Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

”The Self That I Long to Believe In - The Challenge of Building Self Esteem” - Part Two

“Who Am I?”  What the Question Evidences

“Who am I?”  The question seems a bit overused these days.  It’s something more like a vogue, trendy kind of question that pulls us out of the doldrums of living among the masses and plants us in the more desirable currents of the intellectual mainstream.  In our culture, I tend to think it’s less about thoughtfully unearthing who we are as a means of living in awe of what God wrought within us.  Rather, I think it’s more about creating something that’s culturally acceptable and that adheres to the contrivances of whatever trend is currently trending in the culture.  It’s the creation of a self suitable to the world rather than discovering who we are as both in and above the world.  

The question of ‘who we are’ suggests that we’re exercising our intellectual acumen to probe our existence.  That exercise itself lends weight to the fact that we have an intellect to exercise and an existence to live it out in.  By its very nature the question of ‘who we are’ poses the thesis that we are something other than being nothing, and that ‘something’ has relevance when ‘nothing’ doesn’t.  By asking the question we reveal the need that we possess to believe that we exist and that our existence is purposeful.  We want to believe that we are supposed to become ‘something’ rather than float around being ‘nothing’ going nowhere in the going.  To ask the question is to evidence the fact that we are beings in need of asking the question.  And that in and of itself evidences the incredible depth and unparalleled richness of our humanity.

In addition, the question of ‘who we are’ also suggests that a simple answer is simply not suitable.  That some cheesy pabulum will not suffice.  That the definitions proposed by innumerable philosophers and those who for centuries have probed the inner-workings of life aren’t quite enough.  That holding ourselves up against everyone else in order to grasp some sense of who we are by comparing ourselves to who everyone else is simply repeatedly comes up short.  That aligning with political hashtags or running off after a litany of causes that have caught the wandering eye of those without a cause don’t answer the question.  That even though we’ve gorged ourselves on self-help philosophies and immersed ourselves in the rigors of mindfulness (or any one of the many other popular contrivances) we still don’t have the answer.

And that is not necessarily that all of these things are incorrect or that they don’t speak something of truth into our lives.  It’s not that at some level they don’t have some sort of value.  It’s that they’re not enough.  The cumulative weight of their collected insights falls short.  Mankind has asked the question of “Who am I”? for as long has mankind has existed.  And yet in the end, we don’t have an answer that explains the whole of who we are.  After untold millennia we are still on this search and we are still asking this question.

And if all of this evidences anything at all, it evidences the depth of our depth.  It speaks to the innate and persistent complexity of who we are.  Stored within the body, mind and soul of each of us there is a vastness that all of the combined explorations of mankind have yet to fathom, much less understand.  And can we not correlate this complexity and depth with our value?  Everything in existence has value for the place that it holds in relationship to everything else in existence.  But we stand apart in complexity, intellect, reasoning and ability.  We have been equipped for and tasked with the responsibility to care for everything else and nothing else has been assigned that role…except us.  Indeed, does this not evidence our value?

 

How Do We Not Know?

The ever-baffling fact regarding the question of ‘who we are’ is that we live with ‘us’ every single solitary day of our existence.  Yet, even though we live with ‘us’ with a transparent intimacy that no one else in all of existence ever will, we still don’t know ‘us.’  How could that be?  How could we wake up every day and go to bed every night with this person that we are and still not know who we are?  How is it that we walk through the myriad array of dynamics and demands of life and living, and somehow not see ourselves in the act of dealing with those things?  How have we lived with ourselves yet missed ourselves in the living?  Yes, as we have stated, we are phenomenally complex.  However, is there something else?

 

            We Don’t Want to See

One answer is that we don’t want to see.  We don’t want to see because we fear that if we actually look at who we are, we might not like who or what we see.  It may confirm our deepest fears about who we are.  It may affirm the presence of something we desperately hoped wasn’t there, or it may confirm the absence of something that we hoped was.  It may convince us that we really don’t have the capacity to achieve the dreams that we want to achieve.  It may corroborate all of the negative things that people have said we are, when we’ve spent our lives fighting against believing that that’s who we are.  We may choose ‘ignorance’ as opposed to ‘knowing’ so that we can continue wearing the weathered façade that we’ve found comforting, in whatever way it might comfort us.

Or, looking at ourselves might actually confirm that we are better than what we thought ourselves to be, which will result in some sort of accountability that we don’t want to be accountable for.  It may highlight rather formidable parts of ourselves that we haven’t cultivated, or personal resources that we’ve wasted in the wasting.  It may reveal potential that has languished in the pit of ignorance, or giftings that have been left to rot in the sewers of apathy.  It may call us up to places that we don’t believe we can go, leaving us greatly vexed by the contradiction of it all.  So, we don’t want to see because seeing is just too painful, or too demanding, or too burdensome, or it comes weighted with too much guilt.

 

            Becoming What They Want

Or, we’ve spent our energies not coming to understand who we are, but vesting those precious energies in becoming whoever it is that everyone says we should become.  There are demanding social pressures to adhere to.  Heavy-handed societal expectations that press us for compliance.  There are those who are committed to whatever politically-correct agenda they’re committed to who are easily aroused and readily enflamed to rage should we refuse alignment with their agendas.  There are the voguish trends that demand adherence lest we be labeled as outdated or just plain ignorant.  There are the expectations of parents that rest heavy upon us, and the voices of well-meaning mentors that too often called us to some vision of who they thought we were.  Therefore, we don’t have time to see ourselves because we’re spending our time trying to become another ‘self.’

Pressured to conformity by these elements, we develop this sectarian view of what we should be.  We’ve collected this societal and relational collage that appears to be a perpetually changing montage of what we’re supposed to be.  Somehow this becomes the standard template in place of ourselves being that standard.  Over time, we are lulled into believing that the pursuit of this template is the truest pursuit of self, when it is nothing of the kind.  And we become what we are not. 

 

            Being What Circumstances Made Us

It’s possible that we might have determined that it’s not who we are, but who circumstances made us to be.  Abuse as a child.  Bullying at the hands of thoughtless people bent on propping up their own fragile insecurities at our expense.  Jobs lost in acquisitions that sacrificed employees on the cold altar of budget and profit.  Marriages that collapsed at the hands of spouses who decided that the trade-off for personal agendas as held against the life of a marriage and a family was legitimate.  Enemies that we mistook for friends who slowly circled around behind us and stabbed us in one of the many ways that people stab others.  For us, these answer the question, “Who am I?” 

The wounds, the disappointments, the betrayals, and the losses both large and small have defined us.  In addition, the process of healing from the wounds inflicted, as well as angst involved in waiting for the ones that are yet to happen further define who we are.  The embracing of an existence defined by what happened to us, further shaped by what we fear will happen becomes the sum total of who we are.  Our lives become a tragically circular story of being wounded and then healing only to be wounded yet again.  The difficult issue in being defined by our circumstances is that to understand how all of that has defined us means that we have to think about how all of that has defined us.  And in our mind, the pain of doing that far, far offsets any potential self-discoveries.  So we don’t think about them (or at least we try not to).

 

            There’s Nothing to Discover

Or, we don’t feel that there’s any identity to discover.  That somehow we are the embodiment of a bunch of ‘nothing’ that will only add up to nothing.  That because there’s nothing there, the need for some sort of pursuit becomes unnecessary and embarrassingly ridiculous.  We are what we already know, despite how little that might be.  Somehow we ended up at the shallow end of the gene pool, or we showed up late when things were being handed out.  We got to rummage through the left-overs or we were looked over.  There was no motivation to develop anything along the way, or the opportunities to do so simply never came our way.  Therefore, we don’t know who we are because we’re pretty much nothing and we already know that. 

From nothing you can only get nothing.  So we become embedded in a sense of hopelessness regarding both the present that we live in and the future that we have come to dread.  The journey of self doesn’t exist because there’s nothing to journey from, and nothing to journey to.  There’s a settling of sorts, where we fall into a sedentary malaise.  And in this place where everything is nothing, our soul slowly stops breathing.    

 

            Other Reasons

Or could it be something entirely different?  Could it be that we are vast beyond comprehension?  That we’ve mistaken this journey of ‘who am I’ for a destination that gives us a clear and solid answer verses seeing it as a journey where the answer is always fleshing itself out with ever-great clarity as we go along?  That we are someone who is perpetually in the process of becoming more of whoever that someone is?  That we are not meant to be something that’s stagnant in time and space, but we are something that is always evolving in a manner that we are constantly advancing into time and growing in space?  And to understand that is to begin to build a sense of self that will effectively begin to disassemble our negative sense of self. 

All of this implies that we are, in fact, created vast beyond comprehension.  And this personal vastness is so vast that it gifts us with resources that are beyond the years that we have to live out those resources.  We are bigger than our own lifespan.  Therefore, ‘who we are’ is based on ‘who we are in the becoming of who we are.’  Who we are is not defined by some sedentary event such as an alliance, or someone’s expectations of us, or the events that have befallen us.  And unless we understand that, we will have missed the process of becoming who we are by looking for an answer in all the other things that can’t answer the question.

  

The Size of ‘Who I Am’

We have been gifted with a depth that will invite exploration and make space for such exploration for the entirety of our lives.  We will never discover something about ourselves that will be that distinctly final discovery that concludes the journey.  New vistas, fresh insights, and breathtakingly vast levels of awareness always await.  We are entirely fluid, having each thing we learn expand upon everything that we learned before it, and subsequently enhancing everything that we’ve yet to learn.  We grow geometrically, moving out in every direction at every moment in a continual cascade of growth.  The end of who we are exists only as a figment of our sorely limited imaginations and is an outcome of the fear that maybe we are more than we’ve allowed ourselves to be. 

What we do know is that we are the sum total of what we know about ourselves, plus the infinitely larger part that we don’t know.  There will never be the final question.  That every answer to every question is an invitation to the next question and the next one after that.  We are people made of horizons and for horizons, and if perchance we live within walls, it is we who have created them.  The question of “Who am I?” is not one question answered by one answer.  It is a robust collection of questions that slowly but deliberately reveal the tantalizing picture of who we are.  It is an adventure of the greatest sort.  The hunt for treasure that captivates all of our imaginations.  It is discovering the genius of God as that genius was manifest within us without any hesitation of any kind.  Hence the question, “Who am I?”

This search itself blatantly evidences the fact that we are bigger than ourselves, for if we knew everything about ourselves a search would be unnecessary and the questions unprovoked.  There is more to us than we know, and even though we live in union with ourselves every day we remain a mystery to ourselves.  Despite our low self-esteem and incessant deprecation, the question of who we are evidences that there is more to us than we realize.  And if we walk this search for self out, at some inherently deep level we know that ‘who we are’ is so vast that we will spend the entirety of our lives in search of it, yet we will never know all of it.  And if the whole of us is beyond the whole of a lifetime to discover, how indescribably grand must we be?  And maybe this is what should shape our self-esteem.  This is how we should view ourselves.  This is what fires our imagination and fuels our journey.   

 

Seeking the Answer Verses Searching for Peace

The question then begs the search, which can be unsettling for many.  The penetrating angst and unrelenting curiosity generated by the question of ‘who we are’ is the impetus that sends us searching for some sense of peace about who we are.  This peace is not necessarily obtained by having some answer to the question of who we are.  To our own demise, the frenzied search to calm our souls in this grand search often sends us into the ‘plug-and-play’ of a culture ready to give us the once-over and then plug us into whatever the once-over has determined us to be.  It becomes something of a search for the defining box that our careers hand us, or the identifying label that our social circles have crafted for us, or the place that our socio-economic defines as ours, or the role that our family or friends have etched out for us. 

There’s a myriad army of people and philosophies and social structures ready to dress-us-up and deck-us-out in the borrowed garments woven of their biases and stitched tight by their sordid agendas.  Should it have its way, the world would abscond with us, embezzling our resources in the service of its agendas.  And while all of these might give us an identity, that identity is borrowed or imposed or both.  Suffice it to say, an identity either borrowed or imposed is a costume parading itself around as something it is not.  At best, it may grant us a fragile and fraudulent peace that we gladly mistake for the real thing. 

However, it lacks sustenance and stability.  Typically, it’s constructed to fit a space suited for those who created it, rather than knock down the walls that have constricted us.  It’s what fits them, but what enslaves us.  Therefore, we have to repeatedly adjust it as we might, tear it down when we tire of it, build it back up when we’re scolded for tearing it down, and repeat the worn out narrative of why this is us and why it works…when it’s not and it doesn’t.  Subsequently, the question goes unanswered because we don’t have the time to ask it. 

Because it doesn’t work, our low self-esteem sits on forlorn hands and tells itself that the search is impossibly complex and that we would wise to relegate ourselves to some static existence of some sort.  We are either nothing, or we are something that we are not, or we are all things bad built upon all things bad.  We end up in one of these places because we’ve come at this defining question from every possible angle except the right one.

 

Within Not Without

As patently simplistic as it sounds, we are defined by who we are.  We need not reach out to everything around us in order to define that which is within us.  If we reach out to something or someone outside of us in this search for self, whatever or whoever we reach out to needs to walk us back inside of us because that’s where we are.  It’s about being intelligently introspective in a manner that is intentional, thoughtful and relentless.  It is about peeling away the sticky layers of culturally imposed norms, digging through the impregnable strata of our histories, breaking out of all of the superimposed roles, and rigorously erasing all of the rogue messages that others have penned across the tablet of our souls.  And in the upheaval of a process that grand, it’s then formulating the right questions hoping that we’re actually daring enough to ask them.

In this rigorous process, it’s not about evaluating what we see as held against some clandestine societal rubric or chafing personal bias.  Rather, it’s more about accepting what we see and asking how it can be shaped, honed, cultivated and nurtured.  It’s about believing that we were created with all the essential elements to become the essential person that we were intentionally and rather ingeniously designed to be.  It’s about understanding that there is a specific role out there somewhere that’s waiting for us to show up and that it’s probably sitting a whole lot closer to us than we think it is.  And the best way that we can show up for that role is to come as we are and not as the world says we should come.  It’s presenting ourselves before the God that created us, stepping into the life He set in front of us, and believing that it will unfold if we just show up for everything to unfold.

This is not about giving ourselves permission to spin off on some ill-defined quest of self-indulgence, for our true selves won’t find themselves shaped for that kind of agenda.  This is not about permission to become absorbed in a self-satiating endeavor where we suddenly realize that life is ours for the taking when we’ve spent our lives having life take from us.  Rather, it’s respecting our authenticity as being something that adds to life rather than adds to self.  It’s about realizing that our true self will never detract from the true selves of those around us nor will it ever impinge upon them.  And if perchance it does, it wasn’t ‘us’ to begin with.

You are uniquely designed with everything you need to be everything that you are.  And that design is sufficient to be able to do everything that you were designed to do.  It is big enough to exceed your lifetime.  You may not see it, but as have noted, seeing something does not evidence its existence or lack thereof.  It’s coming against the lies that have been spun about us, the identities that have been forced upon us, and breaking the box that other more fearful people have crafted for us.  Despite the nature of your self-esteem and the darkness that it has layered ‘round about you, may the quest to discover all of this be relentless in it’s scope, potent in it’s process, and blessed throughout.

”The Self That I Long to Believe In - The Challenge of Building Self-Esteem” - Part One

The Self That I Long to Believe In - The Challenge of Building Self-Esteem

“We’re driven.  Whether that’s for our good or our ill, we’re driven.  That drivenness may be born of a free spirit bent on living with unimpeded freedom, or it might be a drivenness used to hold ourselves captive.  It might be a drivenness to face ourselves, or a drivenness to run from ourselves.  We can be driven to do great things, or to hide from great things.  Being driven grants us the ability to fly, but we can use it just as readily to die. 

If we are bent under the weight of a low self-esteem, our drivenness is often exercised to our own demise.  It’s used to create places to hide, excuses to run, rationalizations to justify the awful person that we are not, and the freedom to embrace beliefs about ourselves that have no basis in reality other than the reality we’ve crafted from the skewed messages of others.  On the other hand, we might become driven to prove ourselves as worthy through various accomplishments and achievements.  We work, we strive, we reach, and we relentlessly press on to show that we are more than what we’ve come to believe ourselves to be.  If we fail in such an endeavor, we’re driven to convince ourselves that we are nothing of the sort so that we don’t ever take on such a preposterous task ever again.  Either way, we possess a drivenness even if it isn’t used in our best interest.

 

Driven to Prove Our Worth

Maybe this whole mentality of drivenness has been a product of our life story; having to do it all ourselves because no one was there to help us.  Maybe this left us with the need to prove ourselves and to establish our worth by whatever means we chose to prove that.  Often we have the need to display our intellectual prowess, to exercise the muscle of our skill-set, or flaunt our expertise in order to secure our place in some sort of ill-defined and vague pecking order that defines our sense of worth and value.  Our identity then becomes entirely defined by all of the things that we do to prove our worth and the efforts that we put forth in doing them. 

In some instances this happens because we’ve lived in someone’s shadow and we need to show ourselves as bigger than the shadow that was cast upon us, or at least prove that we’re as big as whosever’s shadow that was.  At other times we’re out to prove people wrong, to conclusively show beyond any shadow of a doubt that we’re competent even though people repeatedly said we were entirely incompetent.  It can be the product of a deeply ingrained behavioral pattern where we grew up being affirmed when we performed, with such affirmation being clearly withheld when we didn’t.  In the end, it’s typically ourselves that we’re really trying to convince simply because the toughest audience that we play to is ‘us.’

 

Driven to Prove Our Lack of Worth

Or we’ve done the opposite of all of this by being driven to surrender to minimums.  We’ve decided to withdraw from it all and just do what we need to do to get to the next day.  It’s about being driven to draw away and hide so that others won’t see us for who we are and thereby judge us, or we won’t see them and subsequently judge ourselves by comparison.  We’re driven not to be driven so that we avoid failure, or anything might even remotely resemble failure.  Or, we’re often driven to surrender before the battle ever shows up so that surrender was a choice and not a pathetic manifestation of our inabilities to fight the battle. 

In embracing this mentality, we’re not driven to disprove this sense of worthlessness.  Rather, we’re driven to prove it by not disproving it.  It’s a battle of a different sort.  It’s not a surrendering to any battle that we’ve fought.  To the contrary, it’s a surrendering to the need to fight for something that doesn’t exist to be fought for.  Surrender then indisputably evidences our worthlessness while simultaneously granting us full license to walk away without guilt or remorse.  And while such a package seems marvelously relieving, it is in fact horribly life-killing.

 

The Failure of Trying to Proving Ourselves

Proving Our Worthlessness

The drivenness to prove ourselves is wildly relentless.  But what are we trying to prove and in what way are we trying to prove it?  If we wish to prove ourselves as inadequate or inferior, we do so by acting in ways that substantiate those things.  Our lives become a reflexive response to the preconceived notion that we are worthless.  Therefore, our actions reinforce what we have come to believe ourselves to be.

We can sabotage our own good fortune.  We can take opportunity and destroy it, thereby declaring that it was never really opportunity in the first place.  We can shrug off compliments, offset every positive with a blistering array of negatives, or endlessly compare ourselves to others by dramatically inflating them to be far more than what they really are so that we look far less than what we really are. 

 

Proving Our Value

Or, we try to work against this despairingly negative sense of self by expending all of our energies to prove it wrong.  Our lives devolve into these incessant tasks that never achieve their stated goal, leaving us convinced that despite our best efforts we are not worthy of our best efforts.  Fundamentally, at the core of the desire to prove ourselves through achievement there lies two fundamental needs.  First is the need for identity.  And second, is the need for worth and value.  If the basis of our identity and our sense of worth and value is rooted in achievement, (which is the stuff that we do), then we’ve always got to be doing.  We’ve got no alternative except to always be on the run, always planning the next thing, always tediously mapping out the next endeavor to insure that it’s better than the last one, and always taking everything that we lay our hands on to the next level to the point that we eventually end up putting the next level entirely out of reach anyway.

Part of the perpetual frustration lays in the fact that the point at which we hope to gain this cherished sense of accomplishment to build ourselves or diminish ourselves is ill-defined.  We have some vague and often wandering sense of it, or we’ve determined a general proximity of sorts.  If it has sufficient clarity, we can be fairly certain that we’ve arrived.  However, we’re often doomed to realize that what we wanted this to do for us upon our arrival did not happen.  Therefore, there’s a sense that we failed on our way here, thereby robbing our arrival of what we hoped to gain from it.  If our sense of it was unclear, we typically determine that we really have not arrived or we’ve arrived at the wrong place.  Whether we are driven to prove ourselves worthy or unworthy, either way failure is certain.

 

Who or What’s Driving Us?

William Frederick Book wrote that “A man must drive his energy, not be driven by it.”  We know that we expend energy, and typically we expend a lot of it.  But we rarely question if we’re driving our energy or if our energy is driving us.  Who’s in control here?  We pound and we push and we perseverate and we plod along and when we get pummeled we pick ourselves up and press on.  The relentless nature of it all rarely if ever gives us the time or the resolve to pull back, pause and ask who or what’s controlling the energy that we’re expending?  And if we were to define success either in proving our worth or showing ourselves as worthless, defining what we’re doing and why we’re doing it would be a vitally important part of that process.

It would be reasonable to say that if we’re not controlling the expenditure of our energy, if we’re simply responding or reacting or being driven by something that we can’t in reality achieve through whatever our efforts are, then the energy spent is wasted.  The deceptive nature of it all is that just because we’re expending energy we assume that something’s being accomplished.  The fact that we’re doing so much could only result in some sort of goal attainment.  Something good and successful (in whatever way we’ve defined success) must be coming out of this simply because the energy we’re putting out has to be resulting in something . . . doesn’t it?

 

Productivity as Value

Productivity is often defined by expenditure, even though the two may not correlate at all.  We’re busy about being busy, and somehow being busy suggests purpose.  We’re pounding out this thing that we call life, as if the pounding has a purpose other than the pounding.  We’re fighting the battles, climbing the mountains, forging though whatever wilderness we think we’re in, and charting out journeys of glorious adventure.  We’re pressing through the obligations of the day and the challenges of the week.  Or, we’re working hard to believe that we’re not worth believing in so that we can finally lay ourselves to rest because we have no value to lay our lives upon.  Either way, we’re busy and we believe that our busyness evidences our value.  

Our value however, is not believed to be a constant.  Therefore, to maintain our value we have to remain busy.  Yet beyond that, there is some glitch in the human psyche that says that to have consistent value, we have to be consistently busier.  That what worked today, will be inadequate tomorrow.  That what was sufficient this week, will be woefully insufficient next week.  That proving one’s worth through busyness requires a perpetual escalation of busyness to the point that there are simply not enough hours in a single day, or a collection of days to be that busy.  We will fail.  But we will view ourselves as the failure rather than understanding the sheer impossibility of the dynamic.

 

The Privilege of a Place

However, the things that we do, despite the positive or negative nature of them, illustrate the fact that life has crafted a place for us and therefore we have a purpose.  Life has deemed us of sufficient value to carve out a spot that is uniquely ours.  We have the privilege of having been gifted with this life and having been handed the authority to live it in out in whatever way we choose to live it out.  In fact, we have been tasked with living it in a way that is entirely unique to us.  We have been granted a privilege unlike anyone we will ever meet. 

We might be using that privilege negatively.  We might be using it to our own demise.  We might be turning it against ourselves.  But we have the privilege of having a place that is uniquely ours, regardless of what we choose to do with it.  And because we have all of these things that life has granted us and subsequently called us to do, we obviously must have value.  We have been granted the privilege of both life and choice because we have sufficient value to have been granted those privileges in the first place.  We might misuse them, but we have them to misuse.  And that means that we were good enough to be granted them in the first place.

 

What Drives Us Drives Our Energy

It’s the fact that we’ve been called.  We have a purpose that is uniquely ours.  We’ve been granted a niche.  We have a place at the table.  We have a place that has been specifically reserved in this eons long thing that we call life.  Yes, deep down we want to be successful.  As we have said, the reality that we have been granted this place is life evidences the fact that we are of sufficient worth to be there regardless of success or lack thereof.

However, having been granted this place does not appear sufficient for us to feel that we have real worth and substantive value.  Our low self-esteem lulls us into believing that we don’t actually belong here…at all.  It speaks to us in tones either loud and deafening or quiet and bedeviling that this is not our place.  Therefore, we have to prove that we are worthy to be here.  We have to show that this calling or these privileges weren’t a fluke, or something that we fabricated out of our desperation to feel that we have value.  We have to make this real.  We can’t simply bow in grateful appreciation for what life has bestowed upon us.  Rather, we have to prove that we are worth the bestowing.

Because we have embraced this line of thinking, our energies are expended on our attempts at achieving something in order to prove our worth in the place that we’ve been granted.  We’ve got to achieve, for if we don’t maybe we weren’t good enough for this place in the first place.  We’ve got to earn our place.  But while we’re expending energy holding our place through the earning of that place, we have to earn our way to the next place at the very same time.  We have this sense that the place we’re at has limited value.  That in the ever-incessant flow of life, wherever we’re at has a really short shelf-life.  We know that soon it will become the place that we should have left in pursuit of the place that we should be going.  The accolades of today’s achievement can quickly become the murmuring of tomorrow’s questions as people begin to wonder why we’re still sitting in yesterday.        

Therefore, we fight to stay where we’re at while simultaneously fighting to move into tomorrow.  We desperately want to solidify our current position, but not so much that we inadvertently lock ourselves into it.  We must lay rigorous claim to the moment in order to preserve it as the step to the next moment, for if the former fails that latter will never exist to be given a chance to fail.

 

It Doesn’t Work – Wasted Energy

With that all said, whether we actually achieve what we’re out to achieve or not (whether that be good or bad), in reality it neither defines us nor establishes our worth.  Whether we rise to some position of prominence, or achieve some step, or have a litany of letters stacked up behind our name, or cross some ill-defined finish line; none of these have any bearing on our worth or value.  Our energies have all been about the achievement of whatever goals we’ve set for ourselves as a means of evidencing the fact that we are worth a place at the table.  And while all of the trappings of doing all of this stuff appears to build us up, the trappings are in fact the very trap that will leave us living out our lives surrounded by successes, but engulfed in the forever question of “Am I good enough?”

The need to achieve these goals controls our energy, not us.  We have this terribly rampant fear of not knowing who we are and subsequently having absolutely no grounding at all to effectively engage life as it roars at us, spins around us, and challenges us to do something with it and about it.  Or, we have this terribly desperate feeling that our worthlessness has become completely exposed due to the fact that we stand here with nothing to hold up to show that we have value, and that based on our inability to evidence our value we have no inherent right to the place we’ve been granted.  Therefore, we stand shamed before the whole world.  Or, we do the opposite and we sabotage our situation to prove that we don’t belong here rather than working to prove that we do (which isn’t any more helpful). 

And then we start asking ourselves a host of terrifying questions.  What if none of this works?  What if we don’t measure up?  What if we fail life?  What if we look the part but are nothing of the part?  What if it was all energy spent and wasted in the spending?  What if we were the fool and we just postponed the reveal?  Living with ourselves in a manner such as this is dying dressed in the façade of living.

 

Easing the Panic

And so we default to achievement to rectify it all and get rid of the questions.  If we achieve, it all goes away.  If we achieve we can hold up the mirror of whatever we’ve achieved, point to it and say, “See, that’s me, that’s who I am, and therefore I do belong in the place life afforded me.”  We can grab that mirror and gaze into it every time our self-esteem wanes or teeters on some precarious edge.  We can carry it around with us and peer into it when this perpetually flagging sense of self starts to flag.  We can do this until the mirror doesn’t work anymore and we begin to fall into the trap of believing that maybe we don’t belong here.

Achievement says we have value because we can point to the validation of the achievement; that we took nothing and made something from it which says that we do have a place and a purpose.  That we stood in the face of both searing criticism and daunting obstacles, and in the standing we bested them both.  That we overcame.  We won. 

And in reality, these things neither define who we are or substantiate our value.  Our energies are horribly misdirected and tragically wasted because those precious energies are entirely controlled and completely disseminated by these convincing illusions that are destined to fade and die.  We can’t prove our worth and value through achievement of any sort.  And until we recognize this, we will live our lives very much ‘out-of-sorts.’ 

However, rather than understanding that these never work despite the best of our energies, we fall into the trap and we assume that ‘we’ didn’t make them work.  We presume that we just weren’t good enough.  We determined that we didn’t have the wherewithal and that we lacked enough of everything that was need to become something.  It just wasn’t in us.  Subsequently, we mentally and emotionally bury ourselves in a place that we never should have been in in the first place. 

 

Our Value as Internal, Not External

Despite the screaming message of the culture and the declarations of those on lesser ventures, our value rests in who we are, not in what we do with who we are.  Without a doubt, what we do with who we are has value, but it does not grant us value because that value already existed prior to any achievement.  Our existence alone is the greatest statement of our worth and the clearest evidence as to our value.  What we do with that existence is up to us.  But the sheer reality of that existence evidences value.  The fact I am writing this and you are reading this attests to the fact that we both have immense value because we both exist to do both of those things. 

Have you considered the fact that without who we are, what we do would not exist?  Every victory, every achievement, every accomplishment hinges on the fact that we were there to do it.  Therefore, what we do is entirely dependent upon our existence.  All that we do emerges from everything that we are; our gifts, our talents, our abilities, our qualities, our characteristics, our attributes and so on.  What we do is simply a manifestation of all of those things expressing themselves in whatever we’ve put our mind to expressing them. 

 

Deserving Our Place at the Table

That is why we were granted the place of privilege that we were granted.  That is why we have a seat at the table.  What we do is simply a manifestation of who we are working itself out in who and what God already knows us to be.  We would be much better served to use our energies to bring growth and maturation to who we are, not to squander those energies in our attempts to prove who we are or establish who we are not.  This is not to say that achievement is bad.  In reality, achievement is very good and we are privileged to do it.  Rather, it’s to say that achievement for the wrong reasons or misplaced motivations is damaging.

We don’t have to prove that we are worthy of the places that life has granted us.  Yes, we need to be thankful for them.  We need to cherish them.  We need to hold them in high regard and never minimize them.  But we’ve been given them because we’ve been deemed equipped for them.  There’s nothing to prove.  What’s the sense in attempting to prove what’s already been proven?  There’s just the work that we’ve been blessed to do and the positions we’ve been blessed to have.  And those are not granted to us to prove anything to anybody.  Rather they are given to us to bless and maximize everything.

Mentally that’s a tough shift to make.  It’s a reversal of epic proportions and the fact that it is evidences the depth of the lie that we’ve been living.  Each of us needs to embrace the fact that our value is in who we are.  And we need to widen that thought by understanding that this value that we carry within us exceeds our greatest estimation of it.  It will readily eclipse anything that we do.  That value is already there within us, even if we don’t see the far-reaching nature of it.  Seeing something is not necessary to evidence its existence.  It rests in exercising the faith that to be human is to possess potential.  To be a child of God is to possess the infinite.  And to possess infinite potential means that there’s a grand mission for the manifestation of it.  Therefore we don’t need to create something or prove that potential.  We only need to rest in it and let everything flow from it.”

Consequences - We Are the Cause

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.

 

What I Would Say to the World - Thoughts for a Struggling World

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? 

”An Intimate Collision - Encounters With Life and Jesus” - Part Four

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.

 

”An Intimate Collision - Encounters With Life and Jesus” - Part Three

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

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”An Intimate Collision - Encounters with Life and Jesus” - Part Two

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.

”An Intimate Collision - Encounters With Life and Jesus” - Part One

Filth described her very well.  While it was an apt depiction, it failed to embrace the fullest description of what she was.  Some lives seem to be nothing more than a brutal manifestation of the accumulated slag and scum that is leftover in the wake of some departed tragedy.  These people become the thing that life has done to them, being so irreparably identified with their own tragedies that they themselves are a living manifestation of all those assorted tragedies.  Sometimes we become what life has done to us.  Hers was a life that was already an abysmal collection of untold catastrophes that resulted in filth nearly indescribable.  She was only fourteen.

Susan was of little note as she stepped off the bus that first day of summer camp.  She was one of over one hundred campers swirling in an arriving mass of anticipation.  Gathering tattered bags and a tattered spirit, her eyes were set hollow with the effects of a life lived in hatred.  Filth and a pervading stench drew her apart from the rest almost instantly.  Her soul seemed to reek with a putrid odor that handily eclipsed the smell emanating from her skin and clothing.  There was about her an inner ugliness that permeated everything else about her, that had consumed her and had digested whatever shred of good there might have been.  It all seemed to have effectively left the fragrance of any human goodness now consumed in the sludge of whatever it was that seemed to define her.

Her defense mechanism was so refined that she immediately repelled all who drew near, thrusting others so far away that she guaranteed her own isolation.  Her own woundedness was so utterly complete that the poison of the pain she felt spewed in venomous rages at anyone who drew near.  Her self-hatred was effectively projected outward onto anyone who dared draw near physically or emotionally.  She seemed as something less than human, something abominable; something terribly horrifying within which any shred of humanity was consumed and utterly lost.

The following week of camp was to be marred by ugly confrontations.  She devolved into assorted rages that were wild, brutish, entirely unprovoked and profuse.  She refused to shower.  Ferocious outbursts were filled with anger distilled into lethal poison that devastated other hearts, young and old.  Physical assaults and violent rages had an insane wildness and a touch of insanity about them.  There emerged at times something animalistic about her, something very primal that raged unrestrained by either reason or rationale.  At times the line between that of a visceral animal and a human being was blurred and terribly ill-defined. 

In the end, Susan was isolated in a lone cabin.  Her parents refused to come and get her.  Her pastor was unwilling and unable to deal with her rages as her life did not fit neatly into some clean theological rubric that he could manage.  The camp staff gathering to pray for her, but found their prayers as ineffective.  Some sort of spiritual possession was questioned, and rightly so.  She was a monster; a raging pathetic monster that we waited to relieve ourselves of at the close of camp.  Such was our judgment of her.

 

Judging From Fear

Judging is, I think, a manifestation of our own fears.  We judge so that we might have some sense of control and some feeling of superiority.  If we judge that which is before us, we assume we will not become whatever it is that we are rendering judgment upon.  We set ourselves apart as distinct from that thing or that person with that distinction somehow convincing us that we are different.  Judging places us above that which we judge, meaning that we will not succumb to it from our supposedly elevated position.

We judge because we fear, and because we fear we are not prone to look deeply into the person that we’re judging.  For if we look deeply, we might see ourselves.  We might be forced to surrender to the reality that that which we are rendering judgment upon is as much a part of that person as it is a part of us.  Superficial judgment allows us to bypass our own humanity and live in the lie of superiority.  The person whom we judge is then sacrificed to our thin self-serving judgments and whatever is it that God wanted to do in our lives through that person is tragically lost.     

 

Judgment Revealed

It was to be that final night of camp.  The next morning a mass of buses and cars would invade the gravel parking lot, snatching up sun burnt campers filled with the wild tales of a week’s adventures.  But that would be tomorrow.  For now, night had fallen, drawing up a warm blanket of thick summer air across the camp and out beyond the wooded expanse, tucking the world in at each horizon.  Crickets sang in a chorus of the night from the deep woods, lulling the day to slumber with their mesmerizing notes.  Frogs bellowed thick from a stream that meandered through a wooded ravine down a slight ridge.  Their chorus hauntingly rolled up the rise and across the slight meadow.  Lightening bugs cast dancing pinpoint pigments of yellow across the shadowy landscape and deep into the tall stands of sleepy timber.  The moon had only shaken a sliver of itself awake, mingling with the starry minions.  It was the perfect night; soft and subtle.  God’s creation was melding into perfection.

With the campers bedded down for that final night, I strolled down to the chapel now bathed in the soft shadows of night.  A few moments with God at the end of a long week seemed so right.  Drawn, I descended the winding dirt and gravel path with the soft crunch of each step muffled by night’s thick softness.  Slight shadows cut from the thin pastel light of a sleepy moon seemed to whisper something about reverence and what it is to be alone with God.

Another person had thought the same.  The outdoor chapel was framed by a wall of river rock that extended muscular granite arms around an expansive gravel floor.  Across the gravel expanse there stood a rock and timber altar with a muscular, rough-hewn cross as a shadowy sentry.  Thick timbers supported a vaulted wooden roof spread with broad knotty pine boards.  The woods beyond were alive with the night.  And Susan was there.

A shadowy figure knelt at the altar.  Her aloneness was poignant, an isolated life kneeling before an altar in a desperate hope of somehow breaking that isolation.  The crying was soft and indistinct, being defy muted by her fear of vulnerability.  The moment was a manifestation of a broken heart and deeply wounded spirit which had somehow collided with God enough to strike a spark of hope.  She was kneeling there, her fingers embedded in the rock altar, hoping that this hope would not fail her as had everything else.

We had all seen her as ugly, despicable, the slimy scum of humanity that teetered on the savagery of a wild animal.  We wanted nothing more than to see the sun break on the final day of camp and watch her leave both the camp and our lives.  We could not wait to be rid of her, to relegate this vermin back to the hole from which she had crawled.  To say we hated Susan was likely excessive.  To say we despised her was likely true.  And yet, here she was, broken.  The wounded humanity she so vehemently lashed out from was pouring out across that rock and timber altar.  Her core was exposed and for the first time I saw a slight glimpse of her humanity.  I had errantly judged it not to be there for fear that I would recognize it in myself.  Now I saw her brokenness and in it, I recognized my own.

I feared her, not knowing in that moment what to do; not wanting to do anything out of the fear of behaviors I’d observed and the hatred I’d seen spew from her.  But I found myself walking toward her anyway.  Having made no conscious decision to do anything, I stepped, my footsteps dictated by something wholly other than me.  Suddenly I was beside her in the thick dark, in the thick of night; in the thick of her night.  Without a word spoken, she reached up and took my hand and drew me down to her side with a force that buckled my knees.  Putting a trembling arm around me as if the whole of her spirit was leaning its weight on me, I felt for that brief instance the intolerable hell of her life.  And in that moment I understood why she was what she was.

Her words were to silence the night that surrounded us.  Nature drew down into the moment, stood on tiptoe so it seemed as God reached out from the expanse of that starry night and changed a life.

Her next words set me back, instantly slicing through all the things that had caused me to judge her so harshly and revealing who this really was.  She said, “would you pray with me?”  Without a word from me her heart ruptured open in prayer.  I never uttered a word.  I didn’t have to as such an action would have been only an intrusion in that transforming moment.  Massive floodgates surged opened and a enormous reservoir of pain that had accumulated over the incalculable expanse of years and events deluged the darkened chapel.  I knelt . . . stunned.  I had arrogantly diminished her in my judgments, and I experienced my own cleansing in hers.  It was a marvelous and privileged moment.

In the end, we spent over an hour kneeling in the gravel, cloaked in a deep summer’s night. Her prayers, a lifetime tidal wave of events and circumstances kept coming; of abuse and neglect and drugs.  The assorted maladies such as hunger, too few clothes, empty birthdays, numerous evictions and the rejection of society that abject poverty brings to a young life.  There was a devastating abortion and a fathomless litany of other terrifying choices that shredded her soul.  A father’s alcoholism, a brother’s suicide, and a mother’s incessant marital unfaithfulness layered in it all.  Things that I could have never have comprehended.  Hers was a devastated life beyond description; a human holocaust.

And it all poured into the night, across the rock and timber altar, down the gravel floor, out into the deep woods and into the expanses of heaven itself.  When it was done, she was free and her core was cleansed.  Likewise, I was free.  In that chapel God gave me far more than I had ever expected as I had trod the dirt and gravel path earlier that night.  I saw bits of me in her, and they were likewise swept away in her own release.

The next sunrise may have actually been her very first sunrise, the day dawning over a new life.  With the sun barely warming the eastern horizon, she went to the shower.  Her clothes were deposited in the washer.  She combed her hair into long translucent waves, brushed her teeth bright and put on fresh clean clothes.  A touch of borrowed make-up and a slight sprits of perfume rounded out the transformation.  Arranging herself in the mirror, she gently primped herself to perfection.

Susan walked into the cafeteria for that final breakfast wholly new.  Silence fell over one hundred campers.  Its power was deafening.  All of our superficial judgments had defined her for all of us.  So complete were they that we all sat there trying to somehow make them fit this new person for, sadly, we knew no other way to define her.  The old judgments of a monster melted away in the light of their gross insufficiency and a fresh understanding of this remarkable young woman seized the room.  A litany of miracles walked in with her.

At that final breakfast she went from table to table to table.  Asking for forgiveness from those she’d hurt.  Weeping with those lives she’d scarred.  Holding the faces of so many in her hands, looking intently into their eyes and telling them how sorry she was.  Hugging and holding and crying with an endless array of campers and counselors.  No one ate breakfast that morning because sometimes life becomes bigger than food and larger than any agenda.  Sometimes life intersects us so powerfully that the only thing we can give attention to is that which intersects us.  And Susan intersected us all.

A revival broke in that cafeteria.  Clusters of young lives gave themselves to God over eggs, bacon and a radically changed life.  Busses and arriving cars were asked to wait until the surge of one life changed had fully raced and run through the hundreds of other hurting lives that morning.  The vast gulf between what we were and what we could be was searingly highlighted in Susan.  And in the end, God ravaged the work of Satan and the deep pain of innumerable adolescents through the life of a single young lady who chose to see her core and live differently because of it.  It was the most remarkable thing I have ever seen.  A wretched and putrid life detested by those around her changing the very lives that had hated her, thereby leaving a legacy of life with those very lives.

 

An Errant Judgment

The rocks had dropped; one by one.  Each thud stirred a slight wisp of talcum-like dust that quickly settled.  With it, a slight wisp of hope and of life spun gentle eddies in her heart.  Garbled whispering rose from the gathered cluster of angered religious leaders.  Cutting glances rendered razor sharp with hatred were slung across the courtyard toward her.  Righteous indignation wrapped itself like a robe around pious bodies.  And then, a slow dispersing of those gathered in their robes and finery with the old leaving first.  The sound of feet on departing gravel built and then gradually lessened as the courtyard was emptied. 

Soon silence drifted in, leaving the scene littered still with lifeless rocks that attest to hatred halted and judgment deferred.  All that was left was a prostitute and the Son of God.  What remained was a broken woman human groveling in the acidic guilt of promiscuity . . . and Jesus.  Wholeness and hollowness stood one on one.

Half naked, the hours had been truncated with deception, discovery, detainment and deliberation.  Deep in an illicit sexual embrace, eyes were watching it all happen, peering past slightly parted curtains.  A door stood ajar.  Shooing away curious passer-byers, they collected visual evidence as to the unfolding offense under the guise of a righteous action while hiding the feeding of their own sensate passion by vicariously engaging in the heat of passion themselves.  The trap was sprung.  She was seized, a few loose garments were thrown around her naked body, heckles of debauchery were hurled at her and she was dragged away.  Her partner somehow vanished as his purpose was fulfilled.

The religious leaders had now departed.  Jesus slowly stood.  His eyes, contemplative and soft, shifted from the marks scrawled in the dirt and were drawn across the empty courtyard.  It is painful that people condemn in others that which they cannot accept in themselves.  That somehow the act of condemning it in others supposedly frees them from that very same thing in themselves.  They had in some way proven themselves invincible to whatever they were confronting because they had identified it and confronted in it another.  In doing so, they somehow viewed themselves as insulated from that same thing.

In the oddity of facing our own filth, judging is most often not a necessary action, but an action initiated out of the fear that those judging might themselves engage in such horrific actions.  Judging is too often a self-centered act designed to free the one judging from the belief that they will ever be consumed or controlled by that which they are judging.  The sense of love that one might possess for another human being had succumbed to the fear of what oneself might actually do and the narcissism of self-preservation that arises out of that fear.  It had all resulted in their judgment of this woman.  The rocks that littered the court yard yelled it loudly long after those who had dropped them had exited.  

Jesus drew a slight breath, paused and then turned.  Before Him there now knelt a scathingly hollow human being.  Few turn to the profession of prostitution unless there is wounding emptiness.  There are few people in life who are so relentlessly hollow and hold such an unyielding self-hatred as those who ply her trade.  She had likely arrived at this moment in time hollow and empty; in desperate need of a touch, of some slight affirmation.  Receiving even a morsel of someone’s heart and life might have been just enough to pull her up and out of the life that she lived.  Empathy instead of judgment; compassion instead of condemnation; love instead of legalism; someone who might look just a bit farther beyond the putrid exterior to see the wounded and bleeding person inside. 

Men had used her, violating her for a few scant coins.  They saw her only as an object upon which to release their sexual tensions and live out their distorted fantasies.  They had been unwilling to see the person who died a little more after each illicit rendezvous.  They didn’t care to see.  They had judged her too, but they judged her differently.  They had judged how she might be used by them and how the assets she possessed could be abducted in the vandalism of another human being.

Then there was the disgust of other men that was thrown out in taunts and heckling as she made her way through tight streets.  Vendors refused to sell her goods.  Still other men wanted to stone her, to kill her; to rid the world of her without understanding why she was who she was.  All of them rendered their sordid judgments, each colored by their place of proximity and point of orientation to her life.  It was the very same thing I had done to Susan.

Yet, here was a very different kind of man, the kind of man I would like to be.  His example prompts and prods me to grapple with my inadequacies rather than judging those in the lives of others.  His example convinces me that something human resides in even the most destitute of persons and that I must be diligent in seeking it out even when I can’t see it.  I must do these things so that I might do the same as He did.

Jesus had no need to judge.  He did not need to judge her to feel insulated against her atrocities.  He had no need to elevate Himself over her to feel safe from that which had destroyed her.  He was not concerned with advancing Himself or His interests at her expense.  He simply saw her humanity, He protected it, and then He allowed it to be released rather than condemned by the rendering some sort of self-serving judgment. 

He stood in the breech and turned the condemnation away.  ”’Woman, where are they?  Has no one condemned you?’” (John 8:10), he said to her.  A life of condemnation was suddenly still and hauntingly absent; she was entirely free of the condemnation that had satiated her life and shackled her heart.  It was an odd and alien experience for her.  She was no longer suppressed by the judgments of others that were designed to elevate them.  She was not sacrificed out of the need of someone else to feel superior.  She was not used so that someone else was satisfied in the using.  She was freed to be different and to do different.

Often God intervenes in ways that are outside of our realm of experience.  Often the very thing we need, we cannot conceptualize.  But it is these very things Jesus brings to us.  And in the perfect freedom of the moment that Jesus brings we find ourselves frozen.  She was frozen and unable to look up.  Her silence makes it clear.  This man had turned away the wrath that had followed her all her life.  The stones of judgment lay still in the dust.  Their voices had been muted and she had no idea what to do in a relationship where she would not be judged.

Caught in the void, she attempted to somehow acclimate to what had happened.  She floundered in the freedom because freedom is the place where judgment is absent.  She was free to be who it is she truly was without the proclaimed judgments of others forcing her to remain who she was.  She stammered with the words forming in the midst of mental groping and said, “‘No one, sir’” (John 8:11, NIV).  It was just the two of them.  Face to face with this man; alone in the courtyard of her life.

 

Our Courtyards

“‘Then neither do I condemn you.  Go now and leave your life of sin’” (John 8:11, NIV).  It is not about judgment or punishment.  There was no recitation of sins.  No lengthy exposé on the spiritual and psychological implications of sexual sin.  There was no need.  All that stuff was clear.  It was known.  Her choices were not the point of discourse for they were only the manifestation of pain, not the pain itself.  The lacerated core of this woman that had been heartlessly bludgeoned by so many others is what defined her.  Not the outward appearances as they are only a product of those wounds.  Not the manifestation of behaviors that are a part of all of that as well.  Not her acts of sexual promiscuity.  But the terrified and bloodied inner self that intentionally repulses all others at all costs so that wounded self will not incur further damage. 

It’s about refusing to judge as judgment only sentences others to that which we’re judging them for.  Rather, we need to take a wholly different tact and attempt to see past the behavior to the person behind the behavior so that we can release them from the wounds that so bind them.

Likewise, I have stood in many of my life’s own courtyards.  There, in those places, inherent in me is the fundamental knowledge regarding my own nature and the manifest actions of that nature.  I often pretend that to not be the case, rummaging forward through the accumulated filth of my life pretending not to know the reason for its accumulation.  Playing dumb.  Feigning ignorance.  Judging others ruthlessly so that I think myself superior and insulated from being what they are, thereby escaping accountability and the possibility of their fate.  But I know.  I know full well.

But, those that condemn me have departed.  The rightful punishment that I deserve is suspended.  Justice as I perceive it has been placated and postponed.  All that should be happening to me is not.  And in the absence of judgment is freedom.  God renders all judgment void because the cross consumes it all and renders it all as all gone.  The distractions, demands and declarations of the world as it rails against my sin is rendered silent.  Any judgments are unable to shackle me to my sin because all judgment has been suspended.  Everything that would give me pause to defend defenseless actions is absent for there is no judgment against which I must defend myself.  Every voice that would legitimately and rightly describe the repercussions of my behaviors have fallen silent.  Justice is suspended in silence.  And it is only God; my sin and God and the freedom to be different.

 

A Choice Freed from Judgment

What was her choice after Jesus turned and left?   She stood there, aghast and in paralysis.  The sunrise would likewise dawn an entirely new day for her.  In the months and years ahead she would wash Jesus’ feet with her tears.  She would attend to Him; push through the crowds that hailed Him and then condemned Him; follow Him through the pressing mobs and winding streets of Jerusalem to Golgotha.  She would endure the eternity that seemed those three and a half hours on the cross.  She would watch Him die, wait through that Saturday with angst indescribable, and be the first in all of time to see Him risen.  Her life would be radically new in ways incomprehensible to her, being wrenched out of the bed of prostitution and propelled to partnership with the Messiah.  All because Someone refused to bind her with His judgments and instead, sought her freedom.

 

The End Product

The bus had rumbled up the long gravel road of the camp, dust and diesel leaving a path attesting to its journey.  The dust and diesel was now dissipating and thinning in a slight summer breeze.  Clusters of birds raised a cacophony of song in the dense foliage of the surrounding woods.  Golden sunshine rained from a generous sky of blue.  Hundreds of sunburnt campers with suitcases, duffle bags and rich memories gathered in clusters around a myriad of cars, busses and vans that inundated the parking lot.  In the departing mayhem there was a tug on my shoulder.  A transformed face greeted me.  This was not the girl that came off this same bus six days ago. Instantly I was in the grip of hug dripping with the love of a grateful heart.  Long and rich, the hug was one of life and living.  In the midst of the embrace, she whispered, “thanks so much.  I’ll never be the same again.”

Her bus rolled off down that driveway, leaving a trail of dust and diesel as it had when it had arrived.  On board was a miracle.  God had gotten to the core of her courtyard and suspended judgment.  There she seized the second chance.  And it changed her forever.

 

Pondering Point

We judge based on externals.  It’s easy that way.  There is no expenditure of energy attempting to ascertain that which we cannot see.  Seizing and evaluating the obvious is easy, convenient and simple.  It allows us to render rapid judgment and avoid encountering a life at the core of that life.  It’s cheap living that is superficial and thin.  We do the same with ourselves.  We are distant from our own cores.  That however, is where Jesus meets us.  Here, at the core of our courtyards we are afforded two things.  Genuine repentance centered in the acknowledgment of our core, and then the chance to do something radically different; a wild departure into the fullness of life and the fullness of God.

 

 

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.

Podcast Short: You Are Silent Now -Remembering the Sacrifices

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. 

To Change a Nation - It Begins With Me

How do we change a nation?  We might start by changing ourselves first.  Change begins with us.  We know that, but we also doubt that changing us changes much of anything else except us.  How far does that kind of change go?  Does it really have a broad sweep and a wide impact?  Does it really count all that much?  In the scope of history, much less the scope of this single day, will it matter?  Will it really matter?

Don't underestimate the power of the one person that you are.  Don't.  Your life is staged to touch many lives.  The example that you live out, the principles that you exude, the words that you use, and the battles that you choose to fight or not choose to fight...all of this has an impact.  All of it.  It is said that one life touches six others in profound ways.  And those six others each touch six more.  And on it goes.  Do not think for a moment that the change you make and the life you live does not have impact.  And don't think that that impact doesn't outlive you, for it does and it will.  How do we change a nation?  Let's start by changing ourselves first. 

”In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life” - Part Four

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life"

I Was Thinking - To Think Outside the Box(s)

I was thinking.  And the more I thought, the more I realized that there is a whole lot to think about.  But in my thinking, I thought that most of our thinking (despite how much there is to think about) is really pretty standardized and chafingly rote.  We think in predetermined patterns and pre-existent templates that require no thinking, other than the commitment not to think.  We think in the way that others have chosen to think because they’ve already done the thinking, which relieves us of the need to do so.  We think we think, but the more I think about that, the less I think we think (if you know what I mean).  So, while there’s a whole lot to think about in this big, wide world of ours …we don’t. 

It seems that our thinking is constrained in a manner that there’s really not that much thinking going on at all.  Rather, more often than not our thinking is a tired process of monotonously gathering up a predictable handful of stale but safe thoughts.  And if we play with them long enough, we figure that maybe they’ll freshen up and something innovatively fragrant might actually emerge out of the rot.  If something actually does, we’re usually scared of whatever it is.  If it doesn’t (which is typically what happens) we become increasingly convinced beyond hope that life is actually as stale as we thought it was.    

 

Why?

Most of this appears to happen because we think within boxes that we randomly (and sometimes not so randomly) borrow.  We think within predetermined boxes because anything outside of those requires some innovation wherein we let the leash out a bit, let our thoughts find their legs, and let them run.  But we’ve discovered that sometimes that simply takes too much thought, far too much energy, and far, far too much courage, for it is much easier and much, much safer to just sit.  Or worse yet, we fear that once our thoughts have caught even the slightest whiff of a life running at full stride, they will forever refuse the short leash. 

What if our thinking were to open up fresh venues and pull back some hitherto hidden veil that suddenly revealed vast horizons that leaves ignorance no place to hide?  And what if the magnitude of such revelations is such that it handily crushes the complacency within which we’ve found so much comfort?  What if?  And out of the fear that such things might actually befall us, we peruse the stank back alleys of complacency, hastily borrowing boxes that we find deep in the darkened hovels of mediocrity.  And life becomes a journey lived within suffocating boxes rather than an adventure crafted of breathless horizons.

 

Our Box Collection:

The Box of Societal Norms

We think within the box of societal norms.  We grant these norms legitimacy because most of the people around us adhere to them in one form or another.  Because all these people adhere to them, we naturally grant these norms a morality, assuming that others would not dare embrace them if they weren’t sufficiently ethical or moral.  Therefore, (despite the terribly narrow nature of both the boxes and our logic), they are deemed acceptable.  To our relief, we quickly discover that if we think within these boxes we are far less likely to be met with rejection, or ridicule, or disdainful judgement, or some other rather distasteful response.  We desperately want to be in the good graces of those around us as that’s far more comfortable and far less dangerous than being in some other more adverse state of relationship with these people.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

The Box of the Mundane

We think within the well-worn boxes of the mundane as that path is quite well charted, rigorously predictable, and therefore void of anything dangerous because other people have figured out where all the dangerous stuff is and either removed it, or they’ve created paths around it.  We know that venturing off the path in life is ref with all sorts of calamity that’s just waiting to happen, and so in the box of the mundane there’s nothing to venture off on because there’s one and only one path.  It might be mundane, it might go nowhere, but it’s safe (if you happen to define ‘safe’ as refusing to live in order to effectively avoid being hurt).  In an increasingly busy world that’s careening in every conceivable direction, the box of the mundane allows us to perfectly function on autopilot since there’s only one path that we can walk.  Better yet, if we so choose we can simply sit along the side of this singular path, as this box generously allows us to somehow think (because we’re not) that sitting is a journey.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

The Box of Our Fears

We think within the box of our fears, as anything on the outside of those walls is filled with horrific danger (often of the most fabricated sort).  We’ve probably ventured out there a time or two, and when we did, we got hurt.  And so, when we were hurt, we put our pain on emotional steroids which exponentially magnified our fear.  We then took that fear and fashioned a monster that doesn’t exist, and we hunkered down in our box horrified by the fiction of it all.  And while the space out there is a whole lot bigger than the infinitesimally tiny space in here, at least it’s safe.  And safety (in our minds) is a decent trade-off, so much so that we amply decorate the box and make it homey with the scant furnishings of justification, rationalization, denial and other carefully appointed excuses.  We settle into the scantily upholstered armchair of mediocrity and wile away our days pretending that we’re not pretending.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

The Box of Our Families

We think within the box created by our families as we engaged them growing up.  In many unhealthy families, their boxes were shaped by their own demons and assorted hobgoblins that they handed the reins of power over to.  Over time, they dutifully passed those onto us lock, stock and barrel.  Sometimes these families demand that family members stay within those boxes because, somehow, we will vanish into the dank darkness of another life, or be whisked off to parts unknown by friends, or fall headlong into a career if we dare step outside of them.  Other times, family members may prompt us to move outside of the box because they have come to recognize the life-sucking quality of the box.  Yet, while they prompt us to step out, they did not know how to do so themselves.  Therefore, we must do the most daring thing imaginable and think through exactly how in the world we’re going to do that.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

The Box of Self-Esteem

We think within the box crafted by our low self-esteems.  These are often the smallest of all boxes because we dare not create any room whatsoever for anyone else to come in lest they see how pathetically awful we really are.  Sitting in our confining hovel, we know full well that there’s great adventure and untapped possibilities outside of our boxes.  There’s a good chance that we studied it, or read about it, or on those better days taken a slight peek outside before slamming the door shut again.  In fact, knowing all of that is often the most difficult thing of all.  We know outside this box of ours there’s more life than we can wrap our solitary minds around.  We constantly hear the invitations to come out.  We can imagine adventure because we’ve imagined it so many times that we can almost touch it in our minds, which makes us think that somehow we’re touching the adventure out there (which in fact, we are not).  But we doubt our ability to function in it, or find a place in it, or seize it in the cultivation of our dreams, or much less survive it.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

I Was Thinking

I was thinking that there are a whole lot of boxes.  Lots and lots of them.  But I was also thinking that they are just boxes and nothing more.  A box is not a fortified prison with towering walls and tangled barbwire, even though we have come to see it as such.  It’s just a box and nothing more.  And as a box, it doesn’t hold us.  Rather, we hold it.  I don’t ‘think’ that we have the power to move beyond our boxes.  Rather, I ‘know’ that we do.  And when we realize that power and move beyond our boxes, the parameters of our lives will explode exponentially in a manner that we will be free to think about all the many things that this big, wide world of ours has to think about.  When we do, the role of thinking will finally destroy the rules of the box.  And when that happens, we will be genuinely free.  And when we’re free we won’t be imprisoned by the dark specter of endings.  Rather, we can embrace the majesty of our purpose, and we can run with the power of our calling.

And so, I think I really, really want to think outside the boxes.  So, I think I’ll start getting rid of them.  It might take some time.  I’m going to have to be honest about them and grieve what they’ve already stolen from me.  It might be scary (in fact, I know it will be).  I may wonder what in the world I’m doing at times.  People may wonder what I’m doing as they peer out from the cracks in their own boxes.  But to not get rid of the boxes is to rot away in a box.  And I know that that is not the life for me.  And might I say, I don’t think that’s the life for you either.  So, let’s begin the process of letting the role of thinking destroy the rules of the box.  And let’s be free.

”In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life” - Part Three

"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.

”In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life” - Part Two

"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. 

”In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life” - Part One

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life"

What I Want - The Frightening Call of Great Things

I want to be happy, but I don’t think I want to be satisfied; for satisfaction lures me into believing that happiness is found in reaching some point rather than realizing happiness is born of striving for those points.  I want to experience a resilient and wonderfully endearing sense of contentment that neatly threads itself through every part of my soul, but I don’t want that contentment to morph into the baser mentality of complacency.  I want to keep a weathered eye on every horizon, but I want to do more than just watch those horizons from some sorry distance.  Rather, I want to walk their ridges.  I don’t want to contemplate the taking of a journey.  Rather, I want to be contemplating a journey as I’m taking it.

I want to robustly celebrate the achievements and vigorously revel in the milestones in a manner completely worthy of them, but I never want to fall to the bane of mediocrity that would prompt me to see them as a terminus.  I want to develop a sturdy confidence born of the advances made, and I want to have that confidence perpetually reinforced by the successes achieved.  Yet, I pray that my failures will always serve to temper that confidence so that it never turns to rot in the form of arrogance.  And in further managing this tempered confidence, I never want it to be so strong that I errantly assume any challenge as too small to be worthy of my time.  I want to be happy, but I don’t think I want to be satisfied. 

For whatever reason I might do it and in whatever way I might do it, I never want to hand myself excuses to round the next summit instead of scaling it.  I never want to slothfully presume the ability to achieve a goal without holding myself accountable to actually getting on the track and running the race.  And I suppose worst of all, I never want to scan my assorted array of trophies, whether they be numerous or few, and in the scanning embrace some languid sense born of complacency that somehow it is done and that I can hang up my hat, when in reality life is never done and no hat is really ever hung.

 

Why Do I ‘Never Want’ to Do These Things?

Laziness is humanity domesticated to its own destruction.  Mediocrity is life pent up in the very iron-clad cages that we create out of the misguided notion that an ‘adventure’ is a product of those misty-eyed idealists who expend their lives chasing dreams too elusive to catch.  Therefore, we create dreams that we can cage so that they simply can’t elude us, and in their captivity we can manage them so that, God forbid, they never manage us.  And what we forget is that a dream caged is nothing more than an anemic, pasty-white wish that is always in the process of dying in whatever cage it happens to find itself.

 

We Are Made for More

We are made for more than all of that.  Our humanity yearns for the next adventure.  We desire lofty summits and distant finish lines that tax the whole of our energies in order to get us to them.  There is inherent within us this incessant sense that where ‘we are’ is not where ‘we’re going,’ and that to park it wherever we’re at is to start dying in that very place.  There is some fixed notion in our psyche and some insistent voice in our souls that will not be silenced and cannot be appeased by lesser agendas.  These call out despite the many ways we work to silence them, and in the calling out they call us out.

Sadly, in light of the calling, we too often surrender to fear and we sell-out to apathy.  We foolishly peddle our resources and pawn off our talents to lesser things so that we can hold up some small, pithy achievement to offset the gnawing guilt we experience over bypassing the greater achievements that were our calling before we were called away.  We can’t show up empty-handed, for that would work against our efforts to squelch the already suppressed voice of passion.  Yet, unless we set our sights on higher things we will always be empty-hearted, for blind obedience to fear and the steady ingestion of apathy leaves everything it touches empty.  And I would propose that emptiness of this sort is the bedfellow of death itself.

Therefore, we achieve something because we must.  And at times we dress up those ‘somethings’ so that they don’t look half bad.  But too often our achievements are an insidious effort to sedate our sense of passion and render it appeased.  They’re the anemic manifestation of our fears, a groveling by-product of our lackluster vision, and a response to the snide voice of mediocrity that herald’s ‘passion’ as the fool’s errand. 

Passion is not fooled, even though we are fooled by the belief that we somehow fooled it.  To numb passion is not to diminish its power.  Rather, it is to diminish our sense of its power.  In doing so we stepped down instead of stepping up.  We swapped mountains for back alleys, and dramatic vistas for fading fences.  And these realities create a grinding angst within us that will not be soothed by anything but heeding the call from which we’ve run.

 

What to Do?

Decide to Do Something

As obvious as it may sound, the first thing to do is decide to do something.  Without the decision to do something, anything and everything is only an idea.  An idea, regardless of how ingenious or bold changes nothing until it is birthed as a reality.  The greatest ideas will only tickle our imagination, but they won’t fire it until they’re released.  They will nudge us, but they won’t force us to jump.  They will call, but they won’t beg.

To do something is to decide to be disciplined.  It’s a decision to take a step rather than toy with ideas.  It is a choice to move from the non-committal ease of playing out various scenarios in our head, to grabbing one of them by the throat and acting on it.  It is not based on cost in stepping out, for the greatest cost of all is in not stepping out.  And it is the sad reality that most of our ideas die without ever having been birthed as realities because we choose to do everything but step.

 

Decide If You’re Going to be Brave

An idea as only an ‘idea’ and nothing more than an idea is safe.  As ideas and ideas only, they’re manageable.  They’re domesticated.  They’re leashed.  We hold them within the safe confines of our minds and our imaginations, toying with them as time permits and returning them to those confines when it does not.  But cut the reigns and turn an idea loose and it may not be as manageable and domesticated as we might like it to be.  So, are we brave enough for the ride that is certain to ensue?

An idea that is given legs is one of the most dangerous things imaginable, but it is also one of the most exciting things possible.  An idea running at full stride is wildly frightening in a manner that unleashes something that was never supposed to be leashed.  It is not about throwing caution to the wind as some might think.  Rather, it’s about stepping into the wind and being swept up by it while wisely holding caution as we do.  It’s about understanding that wisdom is not held hostage to safety.  Rather, wisdom is based on figuring out how we navigate dangerous things in a way that no longer renders them dangerous.  And as such, are we going to choose to be brave?

 

Decide How Important Comfort and Familiarity Are

Unleash your ideas and things will never be the same; guaranteed.  Things will change when great ideas are unleashed because they can’t help but change.  What ‘is’ will become the stuff of a history that will lay beyond our ability to ever reclaim again.  Our ideas are the stuff of the future.  They are never home in the present for the present is only the thing that launches them, not the thing that cultivates them.  If our lives have been expended in the acquisition of comfort and the cultivation of familiarity, our future is our ‘now’ and no idea can sufficiently grow in that.

While the degree of success rests on the magnitude of the idea being released, the greater degree to which it will be successful is the degree to which we unleash it.  And if we prefer familiarity and the comfort that it engenders, we might never truly let an idea loose, or we may well attempt to cram it back into the confines we released it from after we’ve unleashed it.  At best, the ideas are hamstrung.  At worst, they perish.   

 

Get the Resources

If you’ve decided that you want to do something, if you’re sufficiently brave to do it, and if you’re willing to forgo familiarity and comfort in the pursuit of it, then get the resources that you need to make it happen.  Real resources.  This is not about thin and pasty resources, nor is it about material that’s been worn thin.  It’s not about sugary-sweet notions or trite sayings that are fun and fanciful but are shallow and porous. 

Rather, this is about finding bold, honest, timely, daring, frank, deep and brisk material that will thrust you out beyond the confines you saw as the terminus of your dreams.  Find resources that are unforgiving in helping you grow, reliable in content, proven in substance, and thick with wisdom.  Learn from trusted people who have been there-and-back who have likewise taken other people there-and-back.  Grab these resources, let them grab you, and then rigorously apply them without delay or excuse.  When you do, you will start the process of placing yourself in a position to begin heeding the call of great things.

”In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life”

"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. 

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - The Power of Principles

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.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - The Power of Principle

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.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - God’s Arsenal

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.

Who Are You Giving Yourself Away To?

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?

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Ignoring Our Conscience

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  We ignore our conscience because we want to do what it says we shouldn’t.  But, we also ignore the consequences of ignoring it.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”

“Disabling your conscience is like disabling your smoke detector.  It doesn’t stop a fire.  It just leaves you ignorant of the fact that there is one.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Running After Stuff

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  We run after a lot of stuff.  Our time, our energy, our finances, and much of our lives are spent chasing stuff.  And when we catch that stuff, we typically find that it doesn’t do for us what we thought that it would do for us.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  

“The insanity of it all is that the search for that which will fill us incessantly drives us to pursue the very things that will empty us.  Yet, the greater insanity is to find ourselves utterly perishing in our emptiness and yet declaring to our dying day that the emptying was the filling.  And that is emptiness of the most chilling sort.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

Asking the Right Questions Verses Responding for the Wrong Reasons

Too often we don't take the time to really ask why we support what we're supporting.  We get swept up in some energizing movement, or we're utterly captivated by some cause.  Something feels inherently good and the premise that drives it appears sound.  We find that an army of people have raced to the forefront of this cause, or it's embraced as long overdue, or it appears right for the times.

But in all of that, do we ask the larger questions?  Do we ask if there is some underlying issue that's bigger than the cause that prompted it?  Is there more here than just the excitement of the moment or the rallying cry of the population?  Do we proceed with a wisdom that will solve the larger issues, or will we just perpetuate all of those by running amuck in lesser things?  Change is needed.  But if it is not thoughtful change, nothing will change.

The Path to Losing Our Freedom

Our freedoms are not a "right."  They are, in fact, a "privilege."  They are not ours to abuse.   Rather, they are ours to cherish.  But as we abuse these rights by demanding our right to them or exercising them in ways that will destroy these very freedoms, we forget that they are fragile.  Very fragile.  They are not permanent.  They are not guaranteed.  They will not stand under the weight of our misuse of them.  And if handled inappropriately or abused in one of the many ways that we abuse them, we may someday find ourselves without them.

We are a nation that is losing it's mooring.  We are blatantly rewriting our history and thoughtlessly discarding truth in some mad dash of ultimate destruction.  We are using our freedoms to destroy ourselves.  And I would think that that is the saddest use of these cherished and long-held freedoms that I can think of. 

 

 

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Freedom is Precious

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is:

“If I don’t passionately desire freedom for all of my fellowmen, it’s likely that I haven’t been sufficiently freed from my selfishness so that I might see their captivity.”

Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - We Need to Stop

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  We need to stop.  We need to put down our calendars, set our phones aside, strip ourselves of the voices incessantly clamoring for our attention and listen.  Just listen.  For life is not what we’re chasing.  It’s what we’re leaving behind in the chasing.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  

“Rich is the person who stops long enough to listen to a bird sing in the celebration of spring, peer into the deep blue of a drowsy summer sky, draw in the pungent aroma of fall’s leaves, and watch the listless kiss of a winter’s snow.  For in doing these you have witnessed that which money cannot purchase and man cannot create.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Fear or Faith

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.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Building Bridges or Barries

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  We build bridges or barriers.  If you think about it, everything that we do builds one or the other.  And the function of a bridge is quite different than the function of a barrier.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  

“Every decision will build a bridge or a barrier.  Therefore, what stands in front of you at this moment illustrates the decisions that you made on your way to this moment.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

Podcast Short: Am I Passionate for the Right Things?

Am I Passionate for the Right Things?

“In full uniform, the color guard marched by as part of the parade.  And as they did, he forced his horribly slumped and deeply aged body out of his worn wheelchair and stood to ram-rod attention.  He held a salute until the guard had passed, and then he feebly collapsed back into his wheelchair.  As I stared in ever-warming admiration, emblazoned across his hat I saw the words “WWII Veteran.”  And while I deeply admire his stirring passion for our country, I stood there wishing that my passion for the cause of Christ might someday be strong enough to lift me out of the many wheelchairs within which I sit.”

Am I passionate for the right things?  Not just passionate.  But passionate in the right way.  Sure, there’s a lot of voices out there.  There’s a lot of causes out there.  There’s a lot of yelling, and screaming, and arguing, and hostile behaviors, and noisy propaganda, and a bunch of edgy people on more than one rant advocating for these causes.  On top of that, the causes themselves shift depending upon the temperature of the culture, or the agenda of the people pulling long strings behind closed doors.  There are causes that represent the demands of a handful of people who find the foundations of their cause so ill-defined or fragile that constructive dialogue is replaced with destructive actions.  Greed is rampant.  Power-mongering runs wild.  Principles have been discarded because they impede the progressive thinking that end up resulting in regressive outcomes.  And in this mess and in the midst of all of this noise, am I passionate for the right things?

Consider this.  There are some things that are timeless.  There are some things that are woven into this existence that you can’t remove.  There are principles and ethics that are foundational.  You can try and remove them, but there’s a huge cost to that.  Civilizations throughout history have messed with them, or attempted to adjust them to suit a particular cause, or worked to rid their culture of them altogether.  And the outcomes are never good.  History will tell us that rather plainly, if we’re willing to be honest about history. 

And so, I want to be passionate about something that’s timeless, because I want it to live on beyond my life.  Something that this culture can reliably build on both today and tomorrow and for every tomorrow after that.  Something that’s certain to sustain my kids and grandkids and great-grandkids.  And nothing that we can create on our own will do that.  What we create is too weak, and too fragile, and too shallow, and too lackluster to do that.  That kind of stuff is only something that God can create. 

And so, it’s this God and what He created and principles that He built it all around, it’s that stuff that I choose to be passionate about.  Not man-made stuff because that doesn’t last.  Rather, it’s God-created stuff.  It’s the principles that shaped this existence at its core that I will surrender my passions to and be passionate about.  Because if I’m not passionate about that stuff, passion won’t matter because very shortly nothing will.

”LifeTalks” Thought for Life - Not As Helpless As We Think

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  Sometimes we feel helpless.  In the midst of tragedy, or painful losses, or devastating moments, we often feel that we are helpless to do anything other than standby and watch.  Yet is that really all that we can do?  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  

“Prayer inserts me into the middle of any battlefield regardless of how gruesome or bloodied.  And in the carnage of whatever that battle might be, it allows me to deliver a force greater than any raging on that field.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - An Existence Without God

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  It’s my sense that God doesn’t need me to speak to you.  He’s quite capable of doing that without me.  But there are times when I sense that He wants me to speak something of Him to you.  And this is one of those moments.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  

“I don’t always preach God, for His existence is obvious.  Rather, I preach what will happen to our existence if we deny His.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

Being a Lamp That’s Lit

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.

Uniqueness - Not as License

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.

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Darren and a Plastic Fish - The Size of Smallness

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.

Being a Lamp That’s Lit - Part Two

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.

Dealing With Grief and Loss - An Autumn’s Journey

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.

Being a Lamp That’s Lit - Part One

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.

Grief and Loss - Part Two

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.

Podcast Short: The Problem Is Not the Problem

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

ECA Ordination Message - The Magnitude Of the Message in the Need of the Moment

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.

Grief and Loss - Part One

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.

Podcast Short: What I Don’t Want to Hear

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.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Talk is Cheap

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.

Podcast Short: Is Anyone Listening?

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

There Is No God - Evidence to the Contrary

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.

Podcast Short: Good as the Enemy of the Best

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

A Noble Calling - A Noble Response

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.

Podcast Short: What Is Better...Really?

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.”  

To Think With Thought - Words of Wisdom in Difficult Times

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.  

Conscience or Convenience

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.

”LifeTalk’s Thought for Life - The Notion of God

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  The notion of God does not set well with some people.  Sadly, that notion was often shaped by people or situations or less than admirable agendas that did not reflect the true nature of this God.  And if we’re going to reject something, maybe we should reject it on its true merits, not those that have been imposed upon it.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  

“I can staunchly reject the notion that I was created to live in relationship with God.  But should I do that, I will be unable to reject all of the consequences for which I was not created.”

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.