing can shake it even when it is invited into the heart of it? Is that possible?
“I am with you always . . . “ (Matthew 28:20, American Standard Version). “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1, American Standard Version). We may find great relief and inexplicable solace in purposefully looking beyond grief in the midst of our grief in order to determine the provision made within it. Grief is consuming, wrestling away the sum total of our attention and energies in order to deal with it and attempt to flee from it. If grief becomes our focus, the hand of God is something other than our focus.
We don’t think to look for any provision as grief assumes none. Grief assumes a process by which grief is navigated and resolved; a process which rarely assumes a place from which to do it. Grief renders us vulnerable which leaves us with the assumption that the struggle is ours alone. Grief calls us out. It strips us naked. It renders us helpless in our helplessness. It assumes little else and it does little else. Yet, what kind of front porch has God given us in the midst of our grief?
Loss Strikes Twice
Into it all, Paul walked onto my front porch and into my life again. He had walked into my life some thirty-five years earlier as a dear childhood friend, settling into my developmental years; navigating the tumultuous journey of adolescence alongside me until I left home for whatever it is that calls young men outward and sometimes upward. However, the demands of living and the scurrying about that seems so much wasted energy had long ago drawn us apart. He had changed over the gaping hole of the twenty-six years since we last said goodbye. The Paul that I knew was gone but there all at the same time. After over two and a half decades of unforgivable separation, Paul came by to visit.
Sitting there on that same front porch, we shared the passing of time and events, of life unfolding for each of us mostly in ways unexpected; the unanticipated and circular journey that led us from that front porch and back again decades later.
Trials and successes, painful failures and lost relationships, dreams realized and other dreams that we surrendered to the cold hands of reality. We talked about life through the eyes of middle age when the ever-increasing distance from the past rolls dim off some subconscious horizon of our minds, while the shortening days of the end of it all draws ever sharper. It was all amazingly rich. In a few moments, the years seemed erased.
With the friendship rejoined, Paul gazed into my eyes with a thick pause wrapped in an unexplainable intensity. With a frankness that belied the length of his own struggle, he cast a longing glance at the hearty trees that surrounded the front porch, ran his finger around the ring of his coffee cup, drew a breath of sweet fall air and muttered that he was dying. It was not some sort of speculation that there might be a cure or that the treatment might yet stop the advance of cancer that relentlessly pushed forward on multiple fronts throughout his body. It was the surrender of a valiant warrior who felt that the battle might not be fighting cancer, but closing out a middle aged life in front of an audience of friends and family as a man of integrity, faith and bravery. It was not about survival anymore, but about legacy.
His condition was terminal. Terminal is such a final word. It’s the ultimate period that’s put at the end of last sentence on the final page of the book. Nothing follows it other than nothingness. Its finality is so unfathomable that you have no alternative except to hope that it really might have been mistaken for a comma; that it’s some other sort of punctuation about the person’s life that might legitimately suggest a pause before moving on again. But terminal . . . how I wished it was something other than the chilling finality of a period.
My mind instantly teetered, tipped in the emotional imbalance and then plummeted. Whirling in wild gyrations, Paul's face immediately blurred and spun. A thousand memories, variant clips and fragmented mementos of our shared childhood raced across the forefront of my mind at speeds that were emotionally deafening. My heart dropped so far that I had no sense of it any longer. An emotional paralysis humanly halted it all.
And then Paul's voice, soft and firm, grounded me. He said, "you don't need to say anything. Just thanks for listening and thanks for the years we had." The words, so needed, were wrapped in a silken veneer of complete peace that gently wrapped itself around me.
My mother was hours from death, Paul was two months or so away from the same thing. I bore both on that front porch. Stunned and pummeled twice. Blackness had fallen once, and then once again. Sometimes you are convinced that life has struck you sufficiently for it seems that its task in irrefutably crushing hope and driving you into some sort of trackless abyss has been so thorough that there is nothing left to destroy or maim. But sometimes life strikes twice, insanely attempting to kill that which has already been killed; finding some savage and sadistic pleasure in touting its victory and superiority by striking one more needless blow on its way back to wherever it came from. If life doesn’t make sense, it’s at times like these.
Being Truly Lost
Struck with a deafening blow by the pending passing of my mother and sent reeling again by Paul’s disclosure; I was dead-center in that place; ground zero in grief. In those places there is no sense of bearing, of true north to at least know where you’re at. Most of the time when we talk about being lost, we have some general sense of direction that provides us a place to start heading off to. We at least have some vague and diffuse sense of where to go.
But being truly lost is nothing of the sort. It’s having absolutely no idea of where you’re at because where you’re at is a place you’ve never been before and could never have believed existed except for the fact that you're now there. It’s having no idea where you should go because all that was once familiar is now terrifyingly unfamiliar and entirely uncertain, rendering the place that you need to go to as unknown.
All of this takes on the horror of a rapidly escalating panic as we suddenly realize that we are utterly and irrevocably alone in it all. Life at its worst isolates us because the more devastating it is, the more unique our experience in it. We become abjectly alone. That’s lost. It is a rare, horrible and deathly place that engulfed me on the front porch that day.
A Path Out of Being Lost
It was all too much had I not bore the immensity of this while sitting on that front porch, that place of deep solace wrapped in majestic trees and God’s thick arms. The front porch offered me a place of solace to watch two people that I loved embrace the reality of a world that is turning and turning dramatically. Oddly and unexpectedly, it was in the watching that I began to find my way out of the lostness.
Both were dying with great grace and valor. There was nothing of surrender in it at all. Surrender implies a weakness that renders us inadequate in conquering that which stands before us. Rather, death with honor and a chaste spirit was hardly weakness. It was bravery of the greatest sort. And on that front porch, surrounded by this place of refuge that God had granted me, I could see it all with great clarity and conviction.
It was not about searching for some path out of the lostness. It was all about watching. The keys and the compass were handed to me in the very things that had thrust me out and down into the abyss that I had plummeted into. Pain frequently results in panic. Panic seeks an immediate resolution and remedy by whatever means that resolution and remedy can be achieved. Panic frequently leads to a flailing and an impulsivity that only deepens and constricts the darkness that wraps itself around us with long, constricting and chilling fingers.
I watched Mom and Paul courageously course their way through the onset of death; deciding to face it head-on with defiance and daring. They had each embraced a posture of bravery and faith; seizing the inevitable, turning death on itself by celebrating and cheering past victories and savoring the innumerable gifts life had lavished on them. It became a recitation of glories, gains and gifts, and deeply flowing gratitude. It was the most genuine celebration of life that I had ever witnessed. I could not grasp it and felt that if I were the one facing death that I would be absolutely nothing of what they were. It was joyous and marvelous, mixed into some sort of wild and terribly rare concoction that I had no right to sip, but was handed by the glassful nonetheless.
Virgil stated, “They can conquer who believe they can.” Conquering for Mom and Paul was about seizing the apparent untimely arrival of death and choosing a posture of celebration and savoring. I confess my inability to grasp it all other than I know it to be real because I watched them grasp it. They seized it in a manner that not only ministered to them, but ministered to others as well. They believed that they could conquer . . . and conquer they did.
It was in this that I instantly found my bearings; both where I was and where I desperately wanted to go. Lostness dissipated by simply watching. The birds seemed to hold their songs for a moment and the trees leaned ever so slightly as if to hear a heart grasp a profound reality. The porch provided me the place. The examples provided me both keys and compass.
In the end, those keys and that compass allowed me to find myself so thoroughly and center myself so precisely that my sense of myself was honed sharper than it had ever been. It was nothing short of stunning and astounding.
God as My Front Porch
“My God -- the high crag where I run for dear life, hiding behind the boulders, safe in the granite hideout; My mountaintop refuge . . . ” (2 Samuel 22:3, The Message). Carefully listen to the metaphors of safety and security that are richly interwoven in this verse. God is place of perfect security. It’s not that life can’t reach us there. God is not a god of seclusion, sweeping us away from all harm and setting us far out of the reach of a world of pain and inexplicable circumstances. He is our refuge right in the middle of this kind of world. He is the place that grants us the place to be found and to find. He is our front porch.
God is that place of perfect security in perfect insecurity. He is that place surrounded by enduring beauty, filled with his marvels so that we might not forget all that is good in all that is wrong. He places us just far enough from the world to muse at it while being separate from it; to find a place from which to learn the lessons that we need to fearlessly engage it. In Him there is a quietness that doesn’t deny the cries of a hurting world, but a quietness that keeps it all at just enough of a distance to grow in it, but not be consumed by it.
“Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life” (Philippians 4:7, The Message). That can only happen in just such a place. In our grief, God affords us a place like that . . . a front porch. And this place is strong enough to weather all the grief that life can throw at us. It is entirely sufficient.
It's a place quiet enough, safe enough and sufficiently spacious for the keys and compass that we need to be handed to us in manner that we fully see them, fully embrace them, and allow them to fully impact our lives. The front porch is then a place of safety, but a place that creates enough space for the miraculous to have plenty of elbow room.
It is an odd, indescribable, nearly inscrutable thing to be able to feel the searing intensity of a life unraveling, and to feel it all in the midst of perfect security that affords me both a path out of my own lostness and opportunity for amazing growth. That is what God affords us in our grief. It is a most marvelous thing indeed.
Paul took it all in stride. He smiled, laughed with a contentment at the life he had been able to live, glanced at the trees and vast expanse of lawn covered in fall’s flaming bounty and said, “it’s been a good life . . . it really has.” Dying fully at ease, that’s what he was doing. He exemplified God’s security in a way most marvelous. God in our grief, that’s what I saw in him. I know it works because I saw it in Paul. Mom exemplified it all of her life. The front porch created a place safe enough and expansive enough to see it.
Because I saw it, I was released to release that which was being lost to me. I was unexplainably released to come alongside my losses and tearfully, yet boldly escort those very losses to the next place.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Wednesday Sep 20, 2023
Darren and a Plastic Fish - The Size of Smallness
Wednesday Sep 20, 2023
Wednesday Sep 20, 2023
We seem small. We look around at the mounting difficulties and challenges in our world today and we simply seem too small to make any sort of meaningful impact. We witness the flood of irrational agendas, the rampant greed, the destruction of morality, the corruption in leadership, and the insanity of organizations that propagate questionable platforms, and we feel far too small to speak into any of those things.
Yet, small is big when understood correctly. After all, everything big started as something small. Everything big is a compilation of small things. Everything big requires the work of small things to sustain them. In essence, small is big.
Craig's recent message outlines the fact that size does not suggest power. That we are capable of making a significant impact despite how small we might feel. Take a moment and enjoy this thought-provoking and timely message.
Tuesday Sep 19, 2023
Podcast Short: It’s Not About Being Ordinary
Tuesday Sep 19, 2023
Tuesday Sep 19, 2023
It's Not About Being Ordinary
It’s not about being ordinary, because we all are. In talking about myself, I’m about as ‘ordinary’ as they come. But, it’s not about being ordinary. It’s about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things. That’s the beauty of it. We’re all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be extra-ordinary. God granted you and He granted me all of the elements, all of the ingredients (if you will) to do what we never thought we could do. You come packaged with resources that (if used correctly) can accomplish things that are greater than the sum total of those resources. And if there’s some tragedy in all of that, it’s that people don’t use them correctly, and therefore they never accomplish the great things that were theirs to accomplish.
The incredibly disappointing thing is that people look at who they are through the lens of who ‘they’ are. And through that lens (which is incredibly limiting) we don’t see all that we are. We have this vague understanding of ourselves, which leaves a whole lot of ourselves unknown, or ill-defined, or misunderstood, or mis-defined altogether. And we walk through our lives with this less-than-accurate understanding of who we are. And that understanding (whatever it happens to be) is typically a horribly marginalized and minimized view of who we really are. So we might be ordinary, but we diminish the incredible abilities that are inherent in being ‘ordinary.’ Remember, “being ordinary” (as much as we diminish it) “does not limit us to ordinary things.”
I think that God wants you to see who you are. The whole of who you are. Not just the good, but everything that’s maybe not so good as well. Not just the stuff that we’re proud of (if we even have anything that we’d say we’re proud of) but all of the stuff. Not just the successes, but the failures as well. Not just the bright and shiny things within us, but the dark places too.
Because all of that is the stuff of the ordinary. And God waits to take everything that’s ordinary within you and do something extra-ordinary with it because “We’re all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be extra-ordinary.” That’s what God does. He takes whatever we are and He makes it into everything that we are not. He’s not looking for us to build all that up so that it eventually adds up to something that God can use. He’s looking for us to surrender all that’s ordinary about us to Him (in whatever condition it’s in) so that He can build it up to something He can use. “It’s about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things,” because we have an extra-ordinary God who wants to birth a bunch of extra-ordinary things in your life.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Saturday Sep 16, 2023
”An Intimate Collision - Encounters With Life and Jesus” - Part Four
Saturday Sep 16, 2023
Saturday Sep 16, 2023
He was four years old . . . barely. Boyish innocence was tightly stitched and held fast to a deep zest for living. He was a mosaic of the threads of a splendid tapestry whose fibers were being woven into a soft spirit that reveled in life. I love Corey. I love him for what he is, and what I see in him that I am not. He is innocence untainted and unsoiled, a young boy that catches the essence of living through windows of the soul yet unsullied by life. Splendidly exuberant, he draws in all the energy of life and expels it freely out to anyone who will embrace its gift. He is both a repository of living and the embodiment simplicity. One without the other would dramatically diminish him, as it would any of us.
“I have seventy cents,” he said. Sitting at a red light, I had no idea as to the nature, purpose or rationale of his comments, arising it seemed from the incessant babbling and spontaneity that frequently marks him. “Dad, I have seventy cents.” Attending to the blur and bustle of the marauding traffic that rushed around me, I attempted to placate him, hoping that he would drift on to something else. “That’s nice,” I replied. He was irritably insistent. My verbal pabulum was blatantly insufficient for him. “Dad, I have seventy cents!” His voice was emphatic. I glanced in my rearview mirror and watched him squirming in his car seat, obviously possessing some agenda of great importance to him that was swallowed up in the supposedly greater agendas that dictated my day. Catching my eyes in the mirror, he held out a clenched fist clutching seventy cents and with sordid determination said, “Dad, I have seventy cents!”
What We Miss
I am occupied, attending to the congestion and myriad events around me. The traffic of my life is made up of frustrating red lights, a rare green one, and irritating yellows that flash across a myriad of my intersections. All of the congestion of commerce and career, the snarls of success and the raucous rhythm of rush hour that I embrace as essential and necessary to achievement.
I am caught in the blindness of believing that living life means winning, being horrified that an opportunity missed is an unredeemable loss that creates a permanent setback and lifetime diminishment. I must master life by gouging and gorging myself on its complexities at every opportunity, without having time to savor the tender exquisiteness of its intricacies. Mine is a hoarding of life, rather than a delicate sampling. In and through it all I miss the minute details in the mayhem, the subtleties that are the very essence of the larger things that I gorge and feed upon. In essence, I miss simplicity. “I have seventy cents Dad!” It was a statement of simplicity, and so I missed it.
Crystal blue eyes and romping blonde hair, his small hands cradled two quarters and two precarious dimes. They were clenched so firmly that his tiny fingers turned shades of red and white; holding them valiantly in front of him with arms outstretched. His face was chiseled with a squared hint of boyish determination, the manifestation of four year old eyes apprehending the core of life and living when I could not see it. His perceived with a crystal clear soul what really mattered when all I saw was an annoying red light and thick traffic. “Dad, I have seventy cents!”
And then I saw it. Quite accidently it caught the barest edge of my mind. Out of the corner of my eye, from the farthest fringes of my life it stirred. The simple intruded upon my chosen world of complexities. A solitary figure sat on the margins of my wild world, passing by me except for a four year old attuned to the wonder of simplicity, hoping that the din surrounding me might ebb just enough to catch a glimpse. I finally saw it.
Scrawled by an unsteady hand across a tattered piece of discarded cardboard, stained and bent were a handful of words. The edges of cardboard were torn, frayed and mutilated, much like the man who held it. It was stained and bent. Primitive letters etched out the silent plea of a lost life. He was no more than ten feet away, and I missed him. The sign read, “Need help, please.” “Dad, I have seventy cents!”
Simplicity Missed and Reclaimed
“Don’t push these children away.” Jesus’ voice was purposeful, highlighting an eternal principal violated by stumbling men who chased after life and missed living in the pursuit of living. “Don’t ever get between them and me. These children are the very center of life in the kingdom” (Mark 10:14, The Message). Simplicity is central to the infinite, which is an odd and incomprehensible dichotomy. That which is complex beyond comprehension embraces simplicity at its core and derives all that it is from that core. The infinite invites us to simplicity as that which is of eternal value is best seen in that which is simple and uncluttered.
Simplicity is the key that turns the tumblers to the door of the eternal. It is the single and sole passport to an audience with the infinite. We must suspect then that such a concept is built into the fabric of the finite as well. Simplicity is the essence of life and living from which all else springs. Without it complexity loses it roots, it has no grounding, no boundaries and no identifiable point of departure that defines it and shapes it. And it is here, with the cluster of children swirling around Him in innocent admiration that Jesus declares simplicity as simply central.
The Pharisees and their malicious attempts to trap Him were barely hours old, still resonating in His mind. God incarnate, the Creator of the universe had been asked to justify Himself. It was indeed the absurdity that arises when simplicity is missed. The rich young ruler and the stench of materialism were only moments away. Face to face with God, the rich young man would prove himself unable to see Jesus in the tangled web woven of wealth and the complexity inherent in the sordid accumulation of power. He had too much of this world and too little of the next; all of which leaves no room for simplicity. The walk to Jerusalem, betrayal, spikes, a splintered beam, oozing blood, death . . . all of that was only a mere handful of days away. Awash in the many manifestations of man’s sin and on the threshold of abolishing it, Jesus “gathered the children up in His arms and He laid His hands of blessing on them” (Mark 10:16, The Message).
Simplicity Lived
As you look at this picture of Jesus, do you see it? It too is on the margins of our lives, sadly so. Jesus is sitting, gingerly drawing an armful of giggling and squealing children into His lap. The thick hands of a carpenter run calloused fingers through mounds of curls gracing a tiny head, drawing a smile out of a timid child with a playful and slightly bemused stare. Embracing their innocence and simplicity as so far removed from the world He faces, the world that He will die for.
He sees in their impish and innocent faces the simplicity that keeps the world from seeing Him. He is at the vortex of His earthly life. In a matter of days all of history will be rocked by His death. The universe will itself reel. Hell will fall. Satan will flee. The immensity of the powers of darkness will suffer complete and uncompromising defeat. He will defiantly tread the bowels of Hell itself and then He will rise and He will, in His resurrection, change the entire course of human history for the full course of human history. What He is about to do is monumental beyond anything that has ever transpired in the whole course of existence.
But here, at this moment, sandwiched between these cataclysmic events, He laughs with children who have no sense of Who He is, or what awaits Him. But, innocent they are. And so He plays for a moment. He tickles and gets tickled. He tells a joke and the air is filled with the squeal of childhood laughter. Eye to eye with gentle intensity He tells them of their immense value and of a Father’s love for each of them. He will die for them shortly, their innocence maybe making that sacrifice more bearable and more compelling.
It is the Creator connecting through simplicity with the created in a way that is entirely unabated and unobstructed. It is the treasure of the deep soul finding connection with the vast God through the conduit of simplicity. The mayhem of life’s traffic, all of the red and green and yellow lights that had dogged His ministry were laid aside so that He could immerse Himself in life’s real purpose.
The Door of Access
From this adoring pile of romping children His gaze shifted, directing his words to the twelve standing about the scene. It was not to be a lesson for children, but one from them. Tussling with their youthful energy, He says, “Unless you accept God’s kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get in” (Mark 10:15, The Message). The contrast is numbing, even paralyzing. The key to complexity is simplicity? But how can simplicity ever hope to grasp complexity? Simplicity would suggest intentional ignorance through the abandonment of the acquisition of knowledge. It was a stunning and completely puzzling reversal.
The complexities of life and living, the minute intricacies of the Law and the sacrificial system, the unfathomable breadth of the cosmos and starry hosts that beg exploration and contemplation, the mysterious yet striking predictability of nature, the grandeur and the magnificent majesty of God as the incomprehensible “I AM” (Genesis 3:14, NIV) next to which all of creation fades and pales into oblivion is accessed through simplicity? Here, in the laughter and play of these children laid the incalculably priceless key to kingdom access and the sole passport to the infinite? It was simply too simple, so simple that grasping it was, in itself, complex.
Peals of laughter drew them back from contemplation, being a sweet elixir to a sullen life. They were the voices of those who had seized the keys to the kingdom through simplicity. Accepting as these children accepted, with innocence and simplicity, humility and obedience, through trust that never asks if there is anything else other than trust. Engaging in a raw embracing, a simple acceptance free of attempts to determine how to shape one’s life so that it might find a shred of acceptability before God. Freely accepting the unconditional as exactly that . . . unconditional. And so it was in the children.
Jesus stood, the lesson now having been taught by example and by word. He stooped, placed His hands on the children for a brief final moment and blesses them, extending into their simplicity the blessing of God. He was able to do so because of the massive and free-roaming space created in and by their simplicity. Access to the kingdom was granted to such as these, its evidence seen in the blessing. It was all so simple, yet so magnificently transforming. Lives have expended lifetimes trying to achieve what these children achieved in but a moment via the vehicle of innocence and simplicity.
A final hug, a parting embrace and the children dispersed, running into the arms of waiting parents. A pair of them skipped off holding hands. Sticks trailed curlicue designs in the gritty dirt. Several ran around parents in errant circles of delight and innocent mischief. A small cluster gathered mounds of wildflowers, pressing their nectared petals deep into their faces, inhaling their perfumed ecstasy. The sound of laughter faded and then dissipated on the soft winds of the day. The bevy of children scurried off to the next adventure, not realizing that they had just had the greatest adventure of all. But simplicity embraces all life as an adventure.
Getting Back
A honking horn exploded into the moment. The light was green. I instinctively punched the accelerator and drove off. “But Dad, I have seventy cents!” How our hearts are drawn to simplicity, yet how difficult it is for us to allow it to remain so; how painful when we cannot respond to it. Life caused me to drive by him, and to do this day I am irritated by that action. Corey and I talked about that man, and we talked about how we could help someone with his seventy cents; seventy cents of simplicity. Could I please have seventy cents of simplicity! Enough to see my world like Corey does. Oh God, could you please grant me seventy cents of simplicity!
How Do I Find Seventy Cents of Simplicity?
How do I balance complexity with simplicity? How do I rectify the God of the universe playing with children and incorporate that principal into my world? How do I correlate the melding of the infinite and simplicity? Where is that common ground where I can embrace simplicity with a relentless vigor and yet live in a world of complexity?
It is not the absence of complexity, for creation is woven of it and it is the embodiment of God Himself. It is the example of the infinitely complex God playing and romping with simple children that we must seize, hold fast to and draw from. The key is the full embodiment of both simplicity and complexity where neither is lost or sacrificed at the expense of the other, but where the complete embrace of both brings fullness and balance to life. The challenge is to hold to both equally. We assume that complexity is the absence of simplicity. Rather, is complexity not the very thing that highlights simplicity and makes simplicity so very obvious and so deeply cherished? Is it not in the holding of simplicity that complexity has a point of origin and a benchmark which dictates it shape, tenor and tone? And is not the fullest embrace of the two, with each holding the other in balance the very thing that maximizes life and living?
We need to live with seventy cents of simplicity, clutching it in our fists and refusing to let it go. Allowing it to hold and ground our exploration, acquisition and understanding of life’s complexities. It is our task to apprehend an understanding of the world God has put us in, but to likewise to maintain eyes of simplicity that keep us centered on that which is central to all of life. Complexity that is not continually grounded in simplicity is apt to be errant, causing us to be consumed in the complexity itself. For that brief moment, following a confrontation with the Pharisees, a pending confrontation with a rich young ruler, and only days away from death, Jesus centered Himself in simplicity. So should we.
Pondering Point
“I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of” (John 10:10, The Message). Could it be that this “more and better life” is in part the ability to embrace complexity while holding tenaciously to simplicity, allowing simplicity to ground us and center us in the complicated and detailed facets of life; each providing a balancing effect for the other, thereby allowing us to embrace the fullness of life without sacrificing anything that a single focus would cause us to miss? And is such a balance the work of God in our lives, His grace and power allowing us to achieve this dual embrace? Indeed, I think it is.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Friday Sep 15, 2023
Being a Lamp That’s Lit - Part Two
Friday Sep 15, 2023
Friday Sep 15, 2023
Being a Lamp That's Lit
So let’s begin at the beginning and ask the first question that needs to be asked . . . are you a lamp that's lit? Matthew chapter 5 talks about being a light, but we might want to first ask the fundamental question, am I a lamp that's lit in the first place?
How many of us are lit and ablaze? We’re all lamps . . . every one of us. But how many of us are lit and burning and casting light, because it’s one thing to be a lamp, and it’s quite another thing to be lit. If you walk through life being a lamp that’s not lit, you will live a diminished life and you will add to the diminishment of those around you. And that is tragic.
The Irish play-write, George Bernard Shaw was interviewed by a reporter who asked him, “Mr. Shaw, if you could live your life over and be anybody you’ve known, any person from history, who would you be?” Listen carefully to what he said. George Bernard Shaw said this. He replied, “I would choose to be the man George Bernard Shaw could have been, but never was.” Will that be your commentary on your life? When the end comes and the years are dwindling, will you say, I would choose to be the man I could have been, but never was?
George Bernard Shaw was a lamp that, by his own admission, was never lit.
“Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.” You . . . all of you . . . all of us are lamps. And the question that I have for you is “are you lit?
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Thursday Sep 14, 2023
Thursday Sep 14, 2023
They leave sporadically. Some of them go at the first hint of fall’s advance. Others hang around until the first snows herd them southward as a rancher with heavy-footed cattle lumbering across pasturelands; gorged on the last of summer’s grasses. The air is sullen and stilled by their absence; the void of song leaving a hole wide and gray. Trees stand as tenements emptied, their residents having taken wing for warmer skies.
But it was the geese really. Their movement was monumental; indescribably massive in scope as if a whole nation of waterfowl moved in unison. Other birds would cluster in sordid bands and bounce southward; a grouping here and a grouping there. But geese . . . they would advance as an innumerable army seizing the very skies themselves.
As a kid, they would surge down the Atlantic flyway as if it were a conduit that compressed untold millions of geese into an invisible highway in the sky. The main body would come in droves of thousands; an endless string of black pearl strands being pulled southward; waving like the tail of a grand kite in the wind. It was too vast to embrace; being one of those things in life that defies the parameters of our imaginations and spills far outside the reach of our senses. Because it does, we’re never quite done with it because we never quite absorb it all. It slips by experienced as something grand, but we inherently know that the grandeur that we were able to embrace was but a minuscule part of the whole. As I kid, I knew that.
The Atlantic flyway cuts a mystical swath through the heart of the southern Lake Erie region. All but an hour's drive or so away from home, we would tumble into the car and head out to sit on the sidelines of the miraculous. From miles away, you could see thin layers of black string formations low-slung across the sky; birds ascending and descending in numbers too vast to count. The water, the adjacent fields, the roads themselves were thick with them, each seeming to be an exact replica of the other; each energized with a corporate sense that something grand was afoot that was as individual as it was collective.
Even as a kid I knew that what I was observing was but a moment in time. Some things are too grand to last for long because you can only absorb so much wonder and majesty before you’ll explode. But therein lays the rub. You want it to last, even if the sheer pleasure of it all kills you. At least death would be happy. You’d die with a smile.
To appreciate most things you have to let them go. Some things become even more precious by their absence. When you lose something you grieve the loss and the exercise of grief can be brutally hard. At the same time, appreciation for that thing is dramatically enhanced in kind of a give and take exchange. It’s the push and pull of life that as a kid watching a million geese I didn’t get. All I wanted to do was to stand in the middle of this ocean of airborne life and somehow try to be a part of it; to find my place in it and believe that I could join it if only in the celebration of a season turning and a migration transpiring.
In feathered constellations of hundreds and sometimes thousands they would launch themselves from all around me in a deafening burst of pounding wings and haunting voices; assailing the sky and rising to warmer horizons. And in it I was left behind, simultaneously feeling a sense of abandonment, an equally thick sense of loss, but a deeper instinctual sense that this was right and proper and good. I had to let go. I had to let it be. I had to close out this moment, let it pass into my history, go home and resume my life. As a kid, that was tough.
Yet there was something temporal is the grandness of it all. Jacques Deval said, "God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages." Some things cannot be bound over or held, despite our desire to do so. It's in the context of unabated freedom that we experience the highest exhilaration and seize the fullest manifestation of that which we are enjoying. Caging it kills it because it robs life of the freedom to be its fullest self. Geese need to fly unfettered, otherwise the majesty is gone. Life is much the same.
Somehow making something temporal makes it precious. Standing amidst thousands of migratory geese, I knew that part of the magic lay in the fact this incredible phenomena was only momentary; a brief moment at that. Holding it would make it ordinary. I couldn't fathom it all as being anything but wildly extraordinary and so I stood in the midst of the sheer magic of the temporal and relished it until it passed. Then I would walk away with a living piece of the magic embedded in the heart of my soul. I had to allow it closure or the magic would be stripped.
Closure – Fighting Against Ourselves in Adulthood
Fall was passing, hugging the calendar on the cusp of an arriving winter that was set to push fall off the page. Sometimes life moves too fast. At times we want it that way. At other times we wish that the calendar would seize up and come to a complete halt, taking away the reality of a pending end and suspending change that we don’t want. Why is it that we can’t stop the clock even when it feels completely legitimate to do so? Why is time so ruthless and insensitive as not to grant us even the slightest pause; to hold the sweeping second hand of life for even a single moment when such a reprieve would allow us to briefly hold a little longer that which life itself is stealing away? To let kids stand amidst wild geese a bit longer?
But time moves on, creating an endless space within which change unfolds and flourishes. The passing of time means that all is in transition all the time. It means that we gain and lose along the way as part of the transition, but it also means that life always has the opportunity to be new, to be fresh and to be tried again. It means that life is left wide enough and unfettered enough to unfold with all the boldness and mystical expansiveness that makes life, life. But with the freedom comes the reality of change and the fact that it renders everything temporary and existent only for a season. An end will come.
However, we can know that change and any end is grounded in “Jesus Christ (who) is the same yesterday and to-day, yea and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8, American Standard Version). With that undergirding, we can find peace in change, knowing that change is ultimately grounded in Him who is unchangeable. Therefore, change need not be feared, grieved or hated as something that steals or depletes or cheats, but rather as something that is ordered by Him who ordered the entirely of creation from eternity past and beyond. We can let change be the creative molder of life, hating it at times but believing in a final outcome as purposeful.
Passing and Change
Ice had begun to take a toe-hold around the edges of the pond. From the edges, it sent slight crystal fingers out onto the surface of water chilled and sullen. Songbirds had taken flight southward. Geese were massing in thread-like V-formations that drew silky black threads of pounding wings across graying skies, their call drifting in the deep woods as they passed. That year I had not stood among them. I had not for years.
Frost had laid a wafer thin layer of ice crystals on the beams of the wooden bridge. It was yet tentative, instantly melting to the touch and pooling in tiny droplets under my fingertips. Everything was changing and I found myself angry and resistant about it all. I didn't care about what might be diminished in stealing freedom. I wanted life caged and held.
The Illusion of Holding What We Can’t
I’m sometimes not ready for things to pass; for geese to ascend and cross horizons out of my line of sight. Life is precious. That which is precious we strive to hold. There is something about its value that drives us to possess it, to retain it; somehow feeling that possession is the only means by which that which is precious can be truly enjoyed. Without possession it is fleeting, easily escaping our grasp and robbing us of the pleasure that it brings. And so we seek out that which is precious. We hoard it if possible. We lock it up, insure it, put it in wills so that it remains under our control even in death, and do our level best to preserve it against anything that would steal it away. And because we hold it, it is no longer precious for we have robbed it of what is most precious . . . the possession of inherent traits too precious to ever be held.
Yet, I think we hold the precious out of fear. Fear that life will be flat, that we will have lived empty lives filled with the damp grayness of a sullen existence; the kind of dampness that goes right through you and the kind of grayness that suffocates you. We fear that endings won’t begat beginnings and that geese won’t return. We have to accumulate that which is precious and keep it in order to stave off the dampness and lighten the grayness. But how do you possibly accumulate and hold a million geese heading south or a mother dying?
Life then becomes the summation of the possessions that we think we hold, which in reality is finitely very little, temporal at best and killed by the fact that we're holding it. Our purpose becomes the continued holding of these things. Our identity, whatever it is that they are. Our passion becomes their maintenance so as to preserve them. Our hope becomes entangled in the continued accumulation of them to stave off potential loss. Our future becomes a cycle of maintenance and continued accumulation. And we can’t let go because if we do, we’ll have nothing left. We then lose the sense of awe when life sweeps our way, and we forfeit the humbling sense of appreciation when its time in our lives is concluded.
The Obedient Letting Go
“If you grasp and cling to life on your terms, you'll lose it, but if you let that life go, you'll get life on God's terms” (Luke 17:33, The Message). Fall was obediently letting go, not demanding some other terms. Summer had let go a long time ago, releasing all of the energy, vitality and splendor of life despite the fact that the life it was releasing surged with a stamina and passion that simply seizes you with wonderment. Yet, summer let it go. Fall was letting go a spectacular inferno of color that raced through endless treetops and splashed the forest canopy to the sky’s edge. It launched millions of geese and hurled them southward over forests thick with falls fire. It was all precious and blindingly glorious, but life found a way to let it go, to release it, to allow it to be free. It seemed to celebrate and revel in the releasing as much as it did when the season first came.
Mom was dying, and I didn’t want it to happen. I railed against letting go. I had no interest in closure because I didn’t want the loss in the first place. She was precious beyond description, a woman unique in a way that makes uniqueness priceless. Time would not stop for her. The sweeping second hand moved with terrible precision, marking off precious seconds that I could neither hold nor halt. It seemed at that moment that I could hold nothing, precious or otherwise. Everything was slipping through my fingers and drifting off on the winds of time much like vapor caught in the swell of a firm breeze; much like geese rising and heading south without me.
We walked across the broad timbers of the arching bridge, into the hospice and down the hall to her room. She was in the throes of death, able to hear but not able to respond. Pasty and a million miles drawn away from me, she laid there; each breath laborious and slow. Her eyes fell into a sinkhole of graying cavities, the blue sparkle having lost its luster as the light of her eyes faded and then found itself doused. Her vision had shifted, catching fantastic glimpses of something majestically eternal which only the eyes of her soul could see. It was all spectacular, rendering entirely unnecessary any need she might have for closure as the magnitude of her destination obliterated all loss. Those deep blue eyes were needed no more.
Obedience and denial found their place in me at the same time, each vying for a place that they could not simultaneously possess. I wanted to let her go, but denied that I needed to. I was appalled by the course freedom had chosen that was allowing her to die. I wished to hold her captive as I might hold endless hoards of migratory geese; not understanding the futility and absolute absurdity of such a thought.
For the next six hours every thought, each memory, the vast storehouse of emotions, the swill and swell of all that makes me human; all were plumbed to depths I could not have imagined. The more she faded, the deeper I went. Up from their subterraneous caverns all of these things surged in an engulfing flood, allowing me to touch my own humanity in a way that made my humanity entirely unfamiliar to me. I shared it with her as she drew further to some distant horizon that I could not go to, reciting those kinds of memories that sweep you away with warm and thick emotion regardless of the number of times you tell them or play them off the folds of your mind and heart. I surrendered to the inevitable course of life and watched her take wing as I had done as a kid engulfed in a million geese all gloriously free.
The Freshness of Obedience
And here I let go. I let go because life is not based on the holding of anything. Life is based on freeing yourself from holding so that you can embrace the wildness of the journey. Holding onto something renders you captive to wherever that thing is at, holding you hostage to whatever that place is. Life that is held is life stagnant. Life that is stagnant is not life.
Life rolls on because it must, because it was designed that way. It’s ever fresh, building upon the past in the present in order to enrich the future. Holding life kills it, much like holding a flower eventually wilts it. That which is precious can’t be held or possessed because it’s fragile and elusive. It’s those qualities that make something precious. If it’s not fragile and elusive, it’s not precious.
So I let Mom go in a sheer act of will that seemed to entail more energy than a million geese aloft, with an exhilaration of equal proportions. I released her to a deepened belief that God’s plan is a process, a series of events that flow much like a river; pooling here and there at times, and cascading in a bubbling froth at others, but always moving. If we attempt to throw a dam across this river, it will pool, stagnate and go no further than the parameters of the dam we have constructed around it. It will eventually mass itself and burst any dam that we can construct because life is irreparably bound to the achieve the complete manifestation of its design and intent. Freedom is entirely and indisputably indispensible to that objective.
Regardless, we attempt to manage it anyway. And in doing so, we will have managed it to death and controlled the vitality right out of it; much in the same way that forbidding the migration of geese would rob us of the wonder of it all; as if we could forbid it at all anyway.
Likewise, if I hold the past I cannot simultaneously seize the future. My grasp will be directed in one place or the other; my energies vested in holding onto misty mementos locked in an unalterable past. Or I can take a firm hold of a future that is unwritten and therefore entirely unencumbered. Letting go lets me grieve. Letting go allows me to run in the natural currents of life, therefore resting in the fact that whatever the outcome, it will be good and right.
Grieving Through Accepting
At that moment, I began to grieve. Something broke open that permitted the first feelings of grieving to flow. You have to release to grieve. Releasing is accepting the course of things out of the belief that there exists a sure and certain order to this course. Geese fly south with an uncompromised certainty. Releasing releases us from our battle to alter the course that our life is taking, and to rest in both the gains and losses of where it’s going; geese moving on, seasons turning and Mom’s dying. We are free to celebrate wildly when it’s called for. And we are likewise freed to grieve deeply when it's appropriate. We can embrace both sides of life rather than attempting to control it in a manner that we experience neither.
A fall sun was preparing for an early slumber. A myriad array of geese and ducks had settled on the periphery of the pond, drawing up against the deepening twilight. I was once again able to walk among them, to join them a bit before I would lose them to the instinct of migration.
Mom would not live to see the next day. She would be gone by the time this array of waterfowl would take to the sky on pounding wings at the first blush of tepid dawn, heeding a call to skies far south. The sun would edge over the eastern horizon without her smile to illumine or her eyes to take in the glistening promise of a new day. For the first time in my life, the sun would rise without her. Life had moved on, leaving yesterday forever in a myriad collection of seemingly endless yesterdays. For the first time, she had moved into yesterday as well.
Acceptance – The Key to Freedom
Acceptance is our willingness to admit that we can’t control life or direct outcomes. It embraces the fact that robbing life of the freedom it needs in order to be everything it was designed and ordained to be is deadly, audacious, and in the end entirely impossible anyway. Acceptance either comes as we teeter on the precipice of sheer exhaustion; our own spent nature leaving us no alternative. Or we readily embrace acceptance because it puts us seamlessly in step with God rather than grating against Him by vying for control with Him.
Acceptance is errantly viewed as surrender when it’s really an acknowledgement that we don’t have the control that we pretend to have and that we’re not as powerful as we might like to think. Geese will fly and people will die. Acceptance is embracing our insecurities. It‘s recognizing that control is our attempt to establish a sense of security and safety in a frequently tumultuous world. Acceptance then is embraced by relinquishing our need to control and choosing instead to rest fully in God’s constant care and provision.
That sense of acceptance that is heavy with peace and rich with empowerment is a sense that when walking with God, life rolls on as it should, even when the gravity of situations or their course would seem to suggest otherwise. It’s about discerning the ebb and flow of life for the clues that God has placed there, rather than merely having our vision halted by questions about whether life is good or bad, fair or unfair, just or unjust. “Those who hope in me will not be disappointed” (Isaiah 49:23, New International Version) says the God of geese and the overseer of death.
It's looking past the nature of events to the lessons and flecks of gold that God has scattered liberally within them. Acceptance is letting freedom give life ample space to do its work without our mindless intrusions and savoring its subsequent bounty.
We can accept whatever comes our way if we know that in the event, regardless of the nature of the event, God has placed something there for us that’s of more value than the situation within which God has allowed it come. Acceptance creates infinite room for an infinite God to work out the infinite in the finiteness of our worlds. It geometrically expands our worlds out beyond the most unimaginable horizons. It breathes possibilities into everything that looms impossible. We throw open the windows of our existence; pulling back drapes of despair and we let our souls air out in a vastness that takes our breath away. In the releasing that acceptance demands, we lose everything that we thought was something, and we gain everything that that is truly everything.
A kiss on a dying forehead that was even now becoming cool; my hands stroked her face and brushed back hair so gray and still that it seemed to have already fallen into an eternal slumber ahead of my mother; a final goodbye. We stepped out into a parking lot somehow sterile and lifeless; people coming and going as if moving through some sort of mechanized script. The angst of holding on and letting go plied hearts and hands as they stood somber over awaiting cars; numbed and lost, fumbling for keys and answers.
And then they burst across the treetops. Hundreds of geese in a collection of V-formations surged over us, skimming the underside of a fall sky and brushing the last pastels of twilight. Fall accepted its own departure, seeing itself as part of some grand drama that played out in the simplicity in geese aloft or as vast as a turning cosmos. Everything seemed thrilled to be a privileged part of it all. In embracing such a feeling, I found the beginnings of closure and a door to the future.
I waved goodbye to the airborne minions and I said goodbye to Mom. Somehow in the letting go I experienced a transition to a place where I was allowed to settle; a place warm and familiar. And in this place of solace, I was likewise prepared for yet another unexpected goodbye.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Wednesday Sep 13, 2023
Dealing With Grief and Loss - An Autumn’s Journey
Wednesday Sep 13, 2023
Wednesday Sep 13, 2023
Grief and loss are something with which we are all well acquainted. Some of the losses that we've experienced are small, while others are utterly overwhelming.
Our natural response in our loss is to press past the pain in an effort to resume our normal lives as quickly as possible. But in the rush to heal and free ourselves from the pain, we miss the immense growth that is awaiting us in the pain itself.
Craig's recent message outlines the fact that "There is great purpose in great pain." However, if we live in denial of our pain or place all of our efforts on simply stopping the pain we will forfeited the priceless growth that await us in the pain.
Take a moment and enjoy this thought-provoking and timely message.
Tuesday Sep 12, 2023
Podcast Short: Dead-End Roads of Our Making
Tuesday Sep 12, 2023
Tuesday Sep 12, 2023
Dead-End Roads of Our Making
We chart these paths. We set these goals. We ponder where we are, and from there we determine where we want to go. There’s some sort of road that we’re walking, whether that’s a road of our own making, or it’s a road that everybody is walking, or it’s the road that culturally vogue or socially trending. Sometimes that road is well defined and clear. Sometimes there’s very little definition to it all, and we end up wondering if we’re really on any sort of road at all. And then some of us are just plain lost in the woods. “There’s some sort of road that we’re all walking.”
Whatever kind of road that we’re on, it’s both amazing and frustrating how many of those roads end up at dead-ends. It’s stunning that there are millions of people who are standing at the end of some road (or what they thought was a road) and it ends. It just ends. They had visualized it going somewhere great, or exciting, or meaningful. It was the path to their dreams. It was the road to a life-long relationship. The highway to fiscal wealth or career advancement. The byway that led them to everything that everyone else said that they could never do or never be…but it doesn’t go to any of those kinds of places at all. It dead-ends. In the middle of nowhere.
A dead-end is likely the product of being on the wrong road. And if I created the road, it’s probably going to dead-end because it’s probably the wrong road. Frequently, the dead-end will be up out of sight from where we started this journey (so that we won’t have second-thoughts taking it). Or, we can actually see the dead-end, but we live in denial of it because we want what we want. Or, the people around us took it and were too embarrassed to tell us that we would run into a dead-end because they were embarrassed that they ran into a dead-end. Or, the culture has deluded us into believing that it’s not a dead-end at all (even though it looks strikingly similar to a dead-end).
Dead-ends. The only road that I know of that has no dead-ends is the one that God lays out for us. Those are roads of no dead-ends. Rather, those are roads of endless beginnings. Forever beginnings. Perpetual beginnings. Where the world says that the road will stop, the roads God creates keep right on going. When the mountains become too high, or the valleys become too low and the roads come to a screaming halt, God has already constructed a bridge or leveled the valley. “There’s some sort of road that we’re walking.” And if God didn’t create it, your dead-end is just around the ‘corner.’ If He did create it, you don’t need to worry about the ‘corners.’
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Saturday Sep 09, 2023
”An Intimate Collision - Encounters With Life and Jesus” - Part Three
Saturday Sep 09, 2023
Saturday Sep 09, 2023
Dean was deaf. It was that simple, but it was inordinately complex at the same time. Life can have its sinkholes. Sometimes there’s a bunch of them, enough of them to cause a broad and crippling implosion where things just cave in all around us. Life then becomes a litany of foggy responses to trauma where we move zombie-like through whatever the day or the moment holds. There is no forward movement in times like these. When our worlds collapse it all becomes about survival because often that’s all it can be about. Soon survival becomes the norm where we strive to survive for the sake of survival itself. Life becomes abjectly meaningless other than getting through the day to fight the meaningless that will face us again tomorrow.
Dean was deaf. But he was mentally retarded as well. Tenderly kind, compassionate and invitingly soft underneath it all, he was the by-product of the sink-holes that had scattered themselves all around his life. In the end, it all imploded and he retreated into his deafness and his mental retardation, finding there some seclusion away from it all. He sat along the roadside of life watching some of it go by and ignoring the rest of it. He surrendered to isolation and held the world at bay, barricading himself many fathoms deep within himself. He effectively placed himself out of reach of anything. He was a treasure lost in the stratified subterranean layers of his fear.
He had never mastered his deafness. Some lean into their disability and shape it to serve them. He never leaned into it. Some work to compensate for their handicaps by strengthening the things that are not handicaps. He never compensated. Rather, he decompensated down into a silent oblivion where he sat hunched and utterly alone.
Sign language and the reading of lips never broke him out of the prison that deafness had thrust him into; that place so many fathoms deep that no one could get down there. He was somehow held inside with the world held outside. Each could see the other from their variant vantage points, but neither could bridge the gap nor plumb the depths. Whatever separated him from the rest of us seemed intractably immovable.
A Conviction of Greatness
Life sometimes persuades us to believe that there is so much more to something or some person even though we can’t see it. We engage that thing or that person with a certainty that there lies within them something profound despite the fact that it’s completely hidden. It seems that we walk circles around them, looking and probing for some crack or tear that will grant us a peek inside. We look for some chink to wriggle through or a knob that we can wrestle with long enough until some hidden door opens and grants us entrance to the riches within. There emerges a dogged persistence about it all because we dare not bypass what lies within even though it’s held away from us.
That was Dean. He was a kid that I could not let go of even though there was nothing to hold onto. His mild mental retardation put him even further away; a young man of riches unearthed that always provoked me back to him. He was frustrating and abrasive at times, being unable to break through his own deafness and reach up and out to everything outside of himself. His coarse and sometimes rash behaviors seemed to be an expression of his deeply engrained trepidation of the world, combined with his own frustration of choosing to seclude himself. Because he couldn’t break out, he reinforced his isolation from the inside out, pushing everything away so that he would have a sense that it was he who was locking it all out. Somehow he found solace in thinking he controlled it because it gave him a sense he could get out of it. He couldn’t.
I didn’t choose to be relentless with this kid. I had no choice but be relentless. Sometimes what you see in another is far too convincing and too terribly compelling to let it go of it even when you meet with nothing more than outright rejection and ever-thickening walls. And walls there were; thick, fortified and towering. I found myself relentless in pursuit and then disappointed into withdrawal, only to do it all over again because this kid was somehow just too precious to let go of. He needed to hear, maybe not with his ears, but at least with his heart. I prayed that God would pull Dean aside and open up something that would open him up.
Deaf to Life
Rejection and scorn was his lot due to the assumption of sin that others had about him. The world was loudly silent for him. Something was missing that he could not identify because he had never known it. Life is indeed an orchestra full and complete, absolutely masterful. But for the deaf man it was absolutely silent. The musical pieces and masterful renditions for which life was created were soundless for him. Notes and scores that were casually written across the faces of friends, that were penned in the raucous flamboyance across bustling open air markets, that found subtle notation in droning bees gently drifting from blossom to awaiting blossom all gave the faintest hints of the melodies they illustrated, but the sounds were never there. The sheet music ran in front of him in endless reams, but they didn’t spawn a sound.
The haunting call of myriad geese aloft, the pounding surf throwing itself against a forever beach, or the fingers of the wind rustling through listless treetops were silent for him. The roll of a distant summer thunderstorm on a humid horizon, or the raucous laughter of life rising from the soul of humanity itself was nothing more and nothing less than the sound of silence. Entombed in a vacuum of deafening silence, the orchestra had always played soundlessly for this deaf man; vigorously indeed, but vigorously silent. He was deaf and he was starkly alone.
He attempted to interact and engage with the music and the melodies. But to try to participate in a world you can’t hear leaves you ever outside of that world despite how hard you try. His lips were slow and drawn with words that were ill-formed. He arduously attempted to wrap words around voice and syntax and intonation that he had never heard. He spent himself in perpetually frustrating efforts to do what he couldn’t conceive and could much less imagine, to put sounds to words he’d never heard.
His words were slurred, distorted, verbally twisted and linguistically bent, readily inviting and successfully garnering ridicule, mockery and confusion from those that lived in the world of sound. His was a life forced out onto the fringes of life, exiled there in a lonely land where silence is a hated, but forever companion. There was no breech in the wall to slip back through in order to touch humanity so as to belong to something other than the silence.
Rejection by others was based on the errant assumption that some sin had caused his deafness. This conclusion was elevated as full-fledged fact, rendering him an outcast on the falsest of premises. Rejection and silence are both isolating, the difference is that one is a choice, the other is chance. What they have in common is that the person upon whom they both fell chose neither. It was something like a full emasculation of everything it is to be human. This is what it was to be deaf and mute. And so his life went.
There was a rumor that circulated. A distant murmuring unheard by deaf ears, but caught by others said that Jesus was in the Decapolis. This prophet and miracle worker had come. The verdict as to who this Jesus was remained a point of discussion and debate. Some of that was quite heated and some of it was really rather innocuous. Yet, He was coming and the captivating risk that He was something more than a mortal man was compelling.
Had those around this deaf man tired of his dependency, these friends of his, or did they care for him? Was he little more than an object that could be used to entice a miracle of this prophet? Was their intent little more than a ploy for a cheap thrill? The text is unclear. The motive is foggy and indistinct. But they take the deaf mute to Jesus. It didn’t appear to be an action of the deaf man’ own accord as there is no hint of self-determination or self-initiation. There doesn’t appear to be any sort of remote inkling that the possibility of being ushered into the world of sound is a distinct possibility. How can you possibly know what you’re missing if you’ve never had it? How can you desire something if desire has no place to be cultivated because we’ve no idea that there’s anything to be desired?
Sometimes we see in and through others what we could not otherwise see because it’s not within us to see. Sometimes we experience the passionate and vigorous pulse of desire vicariously through the heartbeat of others and we sense the pulse in them. Sometimes our vision of the possible is only possible because we see that vision reflected in the eyes of another and we watch it listlessly dance about in their smile. Sometimes we actually end up dancing because others have caused us to believe in the dance and have ushered us out on the dance floor even when we can’t hear the music ourselves. Such were the deaf mute’s friends.
And so, the rumor draws them to Jesus. Soon the embedded mass was found. Ushered by these friends, the deaf man pressed through the crowd. The small entourage cuts a swath through a fluid array of assorted humanity that swelled and eddied around Jesus. The clamor of a world of never-ending needs simultaneously sought relief. The world clamored around Jesus seeking some shred of hope and some healing that arises from that shred of that very hope. The crowd swirled around this wandering prophet as if in the grip of the undertow of all creation, an irresistible current from which all other currents find their sole source. Passing through a cultural morass of assembled humanity the deaf man is drawn toward the center.
The aged, stooped and shuffling in the grip of long years wandered about in a cloudy curiosity. Children darted in and out. The blind walked about groping, stretching trembling arms outward, substituting touch for sight and sound for vision. Stumbling, they made their way to Jesus. Crutches that were terribly crude and deeply weather-worn were nothing more than primitive prosthetics that sought a miracle for an absent leg. A cripple, his fingers clawing the arid soil drug useless appendages and tattered garments that trailed in the talcum dirt behind him.
Limp in his mother’s arms an infant teetered on the chilling precipice of death, the pallor of death strangely awash across the face of newborn life rendering his skin hues of suffocating purple. His mother stood on panicked tiptoe, stretching her neck to catch a glimpse of something, anxiously groping toward the center of the mass. It was all silence to the deaf mute. It was all wildly alive, vibrant, turbulent and wonderfully riotous, but deathly silent. From his vantage point, the drama was only partly revealed.
Pressing onward and inward, it was more of the same. The scene was packed tight with shifting layers of broken humanity, the curious, the destitute, the rich and poor alike. Finally the last layer of jostling, clamoring humanity parted like the parting of some glorious tapestry. A man of silent stature stood in the crowd, yet infinitely above it. The nucleus of the swirling mass of people and their needs was deafening in silence. Jesus back was to them. Slightly stooped, His hands gently rest on the shoulders of an elderly woman. The look of astonishment was set in her eyes and splashed across her face. A worn cane lay abandoned at her feet. Something unusual had transpired. It was immediately clear that there was thick compassion in His touch, His stance, and His mannerisms. A parting word to the woman and He turns.
His gaze shifted and panned the crowd. Mussing the hair of a playful child, both smile deeply and invade the heart of the other in a superbly divine intersection. Another step and this Jesus was drawn to the outstretched arms of an ecstatic infant. He moved toward her, His face electrically alive with love and aflame with anticipation. To squeals of laughter He took her, held her high, pulled her to His chest, ran His hand across a misshapen leg and it was straight. The convergence of two souls, He drew her deeply to His face. And then He handed her back to an elated set of parents who now held a daughter who was wholly whole. All of it was too much for words; it was too inexplicable to embrace in the confining catacombs of human understanding. The only question that one can formulate is “Who is this?”
Before the answer can be formulated Jesus is drawn to the pleas of those who have brought the deaf mute, pleas the deaf man cannot hear. The man, this Jesus stepped toward them, fastening His attention on those who had brought the man. He seemed discerning and listening with some sort of intuition and understanding that superseded anything they could comprehend.
He then turned intense eyes and fastened His gaze on the mute. His eyes were more than human, although they appeared to be something that was fully human at the same time. They were infinitely deep, profoundly thoughtful and intensely focused. A soft but chiseled spirit enamored the crowd and drew the deaf man to Jesus. It was all a terrible yet inviting contradiction of commanding power and gentle softness. Jesus’ eyes had the breath of infinity behind them. The deaf mute found himself becoming entirely lost in them until Jesus took his arm, gestured and began to move out of the crowd. God was afoot; the Creator of the universe in intentional motion toward an intentional destination. It was all terrifying but exhilarating at the same time.
This fluid mass of humanity parted a second time, but from the inward out. Shifting layers of broken humanity sliced a swath to the edge of the mass. Jesus breeched the fringes of the crowd, walking with a man whose life had been lived on the fringes of life. Jesus was in the process of isolating a man who lived isolated in deafness. In a moment, the crowd was far behind them, their voices falling into a distant murmur. Those that advocated his healing were absent. Suddenly, inexplicably, this deaf mute was alone with God.
Ears and tongue; the world is drawn in through one with the self being released through the other. They both engage in a partnership of exchange, drawing in and letting out. They draw in the world to process it and then release it back into the world with part of the person attached; adding to life, flavoring it, affixing yet another unique note to the chorus of the ages. There, in the world of the deaf, this dance was never initiated. The deaf man was isolated from the world and to the world.
Drawing the man along, Jesus sought isolation. It was within isolation that isolation would be broken. One on one, God and man in relationship echoing back to a lost garden. The Creator and the created rectifying lost creation in an act of recreation. In this joint journey they walked past the rancor and raucous of an open air market filled with bartering and bantering, scales and sweeping gestures. They skirted around scurrying children and walked past stray dogs milling close to tables spread with red meats. A pair of centurions laden with weaponry strode past in the service of oppression, granting Jesus and the deaf mute no notice. Passing priests in ceremonial robes stepped in pompous cadence on errands of perceived righteousness.
And then, an unexpected turn into a vacant alley made up of basalt stones that cut a manmade canyon. The sun found scant room to watch the making of a miracle. It casts angled rays, canting itself to catch the pending phenomenon. The din of the open air market and the jostling of the vendors was put at a sufficient distance, becoming gradually muted and fading soft and indistinct into the background.
Then, a miracle was wrought with gestures that were so familiar to the mute. Gestures were the very means of understanding and the way in which the deaf mute had navigated his world. Jesus was not a God interacting in mystery, but in intimacy. There were no methods cloaked with indiscernible actions or unfamiliar rituals. All was simple, direct and familiar; fingers in ears and a touch of the tongue. Saliva was a symbol of the fullest sharing of self as a participant in the miracle right along with the deaf mute. Jesus engaged the man not as a distant entity cloaked beyond recognition in some sort of misty immutability. Salvia was believed to have had a curative quality; a belief entirely fictional in nature. However, the symbolism of the act provided a needed vehicle that outweighed the myth of the act itself. So Jesus ingeniously chose to use myth as a vehicle for a miracle; a miracle done in the simple language of the deaf mute’s isolated world to obliterate his isolation.
And then there was something for Jesus Himself. Something the deaf man could not hear or participate in. Jesus looked up to heaven. There is a weighted sigh of a God whose love eliminates His ability not to feel. It was a reflection of both His heart and the heart of His Father. It seemed to be the private pain of a God grieving over His own creation, escaping the lethal weight of it all only by virtue of His divinity. Jesus’s sighing was likely the plaintive moan of God once again embracing the awful reality of fallen mankind as manifest in this single, mute life. It was likely the expression of a great angst that arose from an infinite understanding of how far this man’s life was from God’s original intent for him.
There, in that alley God would meet the need of one man. In a few days, He would meet the need of thousands with a scant seven barley loaves and a few small fish. A few months beyond that and He would meet the need of all mankind on a barren hill. It would be a hill that would not be sandwiched between the walls of some abandoned alley, but between two crosses and two worlds. However, there was the need of the moment.
“Be opened!” (Mark 8:34, NIV) said this Jesus. Not just his ears, but his life as no miracle is excluded or in any way restrained solely to the obvious. “Be opened!” Be free to live fully, to hear in perfect pitch the richness of the notes and measures, the scores of life and living. Be opened to engage everything else in life that was open. Be opened so that being closed simply cannot be.
Jesus took a step back and watched life unfold as the miracle reverberated far beyond the miracle; something like when a stone is dropped in a mirrored pool, sending ripples far beyond the point of impact. An alien experience transpired for which the man had no point of correlation. Sounds began to filter through. The orchestra gradually swelled and expanded. The void of silence filled to capacity.
Suddenly, he heard the crunch of gravel beneath his feet, shifting his weight again and again to reproduce the sound his stunned and hungry mind had never imagined. The barking of a dog floated in from afar, the source of the sound and everything that defined it was entirely unknown. Birds darted overhead in tangles of wild flight, cheeps and chirps synchronizing the feathered masses journey. He was caught in the rapture of hearing his own breath. And then words, the first he had ever heard, annunciated clearly, perfectly and concisely. His own voice now came back to him perfect! The cycle was now marvelously complete.
Jesus stood silently, giving the man room and time to embrace the wonder of the moment. Miracles become freeing and claustrophobic at the same time; opening up entirely new venues that are often bigger than our ability to embrace. Time was needed to allow this astonished man sufficient time to reorient to the miracle of a life restored. Maybe Jesus saw in this man, this deaf mute the liberation that the cross would extend to billions.
It may be that the individual miracles, like this one, allowed Jesus to foresee in this solitary face what the cross would do in an endless sea of faces across endless spans of time. Not the kinds of miracles that would eventually fall to the deterioration of frail bodies and the eventuality of death, but miracles that would be eternally fresh because they open up all of eternity to all who seize it. I wonder if maybe it might have been these moments that allowed Him to endure the long moments on a lonely cross.
And then, the first words of another human being that he ever heard. “Don’t tell anyone,” Jesus said. The first words seem irrational and inexplicable. The world of sounds brings with it responsibility to the world it unveils. Miracles bring with them accountability to both the Restorer and what has been restored. A relationship with God brings obedience, the responsibility to act on faith even when that action appears irrational, contrary, odd or plainly wrong. “Don’t tell anyone”. But containment failed. The measure of the miracle was larger than the measure of the man to contain it. But that is what happens when an infinite God interacts within our finite frames. What He does is always bigger than us and bigger than our ability to contain it. Our faith may be big enough to elicit a miracle, but our faith is seldom large enough to embrace it once it happens. Jesus took his arm, gestured and began to move out of the alley and into life.
Aside in an Alley
And so, Jesus pulls me aside at times and isolates me in my isolation. He places creation aside and draws me to a secluded place, away from the crowds that surround me and the world that has so often thrust me to its fringes. Often I am afraid to be there because I am confused and frightened to be one on one with God. I would much prefer to have Him heal me at a safe distance, or intersect my life in the companionship of others, or touch me as part of something larger within which I can meld. But one on one in some alley in my life; secluded with God? Sequestered with the Creator? It is both terrible and wonderful.
And then, to have Him connect with me intimately in that place of isolation? The God of the cosmos coming to me in my isolation? Not just in proximity or in earshot, but in my language and in the raw essence of my being. God steps into my isolation and speaks to me there. Not standing outside of my isolation and beckoning me out of it from out there. But coming in, gently taking my arm and gesturing me out of it. Partnering with me and in the partnering coming squarely into my isolation to commandeer me and rescue me. Cutting through the mass of issues, pain, self-absorption, and self-hatred that surrounds me and drawing me along with Him.
And there, in those isolated alleys of my life He frees me. He relishes watching me come to life and then fumble with a life that’s so new that I have little idea how to hold it. He is as amazed at watching me come to life as He was when He first formed Adam from the dust and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7, NIV). It is just as poignant for Him, never being diminished for a God whose love for His creation rages undiminished. God is always revealing that creation can only exist if it is constantly creating. “He has done everything well . . .” (Mark 7:37, NIV). Harkening to yet another statement . . . “and God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10, NIV). In that alley God was creating all over again as He always does, doing everything well and good.
Dean’s Alley
It was all experimental, but the doctors said that the surgery might restore Dean’s hearing. He was not enthused at all. Dean walked through the process more like a laboratory rat that had no idea of what was happening or what the possible outcome might mean. He was lethargic through it all, demure and distant.
But the day came quite by accident. I turned and there he stood. My first response was to say “hello” out of some prescribed tedium and routine, knowing that he wasn’t reading my lips. Sometimes rote and ritual turns life lifeless. It robs us of expectation and hope. I felt that way with Dean. But I said “hello” anyway.
He simply looked, canting his head a bit and registering something in those crystal blue eyes that I had never seen. Sometimes we imagine something so much for so long that when it’s ours it’s both wonderful and terribly different than we had ever imagined it being. I think that was the case for Dean. He had heard my voice. The surgery had worked. For the first time, he had taken in the tone and flavor of the single word that I had uttered and had found himself awed by the utterance. He smiled and seemed to wait for more. I paused. “Can you hear me?” I said tentatively, desperately hoping that he was no longer locked in and I locked out.
Instantly he grabbed my arm, turned and in the rush of wonder pulled me down the hall and into his room. He stopped in the middle of that quaint room and pointed at the various objects around us in frantic gestures. It was all so new for me that I had no idea of what he meant. He continued to point in a manner insistent and adamant, walking around the room in a rigid gait and incessantly pointing.
Finally, I realize what he wanted; he wanted me to pronounce what the objects were, to speak their name, to say them so that he could hear them for the first time. Picture, telephone, window, bed, floor, light, wall, rug, Craig; it was a young man surging alive with an urgency that flooded the room with a terrific and wonderful energy. He was hearing it all, for the first time.
Sometimes you sense that you’ve been put in a place of privilege that you are completely and wholly undeserving of. That’s where I was on that day. God came aside this young man through the hands of a caring doctor and an experimental surgery. Now I was privileged to stand beside him as well, inundated in a tsunami of wonderment and life.
It all went on for days and days. I couldn’t wait to see Dean. In indescribable awe, I watched a young man come alive in a way that makes coming alive worth all the pain and disappointment and deafness that we have to endure to get there. A miracle came to me through Dean. Deafness was abated in infinitely more ways that simply physical hearing. Dean reminds me of deafness and what it can do to a person and a life. Dean also reminds me of deafness abated when God comes along side of a single life and renders deafness deaf.
Repeated Deafness
Unlike the deaf mute and unlike Dean, my deafness and my inability to speak to my world come often. Frequently I need Jesus to put His fingers in my ears and touch my tongue. Sin, selfishness and the lure of the world renders me deaf and ill-suited to speak as I should. My condition is pitifully recurrent. God’s presence is likewise persistently recurrent. Daily I am in this alley with Him. While I tire of it and find myself sweltering in embarrassment, He never tires. He likes, it seems, these alley encounters. He relishes taking me aside. And I know that one day He will take me aside for that final time, that time when I will ascend to a place where deafness and speech deficits will simply not exist. Their memory will be vanquished. And there, in that place, I will stand eternally before God in perfection with new worlds perpetually opening up to me. In that place the layers will constantly part to reveal something new. His smile, the relish in His face will never be old, but always new.
Pondering Point
The loud voices in life, those that clamor for our attention are most often not the vital voices. The fact that they have to clamor suggests as much. It is the smaller voices that are weak, thin and easily drown out that are rich. It is these that tend to be the priceless voices. Their worth easily lost in the pompous and presumptuous voices that say much but hold little. It is easy to become deaf. And when we are, we miss the precious voices whose worth is immutable.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Friday Sep 08, 2023
Being a Lamp That’s Lit - Part One
Friday Sep 08, 2023
Friday Sep 08, 2023
Being a Lamp That's Lit
So let’s begin at the beginning and ask the first question that needs to be asked . . . are you a lamp that's lit? Matthew chapter 5 talks about being a light, but we might want to first ask the fundamental question, am I a lamp that's lit in the first place?
How many of us are lit and ablaze? We’re all lamps . . . every one of us. But how many of us are lit and burning and casting light, because it’s one thing to be a lamp, and it’s quite another thing to be lit. If you walk through life being a lamp that’s not lit, you will live a diminished life and you will add to the diminishment of those around you. And that is tragic.
The Irish play-write, George Bernard Shaw was interviewed by a reporter who asked him, “Mr. Shaw, if you could live your life over and be anybody you’ve known, any person from history, who would you be?” Listen carefully to what he said. George Bernard Shaw said this. He replied, “I would choose to be the man George Bernard Shaw could have been, but never was.” Will that be your commentary on your life? When the end comes and the years are dwindling, will you say, I would choose to be the man I could have been, but never was?
George Bernard Shaw was a lamp that, by his own admission, was never lit.
“Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.” You . . . all of you . . . all of us are lamps. And the question that I have for you is “are you lit?
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Thursday Sep 07, 2023
Thursday Sep 07, 2023
Did you ever run with leaves: a wild race born of wind and liberated foliage? It’s a race, but more than that it’s really an invitation to partnership and farewell. Racing with the leaves was not about finishing first; rather it was about a romp enjoyed in the midst of a transition being celebrated. It was playing with a friend before that friend was called away home.
It happened in fall’s own autumn when the leaves turned dry. They had long lost their color, becoming curled and brittle; gnarled sometimes like hands beset with arthritis. Winter’s impending snows skirted the horizon and teased the forecast. It was something like the last hurrah before fall slipped away. As a kid, it was an invitation to play one more time; to playfully challenge the remnant of leaves that had yet to sleep.
It most often began in the street as a brisk winter wind dove and spun from graying skies; slipping just centimeters over the asphalt. The myriad leaves strewn about seemed to grab hold for one final thrill, hitching a ride for one more bit of hilarity and fun. They raced, spun and tumbled down the road, at points catching themselves in winter’s eddies and spinning in perfect circles as if caught in a delirious waltz. Pooled in some sort of scripted conglomeration, they would suddenly burst forward amass to continue their pell-mell race down the road.
For a kid, it was all too inviting. It was play and farewell all in one. You had to race; to run in some sort of camaraderie or you felt that you were somehow betraying fall and being brutish about its departure.
And so we raced. It was playful enough until winter blew a briskly firm wind that sent jovial leaves bounding past us at a pace we could not match. Left behind in a deluge of wildness, we would pull up and stop; breathlessly watching the leaves hurl themselves down the street and into the bosom of winter. It was more than just leaves. Rather it was bidding a season farewell; watching it roil and dance down the street, turning back and waving goodbye as they went. Fall was drawing out of reach, leaving us behind to wait for the next season.
Breathless and aching, it was a bittersweet moment; those times when you don’t want to lose what you have while you’re simultaneously looking forward to what’s coming. It was about wanting to hold all things at all times, not in the sense of seasons for seasons don’t hold; rather they give and then take. We want all the accumulated good of life to be constantly present, rather than a good thing having to leave in order to make room for another good.
Kids don’t understand goodbyes. I saw it all as kind of circular; that whatever I was losing would come back. Fall would come again. We’d race again. The hello and goodbye of this season would happen again and again. It did not embrace loss as permanent so it was easier to let go knowing it was eventually coming back. Kids don’t understand that sometimes things leave forever; that finality has a non-negotiable terminus where an end is indisputably an end often without apology or explanation. But,I didn’t know that. Fall was drawing out of reach only to return on the backside of next year’s calendar. And so we waved goodbye to fall and ran wildly into winter.
Drawing Out of Reach in Adulthood
It wound in stilled wonderment past the sturdy walls of the hospice and around the pond, mystically inviting grieving passerby’s to a soulful stroll. Brushing the edge of a dense forest caught in the early stages of releasing falls blaze, the brick path offered those on its gentle concourse the opportunity to brush the edge of their own existence as well. Death does that, and a hospice is a place for death.
The path was an artistic fusion of decorative bricks laid out in relentless mosaics. It was ever changing and always beautiful. Gracefully worn at the edges and framed in slight strings of emerald moss, the path was a brick menagerie aged and gentle. It wound around the entire pond, encircling the waters with a gentle but slightly distance embrace.
It had known the footsteps of many whose strides were made heavy with pending loss. Tears had mottled its surface. Sobs had run in rivulets deep into its crevices. The lamenting of lives lost and opportunities squandered had drawn the brickwork tight. Grief and celebration held simultaneously had prompted wonderment; the path often attempting to understand the contradiction. It had aged indeed, but with the sturdy mantel of wisdom and the tender softness of a rare empathy. It didn’t dominant but invited the passerby with muted whispers to a curious walk along the edge of life and death.
That Thin Line
The first of falls leaves had begun to litter the path by the time my brother and I walked it. They wanted to race, but their invitation was more than we could heed. The invitation to frolic and farewell was the same, but I had no heart for it. Fall would be back. My mother would not. Fall drew out of reach every year only to return. As a kid, I didn’t understand that sometimes things leave forever; that finality has a non-negotiable terminus where an end is indisputably an end often without apology or explanation. Mom’s departure would be permanent, without apology or adequate explanation.
The path seemed to weep as only true sympathy can beget weeping, brushing aside fallen leaves as so many tears; itself declining one more romp. Something about this path seemed thick and generous with empathy, somehow knowing our pain because of the pain of so many others whose steps and pain still lingered in the crevices and cracks of its brickwork. It beckoned, inviting us to a contemplative stroll that took the mind beyond the simple hedgerows of the heart and deep into the wilderness of the soul.
Death invites us out there, beyond the comfort of life’s edge. It seems that the thin line where life and death meet is a tempestuous and fearful place. One does not cross over only to return on the backside of some calendar. Goodbyes are not followed by hellos; at least none that happen on this side of that line. There was a foreboding permanence that this line was not circular; rather it was linear, moving on to something else someplace else.
A Glimpse of Both Worlds
This precarious line calls into question so many things we prefer not to call into question. Latent feelings lying deep within some sort of emotional substrata are awakened and rise despite our desire to keep them submerged. Edging up against our own humanity is always a frightening thing. Living in the denial or ignorance that finality is final allows us to live with a sense of the eternal in a world terribly temporal.
There is that inherited bit of eternity that lies deep within us that rails against the confines of the temporal, awakening a deep sense that we were originally designed for life without limits. When limits are laid out as lines across the landscape of our lives, much like that path, we find ourselves facing something that was not meant to be, but something that is anyway.
Yet, this line is filled with a sublime richness, handing out pearls of wisdom and priceless insights that give away, in some nearly magical way some of life’s most closely guarded secrets. It is here that the dichotomy of life and death, of the finite and the infinite, of the eternal and temporal edge up to each other and eventually intersect in one place. The two sides of life merge in a rare and uncanny way, giving us vast glimpses of the whole of existence.
Somehow winding down its broad path it afforded the grieving the privilege of winding down a path not often traveled in both heart and spirit. Here the deep wood drew up shoulder to shoulder with the brick path, much as death and life draw shoulder to shoulder in such moments.
It was not a clash, but one aspect of life being fully present with the other likewise fully present; life standing side by side with death in a partnership of sorts. It was indeed the consummation of the entirety of existence, an extremely rare convergence where each inhabited a single place at a single moment. It was really not about anything waving goodbye only to say hello in the turn of some season. It was about the complete appropriateness of this finality as being the crowning touch to life. It was the need for a final exit that set the stage for a final entrance in a place where hello was in reality “welcome home,” and “goodbye” would be eternally unknown and therefore entirely absent. Something surged within me as two aspects of the same thing came together on a simple brick path that wound tight against fall’s wood.
Our Fear of the Line
I lived on the life side of that line, as far away from the line itself as possible so as to be as far from death as possible. My mother was drawing ever closer to that line, moving to cross from this side to the other. Her illness had thrust me to the edge of that demarcation, either as a means of keeping Mom from crossing over or attempting to see that the place she was heading was both prepared and fitting. I don’t know. An illness had pushed her near the line when I was in kindergarten at a tender five years of age. Thankfully, she did not cross then, although she had brushed frighteningly close.
This time the crossing was imminent. There would be no return, no coming back on the backside of the calendar. Leaves blew down the tight brick path into a pending winter. I felt no urge to bid them farewell, nor did I feel brutish and insensitive by not doing so. The farewell that I was facing supplanted any desire for any farewell ever. Yet I attempted to grasp the appropriateness of a final farewell in exchange for a forever hello.
Other loved ones had crossed over this path . . . aunt and uncles and grandparents, descending into some sort of abyss that permitted no spectators, leaving me distanced by the fear of that place. From this side, I couldn’t see what was there. Like the forest running deep and dense, death quickly drew those I loved out of sight behind veils of shadow into some place that I couldn’t see. If there was life out there, I couldn’t make it out. And if there was, could it ever possibly be as colorful as life on this side of that line? What was Mom crossing over to? Seizing the hem of a winter wind, the leaves bounded into the deep wood and cavorted out of sight.
The Known Unknown
“For I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2, American Standard Bible). Somewhere out there a place was prepared for Mom. Across that line that she was approaching lay a provision unknown to me. It was said to be spectacular; the stuff of mansions. But I wanted to see it to affirm it as being so in order to lend me some comfort. She was drawing out of reach. When you draw out of the reach of one place, you draw into the reach of another. However, I couldn’t see that other place.
I held to belief that whatever that place was, it was magnificent. Magnificence begets mystery, somehow becoming so grand that it’s too grand to be randomly disclosed. It is the stuff of privilege, holding secret its bounty until those destined for it see it for the first time. Grandeur disclosed in a sudden massive display is thrilling. I hoped that heaven was such a place. Despite the fact that I couldn’t see it past the deep wood and shadows of life, I prayed that it was out there waiting for Mom in indescribable splendor; a welcome growing in wild anticipation of her arrival from which any departure would be eternally unnecessary.
Despite the wonder of all of that, my first and most fierce intent was to stop this crossing over, oddly railing against a journey I could not stop. Sometimes life appears to carry out its plan without seeming to cast an eye towards those affected by that plan. I felt alone and invisible, lost on a gentle brick path teased by parting leaves that wound around a quiet hospice.
Drawing Away and Fading
A number of the bricks embedded along the way contained inscriptions of names and dates etched deeply into their reddish clay surfaces. Some had filled with dirt and scattered speckles of moss; the footprints of time revealed. Others were entirely fresh and sharp, being new to this gentle path. Each name represented a history likely embellished with both wonder and tragedy; a story now completed and slipping with ever increasing vagueness into a misty past. They were inscriptions . . . a handful of letters shouting out names in brick and mortar relief, leaving the world one remaining voice that would forever speak the names of those who had died in this place.
The names cascaded through my mind as torrents of people whose faces I attempted to visualize and whose lives I found myself fabricating. They were entirely unknown to me. Yet, it seemed all too appropriate to resurrect them in my mind at least, to not allow death to draw them out of reach entirely. It seemed some primitive effort to minimize the power of this line by pulling a foggy fragment of these people back across to this side.
The brick path was a curious path, made for the living by those now dead; made so that the drawing away might not result in being entirely drawn from existence itself. It was an inevitable path, one that we all walk, skirting the immortal at one time or another. Some are in front of us along this path, others are behind, and yet others refuse to walk it even though not walking it is not an option. Life on one side and death on the other.
The record of those passing across that line were etched as whispers on fired clay beneath our feet so that names and lives would not be forgotten as they drew out into the deep wood. All of these names had drawn out of reach, leaving the single footprint sketched out in a handful of letters. These bricks held their ground while falls leaves bounded over them and raced off to winter. Mom would cross this line. Her name and her life were already being etched across my heart.
The soles of our shoes scuffed the path’s surface that day. We paid little attention to the support that it laid under us and the guidance it provided us. We were adrift in a mother drawing out of reach in this place of death. It is likely that the path served the most anonymous role conceivable, being a path upon which the grief of those walking it made the path entirely obscure. Mom was becoming obscure as was the entire scope of life itself. Yet this path gave us a footing that we didn't even recognize, much as God gives us a sure footing when what is precious and sacred is being drawn out of reach.
The Onset of Grief as the Inability to Stop Loss
Grief often begins before the loss impales us. Grief finds its origins in the anticipation of loss and it deepens as we become increasingly convinced of the ruthless inevitability of the loss. At his most dire moment, Jesus uttered the plea “if it be possible, let this cup pass from me . . . “ (Matthew 26:39, American Standard Version). His grief was related to what had not yet transpired. It was ground not in the loss itself, but in anticipating the loss.
It may be that anticipation of loss is something of guesswork and speculation, being our attempts to manage or deal with a pending loss. Sometimes it seems that we attempt to visualize loss as some sort of proactive strategy so that the fury or fire or ferocity of loss itself is contained before it befalls us. Such endeavors call for great speculation, thought and a host of presumptions that frequently render the process itself in excess of the actual loss.
Likewise, it seems that grief arises from our inability to stop the loss. Our grief also appears grounded in the realization of our weakness as held against the enormity of what looms before us and our inability to coerce life into avoiding those things. It’s that we can’t stop loss. We’re powerless before this thing called life. It will forcefully move through our days, our hours and our most guarded core with no consideration for what costs its movement may incur. Often life pulls across this line and out of our reach the very things which we so desperately wish to hold onto. And mom was drawing out of our reach.
Obedience and Understanding
Are we willing to be obedient to that which we may not understand? “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9, New International Version) declares God.
It's not about understanding the movements of God and creation. It’s about finding some meaningful abandonment and embracing an entirely confident surrender to that which we can’t grasp and therefore don’t understand. We intentionally set ourselves squarely outside of ourselves, allowing ourselves to live in places we have no hope of comprehending, choosing to believe that there is no other place so grand to be. We realize that the vast majority of this thing we call life and all that makes life grand and massive and terribly exciting is out there; in a place that only God understands. And there, we are left without any understanding except that we are perfectly placed and at home more completely than anything this side of eternity.
It's impossible to find this place, much less reside there unless we trust that in God’s hands all is purposeful with a purpose whose value is far, even infinitely beyond whatever loss might be sustained. Is it a matter of fighting the pull of life or attempting to redirect the great torrents that come against us; to halt the army of departing leaves that race down the road and into winter? Or is it assuming control by the relinquishment of control? Is it seizing with a brash intentionality the belief that in the pulls, torrents and torments God has a grand purpose if we only dare to look, ask or step aside so that we can run to this place of faith, safety and utter abandonment?
Paul wrote that “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1, New International Version). Faith is not about dissection or deductive thinking or rationalization or endeavors designed to rein the infinite into an intellectual corral where it can run itself in predictable circles. Faith is about deciding not to know. It’s not about ignorance or the lack of commitment to gain and garner knowledge. Rather, it’s about acknowledging that all knowledge will quickly collide with a grand wall which human intellect cannot scale, dismantle or burrow under. It’s acknowledging its presence and embracing, even seeking its arrival. It’s about knowing that the vast majority of life is surrender to what we can’t know and a God who we can. If we can do this, then when death comes and it moves into the shadows of the deep woods beyond our vision, we can accept it, embrace it, and in time even cheer it on.
But here lies the great defeating rub. The lynchpin upon which our thinking is either prone to lavish graciousness or unbridled hate is understanding, or lack thereof. We demand to know. Tell me about this crossing over. In light of its unfathomable permanence, explain its rationale and process to me! Show me how it fits and how it’s the better option.
“It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power” (Acts 1:7, American Standard Version). We hate that, particularly in crisis. It’s not enough. It explains nothing. It asks me to believe without hard data or fast facts that would give me a reason and platform to believe. Our lack of faith demands the infusion of information. Information shapes an explanation. And we hope that the explanation is sufficient.
It’s God’s odd, seemingly incongruent dichotomy that we grow the best when we know the least. Lack of understanding provokes faith and forces it. If we don’t understand we either seethe with rebellion, or take a radical posture of resting in a grander plan whose scope and breadth we simply cannot see or adequately apprehend. Mom was drawing out of reach and I was forced to the precipice of this decision to demand to know or let it go. I found it easy in theory but enormously taxing in reality. I wrestled with it imperfectly.
Beating Grief Equals Surrender
Is beating grief the wrestling with surrender and surrendering to surrender? Would grief not only be reduced, but possibly abolished? Surrender is largely synonymous with abandonment in the sense of abandoning our right to fear and embracing our greater right to peace. “And the peace of God, which passes all understanding” (Philippians 4:7, American Standard Version) . . . is ours if we rest in surrender rather than the terrible angst of information that is always insufficient in loss.
Surrender is a choice. As a choice, it is a privilege. We have the privilege of surrendering to God. Surrender in a relationship with God is not about defeat as we presume it to be. It is a supremely tactical move vested in wisdom and faith.
In dealing with grief, it is handing over our lives and our pain with the full acknowledgement that surrender to God means the defeat of grief. “Not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42, American Standard Version). It’s not acknowledging our inadequacy, rather it is acknowledging God’s adequacy. We move away from the need to know and move toward the need to believe. Knowing is never sufficient . . . genuinely believing always is.
Surrender is letting go to something infinitely bigger than I who sees a plan much bigger than the one I see. It’s resting in the conviction that the path unfolding before me is rich even though its escarpment and ascent seems only the stuff of pain and its glories largely obtuse. It frees me to set a course along that line between this life and the next, drawing into the lungs of my soul both halves of life as living and dying.
More profoundly, it’s embracing the fact that Jesus crossed over this line into death and then of His own accord and power came back across this same line into life again. “He . . . is risen” (Luke 24:6, American Standard Bible): three simple words that are said of no one else in all of human history. Sometimes the grandest of all events are best described in the poverty of a few simple words. In a handful of syllables it was declared that Jesus crossed back over. He did both sides of it, and He controls both sides of it. He returned on the backside of the calendar. If indeed He controls both sides of this seemingly precarious line, then the line is really of no accord.
The sun set a rapid course for a horizon tinged in the color of autumn and chilled by that October fall. The path drifted into the chilled shadows of fall; the leaves having ceased their romp. The day’s advance marked far more than the closing of a simple day. For the first time, and the last time in my life it marked the closing of my mother’s life as well. She seemed tied to this day, passing as it would pass. She was moving out of reach as was the sun and the day it defined.
Oddly, I had no alternative but to surrender. I fought the only option presented to me for an option that I did not have. A few of autumn’s leaves swirled at my feet, dancing it seemed on this line between life and death, inviting me to race. They pirouetted as some grand waltz between life and death as if this place marked celebration, seemingly understanding the permanence of Mom’s transition. The words “nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39, American Standard Version) seemed so easy for Jesus to say. The seasons seemed to grasp them. However, they were not easy, but Jesus said them anyway. I struggled to do so, for in doing so I released that which I did not hold. I stepped back. In the stepping I let go of that which I didn’t hold and I let my mother draw across that path and out of reach.
Tears once again mottled the surface of a gentle path that brushed the edge of a dense forest. The leaves raced off the edge of fall, I found myself unexplainably able to release them to the next season. Although it was fight, in the slow release I sensed a pending space to begin grieving. I cried in the fight against myself and the first thin wave of grief that the fight permitted.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Wednesday Sep 06, 2023
”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - The Power of Principles
Wednesday Sep 06, 2023
Wednesday Sep 06, 2023
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. Christianity stands for principles that are not stood for in our culture. It stands for something lofty, but costly. It stands for principles that are timeless rather than those that suit the times. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“So it is that this man named Jesus handily performed feats that were astounding in their scope and utterly impossible in their nature. And as if that were not enough, He then does something as outrageous as inviting us to a life of doing the same. And yet it would seem that the most astounding and impossible thing of all is for us to blithely reject that invitation in favor of the aching emptiness and endless darkness that rides hard on the heels of just such a rejection.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Tuesday Sep 05, 2023
Podcast Short: Becoming Accountable
Tuesday Sep 05, 2023
Tuesday Sep 05, 2023
Becoming Accountable
Accountability…might it be time to be accountable to who we’ve become so that we can make ourselves accountable to what we can be? Are we willing to divest ourselves of all the lesser things that we have elevated as greater things and engage in both a pointed and painful evaluation of who we’ve become? And once we’ve done that, are we brave enough to look at the damage that we’re incurred in the becoming? Can we relinquish our claim to whatever bit of turf we’ve claimed and lay our playground feuds to rest in deference to a cause far greater than the tiny space that we occupy? Can we shake ourselves out of ourselves sufficiently to wake up to the far greater things that lay ‘round about us? Can we begin to see others as less enemies and more people whose differing views may inform our own? At what point we will understand that partnership and camaraderie must be preserved even when differences of beliefs or opinions would do their level best to blast us into warring camps? When will we forfeit what we’ve become in order to become something so vastly superior to what we’ve become?
It’s not that such a shift is impossible (despite the fact that the behaviors exhibited in our world might suggest otherwise). But in the face of the reckless insanity all around us, will we dare to dare? Will we raise ourselves up to embrace the fullness of our humanity? Will we cast off the scourge of selfish agendas and the saber-rattling born of insatiable egos? Will we be what we’ve chosen not to be at whatever cost we might pay to do so, recognizing that the cost of not doing so is far, far greater? Will we shed all that we’ve become to become all that we can be? In essence, will we reclaim the majesty of our humanity as it was created and tenderly fashioned to be?
I believe that we have not done well, but I believe we can yet do very well. I believe in something better. I believe that we can join together in a mutual assault on the mounting challenges in our world instead of engaging in mounting assaults on each other. I believe, and I hope that everyone of us might join me in that belief. And in that joining might we rigorously inventory how we can be different. And then let us go and begin the process of making things different. Let us reclaim the majesty of our humanity in the care of humanity.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Saturday Sep 02, 2023
”An Intimate Collision - Encounters with Life and Jesus” - Part Two
Saturday Sep 02, 2023
Saturday Sep 02, 2023
Darren and a cheap plastic fish; it was a dollar store bin filler indelibly stamped with “made in China” that bordered on being junk. There were numerous needs in Darren’s life, so numerous that he himself was lost in them. They were pathetic and endless, so it seemed anyway. A plastic fish was little more than a cheap toy that momentarily anesthetized a child-like mind trapped in the deterioration of a thirty-five year old body. It was a mere trinket, a point of focus upon which to forget the realities that had bent him and ultimately broken him. It served as a pathetic distraction from all that had cut thick furrows across his head and heart far too early and far too prematurely. It was a cheap, plastic fish.
The years had stooped his gait and lined his hair with ever lighter shades of premature gray, cutting deep fissures across his brow and thickening young skin. His gait had been reduced to a shallow shuffle, dragging thick shoes across coarse pavement. He wore the soles thin on the outsides edges, further canting his gait. His soul was much the same, deeply worn along the outside edges as well; throwing into a precarious imbalance the cadence of an already distorted life. Darren found himself limping through a world that placed ultimate premiums on that which is new, believing that any value is inherent only in the degree of newness any object possesses. The world viewed his worn edges as old, used up and spent. He was unfairly evaluated as discarded humanity and rendered invisible to the eye of a world too busy.
Baggy pants were thread thin at the knees and frayed at the pockets with stitching pulled and strained at variant seams. An oversized shirt bespoke of his desperate efforts to fit in life. Like his shirt, it never happened. Stained and limp, a faded handkerchief hung from a weary pocket. A mouthful of decay filled each smile and poured out in each conversation. Chapped lips were edged thick by coarse stubble sprouting from a grimy bed of mottled skin. The expanse of his squared jaw and sunken cheeks were covered with a bumper crop of inattention. His words were primitive and slurred; rolling off his tongue in seamless bursts that made comprehension nearly impossible. Shoulders were drawn down by the weight life had exerted on him, pulling him forward in a Neanderthal sort of cadence that was long and slothful. And he wanted to show me his plastic fish.
“Kind of like the disciples, huh? They caught fish. They were fishermen!” he said. A broad smile of decay anticipated a hearty response from me. Darren was thirty-five, yet he was enamored with a dollar store plastic fish. “Like the disciples, huh?” His persistence accelerated my desire to talk to a real adult. Church was over and there were many candidates milling about. My momentary objective was to determine how to terminate this infantile conversation and find someone with some shred of intelligence that I could talk to. I moved to close the conversation with Darren and did so quite deftly I thought. He would have no idea that I had just ditched him. As I stepped away from him, he held the plastic fish in his weathered hands as if it were a precious treasure and muttered softly to himself, “I was a sinner, now I’m a fisher of men too.”
God Strikes
There are unexpected moments in life when God sends simplicity as a blinding light that is far more pure and infinitely more superior than all the intellectual musings I could devise. Darren’s words . . . “sinner” and now “fisher of men”, though soft, backlit my soul in blinding light and thundered through the very core of my ego-centric spirit. They rocked me, simultaneously illuminating my flagrant sense of superiority as paper thin and backlighting my egotistical self against something far greater and far grander. A light both brilliant and revealing was thrown onto something I had unknowingly lost in the dark pool of piousness and shallow Christianity that I had cultivated. “Sinner” and “fisher of men” represented two opposite ends of life. One was represented by sin sheathed in death on one end, and that of salvation and the humanly unexplainable privilege of salvation on the other. He had seized something spiritually authentic that was indefinably powerful because of its innocent simplicity.
His words drew me down with my soul melting into repentant puddles on the pavement and pooling around Darren’s feet. And in my heart a stark thought shot through my brain. It seized my heart and surged through my soul as the light exposed the grotesqueness of my immaturity . . . “go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:9, NIV). I had rarely felt so abjectly ugly and so starkly far from God. I was sickened by myself with nowhere to run in order to get away from myself. Darren had brilliantly backlit my life with a hand full of simple words, a plastic fish and an innocent life. I was repulsed by what I saw in the blinding light.
Fish and Light
The cool of the night aimlessly drifted by. Time drifted listlessly with it. Waves gently lapped the weathered wooden hull as if the night was completely pacified with simply existing. Sails flapped passively, rolling in a dance with an occasional listless breeze that floated out from somewhere deep in the night. The timbered creaking of shifting weight was soft against the darkness. Oars dipped deep and silently, spinning tiny whirlpools of water that softly gurgled in the thin veil of satin moonlight. The damp scent of water gathered in a thin, veneer layer of mist that tentatively skirted the water’s surface. The night was intermittently rendered musty with the odors of nets wet with nothing but water. A distant heron hauntingly called into the night from a far shore. Muffled voices and the lights of other boats drifted listlessly across the water.
Nets were cast in a perfectly spinning arch, pirouetting to the rhythm of the night as they were launched by thick arms sure with experience. Slapping the water, they were given a moment to sink into the night of the lake. Descending, the keel of the boat became smaller in the submerged descent. The chalky white moonlight was shattered into a million moving shards of milky light on the underside of the waves, fading as the depths were listlessly plumbed. The water cooled, darkened, and was stirred by soft currents. All was listless in a dreamlike descent.
And then there was a massive tug initiated by the same sure arms of experience. The net reeled and folded in upon itself, instantly enfolding everything within it. A series of firm tugs follow in a different kind of rhythm that was much less peaceful and much more intentional. Lunging toward the surface the net broke the liquid plane and was hauled into the coarse belly of the boat.
Again it was the same. There was nothing in the nets embrace but weeds, water and disappointment. A gruff remark, and then a curse edged rough with the abrasion of frustration cut the night and oozed the pus of anger into the boat’s belly. Frustration was manifest and coarsely expelled into the night by exasperated fishermen whose finest skills could not coerce the deep waters to offer up their bounty. The waters stubbornly chose to withhold their living treasures. The net was hurriedly prepared by frustrated hands and launched again, and again, and again. Frustration layered upon frustration until nothing other than frustration defined the whole of the night.
The moon slowly descended to sleep behind the horizon. The multitude of stars drifted across the expanse of the velvet blackness, moving in unison with the turn of the universe and the winds of heaven nudging them to the same horizon. Night would soon drift into day. The nets remained empty. Soon the sun stirred with the first tentative band of pastel thin light on a yawning horizon, softly illuminating empty boats. So went the night.
This was Simon Peter’s world, that of his father and his grandfather. His was a lineage of weary boats, hemp nets, flapping fish glinting in flashes of silver, sails and storms. He was isolated within the world of trolling by night as the fish rose to cooler waters and sleeping by day. Lost in this world of his, he was so engrossed in its demands that he was defined by that world, having standardizing everything else by its shape and form. This world of nighttime fishing and the life that goes with it dictated the shape, tenor and tone of his life. It was so familiar and natural that becoming it, for Simon Peter, was being nothing less than who he was and where he needed to be.
There was little thought of anything else for he knew nothing else. No other world other than the methodical frustration of sparse nets, contrary winds, too few fish to market leaving purses thin with coinage, long nights followed by exhausted days with the only promise being more of the same . . . nothing other had backlit his life enough to see anything any different.
In His World
There was an unexpected intrusion in Simon Peter’s tiny world. A carpenter turned prophet found His way to this place of nets, nights and weary men. Word had spread carrying rumors of miracles that had long drifted across the lake, having reached the shoreline and lapped against the wooden hulls of the docked boats. It was likely that many of the fishermen had gotten wind of Jesus as their sails might have caught a slight breeze.
But it was of little import. Rather, it was an inconvenience. Like too many nights, the night had been long and fruitless. The nets had yielded nothing more than water, weeds and weariness. There were no fish to market that day. The lake and the night had joined forces to deny these hunters of the deep any trophy. The coming night would be pressed with the need to make up for a night lost. It was time for sleep, troubled sleep at best, but sleep nonetheless. Yet, despite the need for sleep there was an intrusion . . . of all days.
The crowd grew, giving some degree of credibility or celebrity to whoever this was. These frustrated fishermen picked up a few words here and there, discerning pieces that remained only pieces within the fatigue that enshrouded their minds. Religion won’t catch fish and nice words won’t mend nets. Sweeping platitudes won’t feed hungry families, and brazen prophecies won’t raise wily fish from elusive depths.
But Simon Peter had seen what the winds of rumor had only blown. A mother-in-law had been healed by this itinerant Jesus person. The crippled walked pensively but surely on unfamiliar legs with crutches joyously abandoned at their feet as a necessity that was instantly rendered unnecessary. The blind stumbled in the attempt to align faces with voices for the first time, turning to drink in deep blue skies and finding themselves hopelessly enamored by mounds of brilliant wildflowers. The pallor of death was swept from the faces of catatonic infants with tiny arms and thin legs instantly washed alive with vitality that had no explanation, except . . . He had seen it.
Simon Peter had attempted to correlate all of that with his world of boats, frayed nets, canvas sails and fish. The experience and the exposure had not changed him yet. It was only an anomaly because his world had not been directly intersected. What he had observed was wonderment, but wonderment that had taken place some distance outside the parameters of his tiny and predictable world of wooden boats and hemp nets. It had yet to manifest itself dead center in that world and to render everything entirely less than predictable.
However it happened, Jesus was suddenly in Simon Peter’s boat; dead center in Simon’s world . . . ground zero. Suddenly his boat was turned into a podium and a fisherman was turned into a chauffeur. From the bow of this tired fishing vessel the words of Jesus droned on. It’s not that they weren’t compelling. It’s just that they fell upon a mind dulled with fatigue and deluged with both empty nets and empty pockets. Sometimes the greatest messages are missed because the human mind is occupied with a miniscule net of fish drawn from some tiny puddle when the Fisher of Men is standing right in their boats casting a net into the whole ocean of men.
Scripture does not indicate what Jesus said that struck Simon, it’s what He did. And then, the command came. The nets had already been mended, cleaned and stowed. Weary sails had been drawn tight and tied. Arms were weak and heads were fuzzy. The fish had undoubtedly descended to cooler waters, far beyond the reach of their nets and all of their accumulated skills. And yet this Jesus wanted to go fishing. The logical argument was of no use. A lifetime of experience was discarded and discounted by this Teacher. He was confidently insistent. And so, wearily Peter mumbles, “But because you say so, I will let down the nets” (Luke 5:5, NIV). And he does.
Oars are lowered by weary fishermen who exchanged glances washed in confusion, anger and a slight flush of stupidity for agreeing to this idiotic venture. Plunged into cool waters, awakened oars create spiraling eddies in their wake. The morning sun was now full, having long lifted itself off the horizon of a new day, spilling a cascade of gold that broke into sparkling flecks of yellow glitter on gentle waves. Oars were drawn in with glistening droplets falling from their weathered edges, ever so quickly catching a slight fleck of sunlight before becoming lost in the waters below. Arms of experience grasped the nets, spread them and deftly launch them in perfect flight. Again, they slapped the surface of the water as they had a hundred times the night before. A thousand times maybe. This time however, it was different.
Backlighting
Instantly there was a slight tug. Then, the nets were seized and sent wildly convulsing. The pull was overwhelming, catching the strength and experience of even the most seasoned fisherman entirely off guard. Strained arms were etched with protruding veins. Faces were flushed red. The boat listed under the weight as nets were hoisted to the surface. Drawing against the collective resistance, the surface was broken in an explosive torrent of foaming water and flailing fish. The morning sun caught and threw the first silver glint of hundreds of thrashing fish reflected riotously in the churning waters. The water was agitated, surging white and frothy with the multitude of the catch.
Simon Peter was astounded, his mind gaping with the inability to correlate what he saw with what he knew. A sudden panicked call went out to other boats. They scurried and cast off in pell-mell and chaotic fashion; experienced fisherman completely inexperienced with netting the impossible. Oars plunged deep and hard, frantically pulling against morning’s water. A small army of boats surged forward, creating panicked wakes. The catch spilt as a silver torrent into other hulls. Boats creaked, listed and then dropped to the water line, rolling fat with the bulky weight of the catch.
Simon Peter was caught in the breech of trying to draw in nets that were fraying and snapping while correlating the event in his own mind. For him, it was irreconcilable. It did not match his world or his experience. He was thrust beyond his limited sphere by an event that had occurred in his world, in the very center of it, right in the middle of who he was and what he did.
It was entirely other worldly, smacking of something supernatural even. Every sense and sensation of the miracle was inserted into the very center of his life to blow him beyond that center. His life was now held in sharp and poignant relief against something incomprehensibly greater and immeasurably grander than he. He was no longer compared solely to his world; a comparison which once gave him permission to mindlessly inhabit that world without thought. Now, instantly, he was held up against something infinitely beyond his world. And there, in the stark and contradictory contrast of a miracle happening in his boat, on his lake, with his net and his hands, he saw himself. Here, he was backlit.
Starkly backlit by God, his life was thrust into keen and crippling perspective. The blinding light revealed the thin veneers of his life so much so that he was exposed beyond his ability to comprehend the exposure, much less deal with it. The din of the activity faded as Simon was drawn down, face to face with his revealed self. The sea, the boats, the commotion of fellow fishermen . . . they all disappeared as he devolved deep into himself. Simon Peter was fraught with himself, finding himself grappling with the reality of his person as he had never seen it before, or been willing to see it.
He turned, stepped, and lunged to the front of the boat. Here Jesus had watched the miracle unfold; God incarnate enjoying the provision of the fish, the message in the provision, and lives about to be changed by the provision. Simon Peter dropped before Jesus, a proclamation of utter transparency leaping from his lips in stammering honesty. Starkly set against the activity around him he shouted, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:9, NIV).
God had invaded the core of Peter’s being and he had been illuminated against it. Here he saw the real self. He acknowledged what has been exposed as far too much to comprehend, and far too big to allow him to recalibrate it all into something that made sense to him. He could not embrace it, so vast was the exposure. So, he had to get away from the light and get it away from him. Yet, he would ultimately find that entirely impossible. Soon the disciples would be named and his name would be the first called in a list of many names. It was no wonder as being backlit is often the precursor to being called.
My World Defining Me
And so I am lulled into the ebb and flow of my life, into the circumstances that swirl in variant pools around me; the eddies and rippling waters that reflect back to me more of what they are than who I really am. And I blindly accept those reflections as me, allowing myself to become impoverished in the surrender of acceptance. It is when God steps into the middle of my world that what I took for God I find not to be God or of God. It is when He seats himself dead center, squarely at ground zero that I am inoperably exposed. It is here that something vastly superior is held up against who I have defined myself to be and what I have settled for.
Too often my own light is borrowed, reflected off of variant events around me much like the moon borrowing its light from the sun and reflecting back what does not belong to itself. My life is backlit by weak imitations that reflect things that are not their own, backlighting my life by anemic events that reflect a light so washed out that the landscape of my life is hardly perceptible. This I eventually take for light with the eyes of my soul having become so unaccustomed to real light that its absence is no longer comprehended. I then settle and sell out to vagueness as this kind of light provides little more than that. All the while the profound challenges and wild passions lay a silent captive to the deep shadows that such a light casts; shadows that never surrender their contents to whatever light I bring to them until my life is backlit and the shadows are forced to surrender.
The Hopeful Shock
The shock of being backlit by Jesus rests in the instantaneous awareness that it brings. The sudden illumination of everything makes everything vividly stark and painfully clear. Such is the penetrating nature of this light that the light itself brazenly outlines and defines every sordid aspect of who I am, leaving no room to ponder or stew over them myself. Neither does it give me room to manipulate what has been revealed because the clarity is so pure that it’s cognitively impenetrable and completely indefensible. Otherwise the moment would be robbed, becoming something less than wholly divine in the thievery.
To be backlit by Jesus is to fully see and fully comprehend all at once. All that is left for me to do is to embrace the truth vividly set before me, or squander the moment in futile attempts at denial. More times than I can explain I have rushed to the front of the boat, prostrated myself before Him and begged him leave because I am faced with the horror of myself.
At those times my putrid disgust with myself clearly bars my relationship with Him. Inevitably every time, He looks beyond what I cannot. He sees who I am verses what I have become, delineating the difference in vivid starkness so clear that I cannot stand before myself. He reminds me of His grace which makes my grotesqueness the raw material from which He weaves His glory. And then, bedeviled and helpless by what I see in myself He calls the authentic me to works beyond my comprehension when all I want is for Him to leave. And it is in the angst of desperately wanting to flee and break His hold on me that I am held against myself and am drawn kicking and screaming into phenomenal growth.
Making a Habit of the Light
And so I go fishing with Jesus every day. Fishing for men? Yes. But also that kind of fishing that repeatedly back lights my life against the majesty of God. It is placing myself in His presence while fighting every urge not to do so; readying me for the poignant realization that I am not what I presume to be and being with Jesus will highlight that every time. It is not His disappointments in me for His grace will always tempter that. It is my own disappointment in myself. I want to avoid Him because I want to avoid the pain of personal honesty. But I find an incongruent passion that causes me to leap into the boat because I know the joy of being honest before Jesus and what He does with that. I am constantly, repeatedly and forever changed.
Darren and a Plastic Fish
People continued to mill about me, but they had vanished in the midst of deep thought and emotional turmoil beset within me. I turned to Darren who was meandering off to some unknown destination; much like his life. I reached out and touched his shoulder. He stopped and staggered a bit as he turned to look at me, his body long worn beyond grace and dexterity of movement. Sparking eyes set deep in worn sockets met mine, shocking me into the realization that I did not have that sparkle. I paused tentatively. “Can I see your fish?” I stammered. Although a rare treasure, he instantly placed it in my hands without hesitation or forethought. He unabashedly shared the wealth of his life in a simple gesture, freely giving to a soul that needed what he had found; handing to me what he had grasped. I needed the authenticity of his faith and the deep conviction in whose light my own pathetic belief system shrank and ran sour.
Such treasures often come in simple packages, like Darren. Their simplicity is in their security, as few would look there. Few look there because few lend their eyes to simplicity because simplicity suggests vacancy and emptiness. Those who do look there find the opposite . . . they find treasure. They are not out to rob or pillage the treasure, but rather seek it as a precious gift that no one can hoard or hold individually. It is bigger than one individual and made to pass to and through all individuals, so it passes much more simply through simple people like Darren. It is to be savored, drawn fully into oneself and then left to enrich the next passerby. Hidden away in the Darren’s of the world God has deposited His light, set to explode into any life that is so daring and so desperate as to engage the light in simple places.
I held his plastic fish, turning it this way and that, drawing down into its plastic and paint as had Darren, trying to draw out of it what he had. “I’m going to hang it in my house,” he blurted. “I don’t have anything on one wall. It’s all white. Just white, that’s all. And I’m going to hang it right in the middle,” he said. A barren wall; like his life. His faith was hung right in the middle of it. And I thought, how totally appropriate and how absolutely wonderful.
I handed the plastic fish back to him. “I’m going to go home right now and hang it up!” he said with electric excitement. As he turned to shuffle away, I called after him and said, “Thanks Darren.” There was no response. He hadn’t heard me. He was engulfed in the symbol of his faith, a captive to his mad love affair with his God and his fish. Other people still mingled about me, but I no longer desired what they offered. As Darren stepped into the passenger seat of a waiting car I realized that I wanted what he had. I wanted a plastic fish. I wanted a vibrant faith. I wanted to be consumed with God as was this disheveled man; to have all of that hanging in the center of my life. And he had backlit my life in such a way to show me the terrible deficits that I had.
I can still see that fish in my mind. It is clear and vivid reminder of my faith, of following Jesus; of that to which he calls me. Being reminded of that by an event that backlit my life so that I could see my life. And so, Darren, if some day you are to read this, I simply want to say what you didn’t hear that day . . . “thank you!”
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Friday Sep 01, 2023
Grief and Loss - Part Two
Friday Sep 01, 2023
Friday Sep 01, 2023
Grief and Loss
Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life's Seasons
There's an old Chinese proverb that states:
"Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still."
I'm going to talk about grief and loss in this podcast. And if there's ever times in our lives when we end up "standing still," it's during times of grief and loss. My intent in this podcast is to help us understand how grief and loss, even devastating grief and loss, rather than causing us to "stand still," can actually facilitate great growth.
Grief and Loss
One of my books, “An Autumn’s Journey – Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life’s Seasons” deals with the issue of grief and loss, so I'll be drawing from that book a bit this morning. I ended up writing this particular book for a number of reasons. Unfortunately, I don't have time to go into those reasons this morning. Suffice it to say, I have had my own grief and loss, and for over forty years I've walked with thousands of people through their grief and loss. Obviously, all of that created some of the motivation to write.
In reality however, the thing that really created the impetus for me to take on the task of writing about grief and loss was the unexpected death of my own mother on October 14th of 2007. In those final hours of her life, on her deathbed, I promised her that I would write. I made that promise to her because for years she had encouraged me to write. And so, the journey from her deathbed, to her funeral, to closing out her personal affects and affairs, to visiting her graveside on a cold Christmas Day some two years later is the journey outlined in this book.
Now, time this podcast only affords me the opportunity to say a few, very brief things of the many things I would like to say to you on the subject of grief and loss. The premise that undergirds everything that I am going to say in this podcast is simply this . . . "There is Great Purpose in Great Pain."
So, in order to build a foundation to support this premise, I'm going to pull several different thoughts together. First, I want to talk about pain as tremendous opportunity. Then I want to briefly talk about how and why we miss those opportunities. Once I have those two thoughts in place, I want to share with you two basic ideas, two principles that you can begin to incorporate into your own times of grief and loss to turn your pain into great gain.
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Thursday Aug 31, 2023
Podcast Short: The Problem Is Not the Problem
Thursday Aug 31, 2023
Thursday Aug 31, 2023
The Problem Is Not the Problem
We all have…problems. And there’s a real good chance that we have a lot of…problems. Life comes with problems. It’s part of the deal. It’s a natural part of this thing that we’re all doing called life. Life comes with problems. But the real problem is not that life comes with problems. The real problem is what we do with them.
In the majority of cases, the problem is ‘not’ the problem…despite the fact that we think it’s the problem. The problem is how we’re choosing to deal with the problem. That’s the problem. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in most cases the problem actually creates less problems than the way that we’ve chosen to deal with the problem. The ‘real’ problem is that we don’t want to deal with the ‘real’ problem. And all we have to do is look around at our culture today to realize that we have cultivated, and refined, and ingeniously perfected a whole bunch of ways to do that.
We want to immediately minimize the problem out of our frantic efforts to wave off the gravity of it at any cost in order to salvage our self-image. Or we want to blame others for it so that we are magically free of any culpability from the problem that we (through our geed or stupidity or arrogance) created. We want to devise clever narratives to excuse whatever we did that created the problem so as to hand ourselves a free pass and by-pass accountability for the carnage we caused. We want to see the problem as arising from circumstances beyond our control, leaving us utterly innocent, squeaky clean, and nothing more than the wounded victim of the choices that we refuse to own.
Or, we have come to determine that the problem is marvelously self-serving, and that it grants us some sort of cherished leverage that we would lose should we actually solve the problem. Therefore, we perpetuate the problem, turning a blind-eye toward those who are suffering because of the problem. Or, most deviously of all, we spin the problem to be the brain-child of some ill-defined, but dark and foreboding force intent on our destruction. And these people, or these organizations, or these clandestine groups clustered in some darkened room, or whatever they might be become enemy that they never were, and we become the victim that it is, in fact, the victimizer. The real problem is rarely the real problem.
But when we fall prey to our lesser selves and enslave ourselves to the fear of accountability, or risk tarnishing our cherished reputations by being exposed as the culprits, or have to expend cherished resources to clean up the mess we made when we would much prefer to hoard those resources for ourselves, or when we seize the opportunity to turn our failures on others in order to elevate ourselves above them in some sickening power grab, or when we choose whatever gain the problem might grant us over the destruction it will wield in the lives of others…when we do any of these, we are creating a problem far bigger than whatever the real problem was. Far bigger. And we would be utterly foolish to think that these choices will not come back to haunt us with an unparalleled vengeance that we cannot begin to imagine. Yes…the real problem is rarely the real problem.
It takes courage to step up and own what we have done. It is the brave individual who will refuse to elevate themselves at the expense of others. It is the person of integrity who will unflinchingly stare into the mirror of their decisions and own what they see staring back at them. It is the man or woman of wisdom who will recognize that to embrace the consequences of our choices, and to own the outcome of our behaviors is the single path to freedom, and that any other path will always, always, lead to enslavement. And it is the person of faith will understands that God can only forgive that which we repent of, and that there is nothing so large that He cannot, and will not, forgive. God is in the business of wiping slates clean and handing out new starts. Yes…the real problem is rarely the real problem. And if we are to begin the process of wiping out the problems in our world, we must wipe out the way that we have chosen to deal with them. We must…
“Do not deceive yourselves. If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become “fools” so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness…”.
- 1 Corinthians 3:18-19
Wednesday Aug 30, 2023
ECA Ordination Message - The Magnitude Of the Message in the Need of the Moment
Wednesday Aug 30, 2023
Wednesday Aug 30, 2023
The message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is everything that the world needs in a time when the world is madly pursuing everything that it doesn't need. Our world is desperate for that message. However, our less than thoughtful handling of the message of the Gospel has diluted it to the point that its appeal is nearly gone. We have subjugated it to our particular interpretations, shaped it to our personal agendas, inserted our own biases, preached it for our own gain, presented it more as entertainment than transformation, and assumed that we have the power to deliver it by our own means. A message manipulated and diminished in such ways will have no appeal to a dying world.
Craig's recent message to a group of ordination candidates thoughtfully and yet unashamedly challenges us to preach the richness of the Gospel free of the encumbrances that have left it weak and pathetic. This message is a call to restore the purity and power of the message in a world that is desperate for us to do so.
Discover additional resources at www.craiglpc.com. You will also find daily resources on all of our Social Media platforms.
Monday Aug 28, 2023
Grief and Loss - Part One
Monday Aug 28, 2023
Monday Aug 28, 2023
Grief and Loss
Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life's Seasons
There's an old Chinese proverb that states:
"Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still."
I'm going to talk about grief and loss in this podcast. And if there's ever times in our lives when we end up "standing still," it's during times of grief and loss. My intent in this podcast is to help us understand how grief and loss, even devastating grief and loss, rather than causing us to "stand still," can actually facilitate great growth.
Grief and Loss
One of my books, “An Autumn’s Journey – Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life’s Seasons” deals with the issue of grief and loss, so I'll be drawing from that book a bit this morning. I ended up writing this particular book for a number of reasons. Unfortunately, I don't have time to go into those reasons this morning. Suffice it to say, I have had my own grief and loss, and for over forty years I've walked with thousands of people through their grief and loss. Obviously, all of that created some of the motivation to write.
In reality however, the thing that really created the impetus for me to take on the task of writing about grief and loss was the unexpected death of my own mother on October 14th of 2007. In those final hours of her life, on her deathbed, I promised her that I would write. I made that promise to her because for years she had encouraged me to write. And so, the journey from her deathbed, to her funeral, to closing out her personal affects and affairs, to visiting her graveside on a cold Christmas Day some two years later is the journey outlined in this book.
Now, time this podcast only affords me the opportunity to say a few, very brief things of the many things I would like to say to you on the subject of grief and loss. The premise that undergirds everything that I am going to say in this podcast is simply this . . . "There is Great Purpose in Great Pain."
So, in order to build a foundation to support this premise, I'm going to pull several different thoughts together. First, I want to talk about pain as tremendous opportunity. Then I want to briefly talk about how and why we miss those opportunities. Once I have those two thoughts in place, I want to share with you two basic ideas, two principles that you can begin to incorporate into your own times of grief and loss to turn your pain into great gain.
Friday Aug 25, 2023
Podcast Short: What I Don’t Want to Hear
Friday Aug 25, 2023
Friday Aug 25, 2023
Might I Say - What I Don't Want to Hear
We hear a lot of things. A whole lot of things. We’re incessantly bombarded with sheets and shards and streams of information. It’s about bits and bytes and boatloads of data that we ingest and digest without even realizing that we’re doing that. Either consciously or unconsciously we compile all of that sordid stuff into some sort of choppy mosaic about the life around us and the world within us. And as insidiously dangerous as it is, in time this rather indistinct and somewhat dubious mosaic becomes our reality. In essence, it becomes our existence.
It seems that we tend to be busy about a whole lot of nothing. We can meticulously tally the tasks of the day only to be inordinately perplexed that for some reason the sum total doesn’t come anywhere close to reflecting the sum total of everything that we expended in accomplishing those things. So consumed are we in the tasks of ‘nothing’ that we don’t have time to think about ‘something’. Therefore, we have irreparably fallen in love with plug-and-play and pre-fab. We like things pre-packaged, prepared, and predetermined. We’re looking for answers that were already ingested, digested and reflexively regurgitated for our reflexive consumption by whatever source we happen to have happened upon. In essence, we don’t think. And in fact, there are few things as dangerous as that.
We’re going to ingest a whole lot of something. That’s inevitable. And if that ‘something’ shapes us with that much force, we might be wise to ask what that ‘something’ is.
We live in a world roiling with bias and flushed murky with politically-correct agendas. We have splintering splinter groups proffering philosophies of every shape and sort. We’ve got the thematic propagation of ‘diversity’ that’s more about a permission to be permissive. Too often it’s about the ‘spin to win’. It’s less about truth and it’s more about triumph. It’s about the resolute and rather gritty proliferation of the agenda to the degree that truth becomes the agenda and the agenda becomes the truth. Therefore, truth becomes negotiable and pliable in a forced and placating servitude to an onslaught of dubious agendas. However, truth in the service of an agenda becomes opinion. And too often opinion is bias off the leash and running wild.
So, we need to listen for a change. We need to question…aggressively and responsibly. We need to ruthlessly investigate and corroborate. We need to quit being complacent consumers and become invested investigators. We need to use truth as a steeled template, not as a fluffy convenience. We need to bring the sturdy compass of ethics to point out the true north in every decision whether that true north is to our liking or not. We don’t need to be worldly wise, for that’s an oxymoron of the most deceptive kind. Rather, we need to be wise in the ways of God and life. We need to be sufficiently stubborn to reject the pabulum of the masses, yet pliable enough to hear the beating hearts underneath the pabulum. We need to be bold and brazen in a manner stitched tight by wisdom and lent compelling by reason. We need to be beacons of light knowing that the crowd is apt to label us as sorely antiquated and ridiculously ill-informed. We need to listen in the bravest form imaginable.
It would behoove us to remember that to live passively is to live dangerously. To live inquisitively is to live wisely. To live boldly is to live robustly. And to live our lives based on timeless principles is to honor God rather than worship everything else that pretends to be God. May we choose to abandon the former and judiciously embrace all of the latter.
“Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.”
- Ephesians 5:15-16
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Wednesday Aug 23, 2023
”In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life” - Part Three
Wednesday Aug 23, 2023
Wednesday Aug 23, 2023
"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life"
To Believe In Something Better - The Rise Against What Is
Our humanity is ingeniously fashioned in a manner that it can handily break the realities that would seek to break it. Our existence need never be held hostage nor pressed into servitude to the sordid realities of all that is happening around us. Rather, we are able to stand in spirited opposition to those realities, and in the face of them we are capable of crafting brilliant and utterly resilient solutions that crush those realities by transforming them. We are dreamers and the authors of visions. We have the ability to conceptualize marvelous things and actually begin the act of crafting them even at those times when the presence of them or the hope for them is entirely non-existent. We are a powerful bunch vested with immense potential that exceeds even that which we understand.
Yet, we bring these abilities to bear against a world that would wish to press us flat in its skepticism. The world becomes embroiled in the selfish pursuits that it crafts as it chases things born of greed, gluttony and selfishness. The world would bend us to its darker ways rather than be bent to a better way. The world would prefer to kill both us and itself rather than give up what it has selfishly given itself over to. Indeed, the world has sold its soul to something that it is convinced will liberate the soul that it sold. Therefore, in the insanity of a world gone rogue, the world will viciously fight for the things that are certain to destroy it.
The weight of living in a world such as this, as well as the incessant press of darkness that such living spawns can at times leave us wondering if our influence might be too insufficient to wrestle the world out of a darkness that has become so terribly dark. We stand as single entities, bringing what light we can. Most times, that light seems swallowed in the vast darkness that seems to advance without restraint. We are left in the squalor of a battle that seems lost, only holding the line so that we can delay the full descent of evil and grant ourselves a few precious moments before life is over.
To Believe In Something Better
But we forget. We are extraordinarily quick to lose touch with a greater reality that infinitely surpasses the darkness which surrounds us. Our perspective becomes one of gradual defeat and continual hopelessness. Our understanding of who we are and Who we serve is lost in the grief of a battle seemingly hopeless and ground perpetually surrendered. We fall prey to the lies of the darkness whose own darkness is completely dependent upon our fear of it. Therefore, the darkness must appear dark beyond what it is in order to create the fear necessary to insure its own survival. It is not an undefeatable foe. It is, in fact, a foe that fears lest we discover the power that we possess and the vulnerability that it has.
Therefore, to remind us of who we are in times such as these and to fan the flames of our passion, I have compiled a number of quotes that I have had the privilege of authoring. It is my desire to call us back to lofty dreams and rigorous passion. To remind us that the darkness is the absence of light and therefore is totally dependent on the light remaining absent. As such, the darkness is terribly vulnerable as it possesses no means by which to stop the light other than creating fear in us. These quotes are written to set us free and send us out in the marvel of our humanity to change a world that is too ill-equipped to change itself. To say that we stand for something better, and that we will be that ‘something better’ in the standing. It is my hope that these quotes will move you to move your world, for I believe that you can, and I believe that you will:
The Rise Against ‘What Is’
“If it didn’t go all that well today, tomorrow is the opportunity that I have to do what I did today without doing it the way that I did it today.”
“Pull every dream that you’ve ever had from all of the places that you’ve abandoned them, brush them off, set them in front of yourself, run the fingers of your heart over each of them, fight the lie that you’re not enough to achieve them, and realize that the dream was not too big. Rather, the belief in yourself is too small.”
“Let us not fall prey to the leaching negativity and rank pessimism that runs unleashed all around us. Rather, with the utmost determination we must bring ourselves to understand that these lies have been given legitimacy by people who thought themselves as powerless in the face of them, rather than recognizing that we have the power to rip the face off of them.”
“You, yes you are the impossible waiting to happen. And the only reason that that sounds impossible to you is that you haven’t been daring enough to push the possible out to the point where it becomes what you once mistook for the impossible.”
“I am begging you to let nothing shackle you that God has sent you to unshackle.”
“I’ve sat with tens of thousands of people and I’ve stared into as many empty eyes. And I must say that the inexplicable contradiction for me is that despite the gaping emptiness engulfing every one of these eyes, there yet lies within each one a wonderfully formidable gifting, an irrepressible energy, a depth yet undiscovered, riches unfathomed, and the resources to amply transform this ever-darkening world. And I’ve seen enough eyes to know that if yours are also empty, like everyone else’s they are also full.”
“God doesn’t ask if something can be done. Nor does He ask if we have the resources to do it. For God is bound by neither question. And when we stand with God, neither are we.”
“You are fully and magnificently equipped to stand up and change the world around you. And to simply sit down and tolerate the world around you is to squander who you are in the process of never being who you are.”
“Do not be ashamed of who you are, for in doing so you are not taking into account the majesty of all that you are. And without any shred of doubt, I know that you are a person of majesty, for in my innumerable years of working with people I have yet to find even one person who is not.”
“Stand up and be the light that God created you to be. Stand with me and the millions of others like both of us who have bowed before this inexplicably marvelous God of ours and in the bowing have begged that He not let us die until the darkness in the world around us has died first.”
“Look in the mirror. Go ahead and look yet again. And look not at the reflection, for while this body of yours is marvelously complex in ways that continue to elude the reach of modern science, it is but a simple shell that holds the image of God within you. And if the shell is that grand, how much more what God has placed inside of it.”
“If I let that which I hold to be true fall victim to a world that says it is not, I have in that action surrendered to the voices of those who know nothing of the truth other than to destroy it because it terrifies them. And if there’s one thing I should be terrified of, it’s not the surrender itself, but the fact that in the surrender I have given the world permission to avoid the very thing that it should fear.”
“It’s not the gifts or the abilities or the talents that equip us to accomplish great things. Rather, it’s the persistent and adamantly stubborn conviction that we will in no way leave the world the way that we found it. And I would rather join hands with a single person of this kind than sit with a million gifted people who are not of this kind.”
And finally…
“I will spend my life believing in you so that you will someday commit to doing the same.”
To Believe
We must press ourselves into a sort of reckoning. We must realign our minds with the truth of who we are, who God created us to be, and the fantastic mission that He gifted us with. In a battle this pervasive and insidious, we must ground ourselves in a truth so brilliant and pristinely clean that it will handily stand against the wiles of the devil and the depth of the darkness he has spun. We must align ourselves with a reality so brilliant, robust and muscular that we find ourselves unintimidated by the darkness that now stands quaking in front of us.
We have a God who has called us to great things. Great things. He has not called us to defeat or even some slightly marginal victory. He has called us to complete and unquestioned victory. And such a call would never have been extended had not this God of ours provided ample resources to achieve that victory.
Before moving to the next chapter, I would encourage you to reread the quotes shared in this chapter. I would likewise encourage you to pick one that speaks to you, to write it down, and recite it daily. Let its truth seep deep into your soul and ignite your heart. Let it breath confidence into your spirit and energy into your convictions. Indeed, it is time to rise against ‘what is.’ So, let’s rise.
Monday Aug 21, 2023
”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Talk is Cheap
Monday Aug 21, 2023
Monday Aug 21, 2023
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. “Talk is cheap,” as the old saying goes. We say a lot of things, more due to the fact that we believe that we’re supposed to say those things, or we say so them because, in the end, they’ll get us what we want. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“The degree of my commitment to a cause will not be in direct proportion to the degree that ‘I am willing’ to sacrifice for it. Rather, it will be in direct proportion to the degree that ‘I am sacrificing’ for it.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Friday Aug 18, 2023
New Beginnings - Seeds in Pain
Friday Aug 18, 2023
Friday Aug 18, 2023
New beginnings. The way our lives frequently go, we doubt the existence of new beginnings...at least for us. We've had too much loss, far too much pain, and circumstances that seemed anything but kind to us. And as we look down the road of our lives, we can only envision more of the same. We really don't believe in new beginnings because all we've come to believe in is survival, and we frequently feel that we're doing that all that well either.
But our new beginnings lay in our painful endings. No one likes to hear that, and few of us actually believe it. But the seeds of our new day, our new month, our new life lay scattered about in the midst of our losses. There are new beginnings awaiting you in the brokenness of your pain. And it's worth looking beyond your pain for a moment to gather the seeds that lay there waiting for you.
Wednesday Aug 16, 2023
Podcast Short: Is Anyone Listening?
Wednesday Aug 16, 2023
Wednesday Aug 16, 2023
Is Anyone Listening?
Is anyone listening? In the world within which you live, is anyone listening? Does your voice matter? The pain that you carry, the confusion that dogs your steps, the fear that drains your soul, the dreams that lay buried in a distant past, and a future that you sense is already being buried by the same things that buried your past…is anyone listening? In those moments when loneliness is all that you know. At those times when the loneliness has gone on for so long that you have little alternative than to believe that loneliness is the single story that life has penned for you, and that there is no other story…at those times is anyone listening?
Is there anyone who cares that you cry? Is there anyone who is willing to place themselves aside in order to make sufficient space for you to place yourself in their arms? Is there anyone who is willing to pick you up, to wipe clean the wounds that you have, to light a candle in your darkness, and help you press out into the light? Is there anyone who’s willing to get their hands dirty so that you might begin the process of getting yours clean? Is there anyone listening…at all?
And if perchance someone does listen, are they listening? Really? Or do we sense that they are listening out of obligation? Are we their project, or their charity case, and that in some way they are simply using us in some misguided way to fulfill some guilt-induced obligation to give back to society? Are we the box that they check in the ‘good deeds’ column of their lives because they haven’t checked a whole lot of boxes in that column? Or are they listening because focusing on our pain grants them an escape from their own? Or are they listening because to play the hero in our life is to make them feel that they have a life, or at least some sort of purpose in life so they don’t stumble through life feeling purposeless? Is anyone listening? Anyone?
In the Bible God says, "Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.” God will listen. Not out of obligation. Not because you are a project. Not because you are a charity case. Not because God is checking a box. Not because He’s escaping from anything, or needs to play the hero, or to grant Himself some sort of purpose. There is none of that.
God is listening. And He’s listening because to hear you warms His heart. To hear you thrills His soul. To hear you is the culmination of everything that He created, including you. He created the entirety of this world, and then He placed you in the middle of it so that you might know this God, and that He might love you. Intimate relationship. Unbroken relationship. A forever relationship. And when we broke that relationship through our sin, He refused to let that brokenness stand. That brokenness stood against everything for which God created ‘everything.’ So deep was His desire to listen to us, to connect with us, to hold us, and heal us that He sent His Son to die to heal what we broke. Yes, He listens. He created us to be heard, and when we messed it up He did nothing less than sacrifice His Son to heal what we broke. Yes, God listens. He refuses to do anything less. He listens. And because He does, He’s waiting for you to speak. And so, do the thing that you were created to do…talk to God, for He’s listening.
"Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart."
- Jeremiah 29:12 and 13
Monday Aug 14, 2023
”In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life” - Part Two
Monday Aug 14, 2023
Monday Aug 14, 2023
"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life"
Not Where We Were - Finding Ourselves Somewhere Else
It seems that we have some vague and rather ethereal sense of where we’re going in this thing called life. For the more contemplative soul, that sense might be quite refined. For the casual traveler, it might be a bit more nebulous and scattered. For many, where they’re going is defined by the tasks of the day, rather than enlarged by a vision for tomorrow.
In many cases where we’re going is far more rigorously defined by all the places where we don’t want to go, rather than the places where we do want to go. At other times its definition is rather handily shaped by the opinions of others, or it’s carved directly from the bedrock of the value systems that have been built into our lives throughout the whole of our lives. For others, it’s based on the need to avoid the pain of our past or somehow prove our worth in the face of a self-image that lays battered and bloodied. Vague or refined, we all have some sense of where we’re going. And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else.
Some of us are not necessarily in conscious pursuit of wherever this place is. We have this instinctually primal sense that it’s there and we intuitively assume that our path will take a natural course to wherever that place is. Then, there are others of us who are myopically focused on where we’re going to the degree that everything that we do is wholly defined by that singularly beguiling destination. Some of the more adventurous souls among us nimbly pursue that destination, spiritedly pulling in as much of everything that we can along the way to accentuate both the journey as well as the destination. In whatever way we do it, we all have some sense of where we’re going. And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else.
The Detours We Create
Yet, life is not so predictable as to always wind its way to the places that we presumed it to be going. There are those times when where we were going was bafflingly mistaken as some sort of final destination when in reality it was only a step to a final destination. At other times the place where we’re going is really a destination that we had fabricated because the place to which life had originally called us appeared too big, or too far, or too steep, or simply impossible in whatever way our limited vision happened to interpret it. At such times we craft some other less intimidating and thoroughly unfulfilling destination. Sometimes our destination is to set a course away from our destination so that we can dispense with whatever responsibility or obligation our original destination might have demanded of us.
And then in the magic of life, there are those times where we have actually pursued some authentic destination with such rigorous tenacity that the trajectory of our efforts has catapulted us past our destination to places that are everything of our furthest and fondest imagination. However, it might play out, we’re all headed somewhere.
The Detours Life Creates
But then there are those other times when life takes a sharp turn that seems little of our actions, nothing of our destination, but everything of circumstances designed to kill our journey and crush our destination long before we get within arm’s length of it. There’s a sense that something intrinsically unjust, stealthy and evil is always about and on the prowl, and whatever it is, it’s bound to show up if it hasn’t already. When it does, it undoes everything that we thought was secure and certain, wreaking havoc on whatever our journey had been to that point. And to whatever degree it wrecks the road underneath our feet, we’re left in a blurring trauma that renders our journey disjointed, our destination uncertain, and our lives dispirited.
The Explanation of Detours Missed
How It Happens
Yet, more often than not it’s the not the obvious shifts in our journey that are the core problem. Sure, life shows up and we get shoved down. There’s no question that the natural ebb and flow of life, whether it be titanic or miniscule, will happen to us. Despite our frequently ego-centric inclinations to the contrary, we are not so shrewd or ingenious as to be able to traverse life in a manner that deftly side-steps everything that comes at us. We don’t dance as well as we think we do. Our ingenuity falls prey to our arrogance, and the winds that we assumed to be reliable often shift and drive our genius toward some rocky shoal. And so, life will fall upon us, or ram against us, or pull the ground out from under us, or wreck us.
Casual and Careless
Yet, more often than not, the explanation doesn’t rest in life having shown up. The much more poignant issue is that too often we are passive, flabby and lax in rigorously living out our lives. We’re far too casual and careless. Somehow, somewhere the exquisite sanctity of life and the priceless privilege of living it out was supplanted with some sense that it’s too much work or that it’s not going to work, so why try? The gift is lost in the grind and we lose a sustaining sense of gratitude.
We get caught in the shallows, forgetting that the deepest waters hold the greatest treasures. But we would rather forage for trinkets because treasures are too stubborn to just hand themselves to us and we will not succumb to such preposterous demands. The shallows become our calling when they are nothing more than our coffin. Therefore, we drift without knowing that we’re drifting because we’re no longer paying attention. We come to believe that we are living a life of great things because it is too overwhelming to embrace the truth that we have forfeited great things. The outcome of such passive living is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.
Preoccupied with Pabulum
Too often we’re too preoccupied with pabulum. We’re tediously engaged with tiny things and we’re caught in the tedium of minutia because we can gather these things around us and control them when the bigger things are out of our control. Too frequently we’re goaded by the fear of big dreams and massive possibilities, so we dumb down our lives to anesthetize those fears.
There’s plenty of pablum to go around. Therefore, we assume that if we collect sufficient quantities of it, it will add up to something bigger than pablum. Yet, dreams are never constructed of pablum and our fears are never put at bay by any collection of it, regardless of how massive. It is an escape, but it is never an answer. It’s a detour, but it is never a destination. It is an imitation of what we are attempting to avoid. Subsequently, pablum gives us a sense that we can circumvent everything that we fear and still achieve everything that we dream. We’re caught in small things, and the outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.
Along for the Ride
Frequently we presume that we’re some docile passenger along for a ride that’s going wherever it’s going, so we just let it go to wherever that place is. We freely surrender to passivity which is an invitation to meaninglessness. And meaninglessness is the death of the soul itself. Life is a river, we say. And the best course of action is to navigate it because entertaining the far-fetched notion of swimming against it is utterly preposterous.
Assuming that we are along for the ride releases us from any accountability for the ride and where it might end up. We are innocent. Or we’re victims of circumstance. Or our families put us here because they didn’t know any other place to put us. Or we’re simply being obedient to whatever we’ve subjected ourselves to. Assuming we’re on a ride that we can’t direct, the outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.
The Walls of Denial
At other times, we live in the constructed confines erected from the raw material of denial, causing us to live out a life that is in denial of life itself. We become squatters living in a squatter’s camp constructed by the flimsy materials of justification, rationalization, blame-placing and projecting. We pull in the walls due to the reality that materials of this sort are always pulling inward because they will die if we dare to press them outward. Hemmed in by walls of this sort, the world around us is shut out and moves on without our awareness of it.
We live in walls that we pretend are horizons, or vast doorways that open to massive expanses and marvelous places. In time, we come to believe that they are not walls at all as we’ve visualized them as something that they will never be. We then live out our lives in these confining hovels, convinced that we are forging great mountains and running in wild places. The outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.
Ending Up Where We Wish to Be
We will end up somewhere. The fact that we have a destination is irrefutable as life is a journey that presents us with no option other than the journey. We may decide that the nature and course of the journey is irrelevant, and we may take a backseat to passivity. If we do, we have no right to complain when we end up in some place other than what we may have thought or preferred.
Yet, we can recognize that we are not automatons subject to the flux of the world within which we have found ourselves. It would seem advisable to recognize that we have an obligation to the course that our life is taking, and that along with that obligation we have been granted a profound degree of power to bring to the course. If we imprudently succumb to carelessness, or become engrossed by pabulum, or if we just let the ride go wherever circumstances take it, or if we pull close the walls of denial this thing that we call life will wind itself to wherever it’s going with no one at the helm. And that kind of destination cannot be good.
We would be wise to inventory our lives and determine if we are in some way large or small participating in any of these behaviors. If so, we need to root them out and expunge them from our lives. Reclaiming a sense of vision, and then seizing our lives with discipline and intentionality will set us on a path that will land us in places that we’ve dreamt to land. If we don’t, the place we land may not be on any land that we even remotely recognize.
Friday Aug 11, 2023
There Is No God - Evidence to the Contrary
Friday Aug 11, 2023
Friday Aug 11, 2023
There is no God. It’s not an unfamiliar statement. In fact, it permeates much of our modern thinking, which begs the question if our modern thinking is really either ‘modern’ or ‘thinking.’
We Don’t Want a God
I think that the mentality that ‘there is no God’ is centered primarily on the fact that we don’t want a God. Therefore, out of convenience, we simply declare that there is none, for we fear that the experiences that we crave will be snatched from us, the pleasures that we wish to indulge in will be made taboo, that we will somehow be punished if things feel too good, and that this doting judge-like figure will frown on most everything that makes us happy. So, we decide that we don’t want a God. And subsequently, we declare that there is no God.
Tuesday Aug 08, 2023
Podcast Short: Good as the Enemy of the Best
Tuesday Aug 08, 2023
Tuesday Aug 08, 2023
Good as the Enemy of the Best
“That’s good enough.” How many times have those words come out of our mouths? The idea of this lackluster commitment to the living out of our lives has become so prevalent that we’ve learned to articulate it in a whole bunch of different ways. The rather robust vernacular that we’ve created to wave off responsibility and say “that’s good enough” includes such catchy phrases as “that’ll get us by until Monday,” or “that’s good enough for government work,” or “that’s doable,” or “that’s in the ballpark,” or however we say “that’s good enough.”
The whole phenomena of “sliding by” or “skating by” has always been a byword of history. Subsequently, any vague concept of a ‘work ethic’ seems to have become much less an ethic and much more of a remotely fuzzy idea. We’re constantly working out ways of how not to work. And in doing that, we forfeit doing all the incredible things that we could be doing.
Many of us seem to have developed this fairy-dust type of magical thinking where things will just be there for us. Because we can’t see the efforts and the work of those who fill the shelves of our stores, or keep the wheels of commerce greased, or who relentlessly ply the seas of a forty-plus hour work week, they tend to become invisible. And so, things are just there because they’re there.
Ultimately, our gifts, talents and abilities are sacrificed on the altar of laziness and entitlement. We lose who we are, we lose what we could do, and in essence we lose our lives. At best, whatever our best could have been is lost. Tragically, in time we gradually lose a sense that we could actually do great things, and we forfeit the transformational reality that our best is both achievable and far beyond anything we could have imagined with the best of our imaginations. We forget that to be our best is the best thing that we can be.
Being our best is asking how can we take ourselves to our own limits in any given situation? It’s asking, how do I intentionally leave every situation and every person with more than what they had when I first encountered them? Being our best involves walking away from every situation with less than what we had when we encountered it because we left something behind in the exchange. Being our best asks did we press it as far as was humanly possible, and did we walk away with nothing else we could have given?
And so, commit to being your best. Shun anything that is anything less than that. Realize that you were created to ‘best’ your own ideas of what your best is. Be your best, and in doing so transform yourself and transform those around you in the best way possible.
“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”
- Galatians 6:9
Friday Aug 04, 2023
A Noble Calling - A Noble Response
Friday Aug 04, 2023
Friday Aug 04, 2023
Life calls us to many things. We will have to step-up in more ways and in more situations that we'd likely prefer at times. And when we have to step-up, the manner in which we do so becomes extremely important. We can do so in ways that are less than admirable or less than honest. We can attempt to side-step something, manipulate it to our convenience, shape it to our likes or dislikes, engage it in a way that invites the praise of the people that we admire, or we can ignore it altogether. At some time and in some place, we will have to step-up.
As we watch the world today, many people are stepping-up in less than admirable ways. It has become less about integrity and a whole lot less about honesty. Stepping up has been hijacked by agendas of all sorts. It has been compromised by lesser things that have created a nation of lesser people. But we have the ability to step-up in ways that are noble...truly noble. We can address situations thoughtfully, ethically and with the guiding hand of timeless wisdom. We can change our families, our communities and our world by stepping-up to the challenges of life in ways both noble and brave. We can all step-up in ways that makes stepping-up something beautiful and life-changing.
Tuesday Aug 01, 2023
Podcast Short: What Is Better...Really?
Tuesday Aug 01, 2023
Tuesday Aug 01, 2023
What Is Better...Really?
What is “better?” I mean, the definition of “better.” When we change something, we tend to label the change as “better,” whether it’s better or not. If we adjust something, or alter something, or eliminate it altogether, we define the changes that we make as “better.” We initiate new programs, or we reconstruct old ones, and in doing so we say that we are making things “better.” We craft new policies, or we tear down old businesses, or we adopt new beliefs, or we upgrade this, or we downgrade that, and we label all those actions as “better.”
But “better” based on what? What’s the criteria that determines if something is, in fact, “better?” Is it based on the current cultural climate? Or, is it based on the trends that tend to be trending? Or, is it based on the desire to make a name for ourselves, or get ahead, or beat the opposition, or bring down a boss, or lift up a cause, or promote a philosophy, or demote anything that irritates us? Is it based on our desire to make a win-fall, or get ourselves out of a freefall, or just create a free-for-all? What do we base the idea of “better” on?
Labeling something as “better” is often a justification for something that’s anything but “better”. It’s that label that we attach to our actions, hoping that people will pay a whole lot more attention to the label, and a whole lot less attention to the actions that we’ve pasted the label on. Sadly, most things are not better. They’re certainly ‘something,’ but they’re not “better”.
But what should “better” be based on? “Better” is when others benefit, even if we don’t. “Better” is driven by the need of the common man, as the common man is the common cause. It’s something in the service of a hurting world, and not something that serves to hurt the world. “Better” is something that we do that leaves the world “better” than what we found it, even if we end up not being “better” in the service of that world. It’s sacrificial. It’s recognizing our responsibility to the lives around us, not the agendas within us. “Better” is when we end the day having gained nothing, but having given everything. “Better” is where love is given legs to run and greed can’t find its shoes. The world needs to be “better” in a “better” way. And that starts with you, and it starts with me, and it starts with rejecting anything that is not truly “better.”
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
Podcast Short: How Do We Look at Time?
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
How Do We Look at Time?
“Time is the great intimidator, steadily stealing away precious seconds with no pause in the stealing. And such thievery leads us to believe that in time, the pilfering of these seconds will eventually exhaust all such seconds, leaving us at the ‘end’ of everything. Yet, God states that the seconds are actually the countdown to the ‘beginning’ of everything.”
How do we look at time? As a thief? As something that moves way too fast? As something that robbed our youth and is eroding our lives with every tick of the clock? Do we see it as something that there’s never enough of? Do we see it as something that moves faster the busier that we become, so there’s never any chance that we will ever be able to catch up? Or, do we see it as something that drags when we’re bored, so much so that we’d gladly forfeit the time just to get out of the boredom? If we’re tired of life, or frustrated with our circumstances, or if we just don’t care anymore, do we wish that time didn’t exist in the first place so that we’d be free of whatever it is that we want to be free of? How do we look at time?
But is it possible that time is a resource? And in the expending of that resource (that we call time) is it possible that we can invest in something that we never really thought of? Something that we never really considered? Is the trade-off expending time that we can’t get back, for something that we can? Are we investing in something that can change a life, or alter the trajectory of a marriage gone sideways, or bring healing to someone who’s wounded, or give a bit of light to someone who’s living out their life in nothing but darkness? Is time a resource (when used wisely) can shape a community, touch a nation, or change the world? And more profoundly than all of that, is it something that God has given us to use now that it can have an eternal impact that is not bound by time at all? Is time the thing that we use to bring people to a God Who’s deepest desire is to ultimately bring all of those people to a place called “eternity” where there is no time?
If we use our time to achieve things like this, the passing of time and the loss of that time in the passing is infinitely offset by the good that came out of that time. No, we can’t get time back. No, it’s not a renewable resource. When it’s gone, it’s gone. But what if the expenditure was offset by the good that came out of that time? What about that? And what if that expenditure touches a life for an eternity of time? I would think that that is time well spent, and I would think that it makes the time we have the place from which we change things for all of time.
Tuesday Jul 18, 2023
Podcast Short: Do We Search for the Truth?
Tuesday Jul 18, 2023
Tuesday Jul 18, 2023
Do We Search for the Truth?
Do we search for the truth, or do we search for ways around the truth? Do we even take the time to consider a question like that out of the long-held assumption that we are, in fact, looking for the truth because (we assume) that that’s the obvious thing to do? What insanity would behoove us to do anything less? But do we search for the truth, or do we search for ways around the truth? Maybe we should consider the fact that there are a whole lot of reasons why we actually might stoop to something less.
Truth be told, the truth may not be what we want it to be. It may not support our agendas, or our desires. In fact, it might actually render those things as erroneous and all-together ill-fated. The truth may not support all of the things that we passionately wish to believe, or have talked ourselves into believing. Or truth may dare to go so far as to actually call the entirety of those beliefs into question, and call us out for believing in them in the first place. Do we search for the truth even when it takes the foundations that we’ve laboriously built with the sweat of our brow and the best of our years, and does truth handily expose those foundations as weak, entirely misappropriated, and as nothing more than sand piled in every place except the right place? Will we search for truth even when it looks us square in the face and tells us this kind of stuff? Will we search for it knowing that there is a very distinct possibility that it will tell us everything that we don’t want to hear in every way that we don’t want to hear it? Will we search for truth even then?
I don’t know that we do. In fact, what we seem to search for the most are ways to circumvent the truth. Our search does not seem to be ‘for’ the truth, but rather it seems to be far more vested in ways to get ‘around’ the truth. We would not even begin to label our actions as such because such actions would immediately call the whole of our character into question. But what we label something does not make it what we’ve labeled it. Our search seems to be one of committed avoidance. It is one of intentional evasion, of manufactured detours, of clever deviations that are so slick that we don’t even realize that we deviated. It’s not that we run from the truth as much as we diligently work to create pathways around it, that in the end, never get us around anything. I wonder if that’s really more of what we do.
And as such, these evasive endeavors are quite naturally filled with such familiar things as slippery denials, evasive rationalizations, ambiguous justifications, relentless blame-placing, rogue fear-mongering, the incessant spinning of events, the bogus editing of facts, and the mind-boggling contortions where we take reality and make it something other than reality.
But likely the most dangerous of these is the self-endowed liberty that we have granted ourselves to make truth whatever we wish to make it. Therefore, it’s not about avoidance, because conveniently, that’s no longer necessary. Rather, it’s about creating, which is avoidance of the most calculated, but ill-fated sort. It’s about making truth whatever we want it to be. It’s about making it fit whatever agenda, or belief system, or value system, or platform, or whatever it is that we want it to fit. If truth will not grant us that which we wish, we will simply edit it until it does. But in the end, it is no longer truth, and truth be told, we will eventually find that out, and we’ll probably find it out the hard way.
Truth. Do we search for it, or do we do something else with it? You might ask yourself, in a truthful kind of way, what you’re doing with it.
“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
- Jesus Christ
Thursday Jul 13, 2023
What I Would Say to the World - Thoughts for a Struggling World
Thursday Jul 13, 2023
Thursday Jul 13, 2023
I often think about what I would say to the world. In the pain, confusion, fear, and rampant disorientation…what would I say? With the deceit, the manipulation, the less than admirable agendas being floated on all fronts…what would I say? With marriages fracturing under the weight of a culture gone rogue, with teenagers taking their lives before they ever have a chance to even understand what life is, with eyes cast to a hopeless future that seems to become dimmer by the day…what would I say? What would I say? And as I speak to an audience of patients that day-after-day sit crumpled and bent, as I speak to those who tolerate my penmanship and read the words that I stitch together, as I come across the innumerable people wounded and bleeding in whatever way they are wounded and bleeding, what would I say?
Tuesday Jul 11, 2023
Consequences - We Are the Cause
Tuesday Jul 11, 2023
Tuesday Jul 11, 2023
Do we realize that the choices that we make today lay the foundation for tomorrow's outcomes? Do we really think that things just happen, or do we understand that what happens today is the consequence of a series of choices that we made yesterday? We seem to stand stunned and perplexed by what we see in our culture. But are these things really happenstance and the turn of fate, or are they simply the consequences of the choices we have made along the way?
As the old saying goes, "You reap what you sow." We are certainly reaping. While we need to understand and accept that central reality, our time would be better spent asking how we learn from those choices. Why did we make them? What was it that we hoped to get out of them? How do we stop making them? What would better choices look like? What ethics, morals, values and principles should guide the choices that we make in the future so the consequences of those choices work for us instead of working against us? We are the cause. And since we are, we can also be the cure.
Friday Jul 07, 2023
To Think With Thought - Words of Wisdom in Difficult Times
Friday Jul 07, 2023
Friday Jul 07, 2023
Few of us think with thought. What I mean is that too few of us really examine the times that we're in verses getting caught up in the times that we're in. If we're not caught up in a particular cause or some compelling agenda of some sort, then there's a good chance that what we're caught up in is the fear and insecurity of these various causes and agendas. We're typically rather reactive rather than thoughtful. We reflexively respond, rather than digging deeper and asking the difficult questions. We move to 'fight-verses-flight' rather than something more calming and productive.
This podcast is a selection of Craig's quotes designed to give us comfort, perspective, insight and confidence as we face the uncertain times that we are living in. These quotes assist us in being thoughtful in a manner that allows us to not only effectively navigate these times, but bring something of stability and healing to them as well. They are written to help each of us become more thoughtful about the times so that our response to them can be more productive for us as well as those around us.
Wednesday Jul 05, 2023
Conscience or Convenience
Wednesday Jul 05, 2023
Wednesday Jul 05, 2023
We each have a conscience. Whether we listen to it or abide by it is another story. But we each have a conscience. The issue with our conscience is what will we do with it? The immediate answer might be that we will listen to it. But do we really do that? What if our conscience says "no" to the things that we want to say "yes" to? What if it takes us in an entirely different direction than the direction that we would like to go? What if is says that our dreams will be our downfall despite the fact that we are deeply passionate about those dreams? What if it calls us to something that we feel is either horribly frightening or terribly inconvenient? What if?
Too often we follow our conscience if the following is easy or if it's in keeping with our agendas. It's easy to follow our conscience when it lines up with everything that we want. But when it doesn't we often edit it, tweak it, put a hefty spin on it, or ignore it altogether. And it is in making decisions like these that we end up in places that we never wanted to be. It is the ignoring of our conscience that leads to the destruction of our lives. Our conscience is not this shrill and nagging voice. Rather, it is one of our most reliable compasses that keeps us out of the most terrible of places.
Tuesday Jul 04, 2023
Podcast Short: You Are Silent Now -Remembering the Sacrifices
Tuesday Jul 04, 2023
Tuesday Jul 04, 2023
You Are Silent Now -Remembering the Sacrifices
“You are silent now who once stood on battlefields ravaged by destruction unimaginable, holding in those desperate places the line of freedom for others you would never know, and who would never know you. And being one of those you never knew, I would give all I have to clasp your hand one single time, look into eyes that witnessed the bloodied carnage that results when freedom refuses to bow to chains of any kind, and simply say 'thank you.'”
Men and women died in the service of this country. They died. They…died. They gave up their lives. Their futures. Whatever roles that they would have played in their families. They gave up their dreams. They gave up their aspirations. They gave up ever going home again, or walking past the school that they went to as a kid, or enjoying warm summer evenings, or decorating a Christmas tree, or hugging their kids, or planting a garden, or talking to a neighbor over the fence, or a million other things. They gave all of that stuff up. All of it. Now, that all might sound a bit romanticized, particularly for those of us who don’t want to hear it. But it’s what they gave up. In fact, what you and I do every day is what they gave up doing…forever.
So, we are here only because someone else is not. We are here because someone, somewhere paid the ultimate price so that we could be here. So we could have a future. So we could go home at night. So we could walk past our old school. So we could sit outside on those summer evenings, or decorate a Christmas tree, or hug our kids, or plant a garden, or talk to our neighbors over the fence. People died so that we can do all of that stuff. We are here because they are not.
And I don’t know what I would do if I somehow I had to look even one, just one of those people in the face and tell them that I’ve abused what they died for. Or, that I took it all for granted. Or, that I was so callous that I didn’t even think about what they did for me because I’m too caught up in my own agendas to think about anything else. Or, I’ve lived my life thinking that I was owed these freedoms instead of realizing that I’ve been gifted with them. Or, that I’ve used these freedoms for all the things that they should have never been used for. I cannot imagine telling a fallen solider that that is how I used what they died for. I can’t imagine it.
So, maybe it’s a time for reflection. A lot of reflection. Reflection as individuals, as families, as communities, and reflection as a nation. Maybe it’s time to realize what we have. Maybe it’s time to reflect on the sacrifices of people who we will never know who handed us what we have. And maybe we need to reflect on our responsibility to hold all of that with the utmost respect. Maybe, just maybe it’s time to do that.
Wednesday Jun 28, 2023
”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - The Power of Principle
Wednesday Jun 28, 2023
Wednesday Jun 28, 2023
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. Christianity stands for principles that are not stood for in our culture. It stands for something lofty, but costly. It stands for principles that are timeless rather than those that suit the times. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“So it is that this man named Jesus handily performed feats that were astounding in their scope and utterly impossible in their nature. And as if that were not enough, He then does something as outrageous as inviting us to a life of doing the same. And yet it would seem that the most astounding and impossible thing of all is for us to blithely reject that invitation in favor of the aching emptiness and endless darkness that rides hard on the heels of just such a rejection.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Monday Jun 26, 2023
Podcast Short: We Are a Mess
Monday Jun 26, 2023
Monday Jun 26, 2023
We Are a Mess
We are a mess. We are a mess because we are a people on a mad rant. Sadly, we have become blinded to the fact that we are blinded by a host of pathetically self-serving agendas. And the pathetic nature of these agendas are evidenced by the fact that they are unable to stand up to the slightest scrutiny despite how rigorous our justifications of those agendas might be. We create a litany of agendas whose basis is indefensible, for any self-serving agenda will always be indefensible.
Therefore, we shut down anyone who wishes to do something as simple as dialogue with us about those agendas. The simple and potentially enriching exchange of differing ideas and perspectives is viewed as an inexcusably prejudiced and an entirely unwarranted threat. And such a radicalized stance is based on the insecurities of an agenda that is too weak to entertain anything other than its own indefensible platform. Therefore, we instantly shut down dialogue in order to side-step the painful reality that the agenda is simply too flimsy and too ill-conceived to be defended. And the fact that it cannot be responsibly defended calls into question the very legitimacy of the very agenda that has come to define who we are. For many, this then becomes horribly frightening as it also calls into question the very culture that they are desperately attempting to create that will grant them permission to live out an indefensible agenda.
The concept of personal rights is exercised to near insanity, resulting in demands for liberties that are far more about license to be what we are not, and to do what we should not. We have placed the desires of self over an abiding respect of the liberties that give us the ability to express those desires in the first place. Many in our culture have utilized scare tactics simply because reason cannot support these agendas, therefore it is assumed that fear will press resistant individuals to accept those agendas. We create paradigms that instantly and rather immediately renders anyone in opposition to these agendas as holding some sort of unacceptable bias or ignorant prejudice or ill-informed option that is immediately ruled as simply and utterly intolerable. Once these paradigms are forced upon these individuals, they are immediately labeled as the bane of the culture and unworthy of anything but to be deported to the far fringes of the culture where all of the ignorant and uninformed are banished. All the while, these unsustainable agendas tear at the very fabric of the culture, leaving these individuals entirely unaware that their self-declared and indefensible freedoms will be the destruction of those freedoms.
In it all, we are in desperate need of perspective; of clear, clean, fresh, and undiluted perspective free of bias and wiped clear of agendas. We are in desperate need of balance long lost. We are in desperate need of a recalibration that pulls us away from the insanity of a culture gone rogue, to a reality where things such as selflessness, and integrity, and truth, and morality, and sacrifice, and love for all are granted permission to run rogue and live rogue.
And to do that, we need to be shaken awake and slapped upside the head in order to open our eyes and re-engage a sense of common sense. We need to have something pull us out of our own heads for a moment in order to understand that ‘our own heads’ will only cause us to ‘head’ in all the wrong directions. We need something that will blow the walls off of the confining and selfish vision that our agendas hold us hostage to in order to understand our need to be liberated from our tiny agendas in order to help a world that’s held hostage to horrific things that completely shame our tiny agendas. We need to be broken open, shaken from slumber, rocked out of our mediocrity, shamed by our laziness, humiliated by our greed, thrust out of our complacency, and brought to both our knees and our senses regarding who we’ve become verses who we should and can become.
And to do that, all we have to do is look at the world around us. All we have to do is to take our heads out of our ‘heads’ and look at the world around us. At war. At poverty. At oppression. At dictatorial leaders who enslave entire nations in unspeakable bondage. All that we have to do is to look at disease and those who have no means to fight it. At children picking through garbage heaps and people sleeping in boxes. At nations that recklessly invade other nations for reasons that are both pathetic and the stuff of political manipulation and power-mongering. At rampant crime that pillages the innocent in order to line the pockets of those who are not. At the hundreds of millions of people for whom an education is an impossible dream and food on the table a fading hope. Get out of your own head and look around. And once we do, we must keep looking ‘around until we have chosen to get out of our comfort zones and place our tiny, selfish agendas aside in order to step out into everything that’s ‘around.’ Look around. Get out of your head and look around. And then do something other than live to preserve an agenda that can’t stand on its own two legs, for there are seven and a half billion people out there, many of which need help standing on their own two legs.
“…if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
- 2 Chronicles 7:14
Wednesday Jun 21, 2023
”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - God’s Arsenal
Wednesday Jun 21, 2023
Wednesday Jun 21, 2023
Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. We spend our lives acquiring what we think we need to fight the battles that we think we’re fighting. In a world fraught with fear and uncertainty, we assimilate whatever grants us this sense of invincibility and power for whatever battle we think we’re fighting. Consider this “Thought for Life:”
“I do not weaponize my life for God by rigorously acquiring an expansive arsenal of sophisticated munitions. Rather, I empty out the arsenal of everything but God, for at that point the arsenal is filled to capacity.”
I hope that you ponder that thought today. Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Tuesday Jun 20, 2023
Who Are You Giving Yourself Away To?
Tuesday Jun 20, 2023
Tuesday Jun 20, 2023
Who are you giving yourself away to? To what propaganda have you come to subscribe? To what bit of media polished bias or refined political spin have you succumb? Who has your ear, and therefore holds the heart to which your ear is attached? What are the voices that have methodically and patiently lulled you into some sort of comatose complacency where you no longer engage this rare, but incredibly precious thing that we call common sense? What podium have you obediently sat in front of that has led you to believe that you cannot think for yourself, or maybe that you can, but that you don’t need to? Who has told you that facts are irrelevant, and that the truth is simply an irritating obstacle to be quickly discarded if they don’t neatly fit on the preferred end of some ever-changing political spectrum? Who are you giving yourself away to?
Monday Jun 19, 2023
Podcast Short: We Like Things to Be New When New May Not Be Best
Monday Jun 19, 2023
Monday Jun 19, 2023
We Like Things to Be New
New. We like new things, or things to be new, or to do away with the old to make a place and a space for something new. The idea of ‘new’ is appealing. And because it is, we chase it. But ‘new’ does not mean ‘better,’ and I think that quite often we associate the two way too much. We tend to automatically think that if something is ‘new,’ the fact that it’s ‘new’ somehow guarantees that it’s ‘better.’ Certainly, some things that are ‘new’ are clearly ‘better.’ But many are not. And at some level we know that. But I think that we rather casually (and maybe unconsciously) associate that which is ‘new’ as somehow, someway, through some degree of some sort of magical thinking, as always being ‘better.’ However, ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’
And because there’s this natural association of ‘new’ as being ‘better,’ we often focus on making something new, or doing something new, or trying something new, or inventing something new without really being thoughtful about whether this ‘new’ is actually ‘better,’ because in our minds, we’ve automatically associated ‘new’ with ‘better.’ And that kind of thinking is both dangerous and flawed, because ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’
Sometimes we want ‘new’ to be ‘better’ as some sort of random shotgun approach. We think that if we try enough things for long enough, we’ll eventually hit something ‘new’ that actually (and rather surprisingly) turned out to be ‘better.’ Or we think that our situation, or our lives, or our relationships, or our finances, or our attitudes couldn’t get any worse, so we beguile ourselves into believing that ‘new’ might not necessarily be ‘better,’ but the odds are that it won’t be worse than whatever it is we’re living, or doing, or investing in, or waking up to every morning. But ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’
And so, here’s something to think about. Why ‘new’ anyway? Not that ‘new’ is bad…at all. But why this nearly crazed need to always discard the old in favor of what we define as new? Our problem is that we often see some belief system, or value system, or set of morals, or some perspectives honed by time and experience as old, or antiquated, or ill-informed, or out of their era, or out of date altogether. They might have had value in another time, and they might have brought something meaningful to an era now passed, but things have moved on and it’s time for something ‘better.’ It’s time for something ‘new.’ But ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’
And therefore, we foolishly begin to associate something that’s been around a long time as ‘old,’ rather than seeing it as ‘timeless.’ If something has come down to us through the years, or if its origins find their roots somewhere in a distant past, we casually and thoughtlessly assume that it is not applicable to today. That things are different today. Very different. And that this ‘different’ demands something ‘new.’ That the ‘different’ of today renders the wisdom of yesterday as being entirely out of step.
But the fact is, some things are ‘timeless,’ which places them forever beyond any feeble or weak definition of either ‘new’ or ‘old.’ That some things, in fact most great things, never get old because they apply to our humanity regardless of the era or the time within which we live. The deep things in life are not bound by any generation. Rather, they fit every generation. The great things are never outdated by time or technological advances. Rather, they are the things that time and technology cannot move forward without. Some things stand entirely above time, and change, and the evolution of humanity in whatever way we evolve. No. ‘New’ does not mean ‘better.’ And it does not because it’s not about ‘new.’ It’s about refusing to be so ignorant as to take what is timeless and attempt to force-fit it in the shallow rubrics of old and new. Because if we continue on such a destructive path, ‘new’ or ‘old’ won’t matter because we won’t be around to see either.
“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”
- Matthew 24:35