What have I done to deserve this?

Money is tight all over.  People are being squeezed and pushed, often to the point of breaking.  There are a lot of people who are right now asking themselves what they have done to deserve the tough times they are enduring.  My family is no different.  The budget is tight and we are constantly trying to find new ways to trim it.  As of late, my motivation has changed though.  The truth is, that though our budget it tight, it also has a lot of fat that could be trimmed.  Fast food, coffees, ordering pizza when I don’t feel like cooking, grocery shopping without a list when I’m hungry etc. all contribute to spending more than I need to.   So while I have spent a lot of time in the past thinking about how touch and go our finances have been and asking what we had done to deserve our fate I am currently trying to change that perspective.

These days when I need a new ipod touch because my 4GB ipod mini is at least 3 years old and won’t hold all my media or I need those extra 10 minutes to sleep instead of packing my lunch, I am trying to ask why I feel that I deserve those little luxuries.  Can I justify them?  Sure.  Is it wrong to indulge them?  Probably not.  But do I need them?  No.  So when the budget is tight, and I’m wondering if I have enough to give some away, the answer has to be an unequivocal yes.

Consuming less is the most environmentally friendly thing we can do and what we do with our new-found excess can involve some of the most Christ-like decisions we could ever make.  However, I always have to remind myself that it is not about guilt.  It is about freedom from the things that so often own me.  When I start to feel guilty for every dime I spend, I know that I am trying to change too much too fast.  Like the rest of life, this is a process and it is about incrementally moving towards living the life I want to live as the person I want to be.

So let’s help each other.  Any suggestions on how to consume less?  I would love to hear them.  Here is a link to a cookbook that my mom has used for years and our family is going start using to try to reduce our grocery bills a bit:  more-with-less cookbook

NEW DEMO AND SITE GRAPHICS

I recorded a demo tonight. This song was written in the last week or so. Hope you like it. Here’s the link: mp3

Also, Seth re-worked some of the site graphics for me and added the new logo in. He is what you call talented. You should check out his wall vinyl and his photos. It is all really good art.

NEW DEMO: VICTORIOUS WARRIOR

I recorded a new demo the other night. The song has been around for a while but I have never recorded it before. Here are links for the audio and chords: mp3 pdf

I also posted it on my media page.

BIBLE VIEWING

I was at church the other week and our pastor said something about the bible that clarified some things I have been thinking about for a while. He said that there are two ways to look at scripture. You can either believe that the bible is the word of God or you can believe that the bible contains the word of God.

I believe that the bible is the word of God and accept all the messiness that doing so entails. I believe that God wants to communicate to us through the bible and because of this, He made sure that as it was recorded and subsequently copied and translated, no mistakes were made.

The reason that I cannot accept that the bible only contains the word of God is that a bible that contains some truth is as good to me as a bible that contains no truth at all. If the bible only contains some truth then the only tool I have for extracting that truth is my own intellect. This means that the God that I decipher from the book will only be as big as I can understand. I need a God that is bigger than I can comprehend or I need no God at all. After all, I already have someone as wise and powerful as me to trust my life to.

The truths that someone else chooses from the bible may also be different from the truths that I decided were really true. A careless (or worse still deviously careful) misinterpretation of a select subset of the truths could quite easily be made to say pretty much anything. Many of histories monsters have done just that. It would be quite possible for one person’s subconsciously agenda-laden interpretation to completely disagree with someone elses oppositely-skewed views. Two opposing viewpoints cannot both be true. How do we decide who has adopted the true theology?

The only way to have any hope of understanding the universal truth of the bible is to view each book, chapter, verse and even word as a part of the whole. When we come to a verse that we do not understand we can interpret it using many other passages on the same subject. In this way we can hope to understand what God’s overall message is on the subject at hand. Even using this technique we will all make many mistakes by failing to overcome our own bias or weaknesses. However, with the complete bible as our guide we have an unchanging foundation to return to and a basis for accountablity within our community. It is the only way that I can see for the bible to be an intelligible message from God and like many things with Him, it appears to be all or nothing.

HEAVEN HERE

I love singing lots of the old hymns but I always have problems with the verses that talk about arriving in heaven and putting on my crown so I can walk down to the gold-paved cul-de-sac and up to the door of my palatial mansion. It seems weird to me that Jesus told the rich man he had to sell everything he owned if wanted to get into heaven but when I get to heaven I’m going to be instantly rich. Jesus said that He came so that we might have life and have it abundantly (John 10:10). He also taught us to pray “Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). So if riches were a part of our spiritual destiny then it follows that He would want them to be part of our abundant life as we seek to bring His kingdom to earth.

Since Jesus was not excited about wealth nor did He spend any time pursuing it while He was in human form on earth then it follows that it is not an important component to our eternal joy. It also follows that whatever our eternal lives will look like is not beyond our comprehension or even experience now. Rather, the best or most real parts of our life now should give us glimpses and inklings of what heaven really is.

I believe that the meaning of life is to to be fully known and fully loved. On earth, my closest friends and especially my wife know me very well and still love me very deeply. In heaven I will be fully known and fully loved but it will not be a completely foreign experience for me. Instead, it will be the perfection of an experience that I am quite familiar with from the healthy relationships that I have had while alive. So my goal is not to hole up in a spiritual panic room and look forward to when my physical life is over so that my eternal life can begin but to truly seek to see His kingdom come here and now. Every time we choose to expose ourselves and share our lives with others we risk the pain of rejection but we also gain the potential for abundant (i.e. eternal) life here and now.

MARS HILL BIBLE CHURCH PODCAST

Rob Bell (of the Nooma videos) pastors Mars Hill Bible Church and their podcast is worth subscribing to. Rob’s teaching is great and when Rob is away the guest speakers are usually really good (Donald Miller, Brian McLaren and John Ortberg to name a few that I have listened to recently.) Here is a link to subscribe to the podcast if you want to check it out: http://www.marshill.org/teaching/pcast.php

THE END OF FAITH

‘Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. (I Cor. 13:12). Faith is often presented as the absence of doubt but by definition faith contains uncertainty. Doubt must be overcome by faith and without doubt, there can be no faith.

I John 3:2 says “…But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” So for now we use the strength of the faith we have been given to work at becoming more like Christ. When He returns, we will finish our transformation into His likeness. The strength for this final change will not come from some supernatural metamorphosis or a genetic switch that is flipped in our brains. Instead, the strength to become fully Christ-like will be drawn from the death of faith. Having seen God, there will be no more doubt as to His existence or His goodness so there will also no more faith. Knowing the full extent of His goodness will make the desire to be like Him stronger than the desire to be anything else.

Pulling these ideas together (most of which I have borrowed from people like C.S. Lewis and John Ortberg) has helped me to take it a little easier on myself when it comes to my doubts. It has helped me to see them not as personal weaknessess or fatal flaws in my faith but as the inevitable consequence of simply being human and a reminder of the goodness of what I believe is to come.

THE PRICE OF PEACE

Phillipians 4:7 “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” This verse gets thrown around a lot in Christian circles and for all the times I have heard it, I have never heard anyone talk about the price of that peace. In my experience it’s not cheap. Real peace can only be experienced in the presence of profound trust and trust, takes time and repeated testing to develop.

Before I would commit to buying our first house my wife and I had to trust that it was solid. To come to that place we have to go down to the darkest, dankest corner of the basement, past the cobwebs, spooky shadows and forgotten junk, and physically inspect the foundation. Our quest for peace is no different. To gain the level of trust in God necessary for unshakable peace we have to go down to the darkest corners of our life, the basements where all of the issues that could challenge, rattle or completely obliterate our faith live.

I believe that phillipians 4:7 peace is gained incrementally, and is not an all or none thing. As we go to the basement of each issue in our life we slowly begin to trust God with each one of them. It may take many trips that send us running for the stairs before we learn to be comfortable in those basements, with all our security blankets far from sight and mind.  It is a painfully humbling process but the peace is worth it. There are so many descents to be made it is daunting to think about but there have been a number of basements that I have come back from peacefully already and some more that I am tenatively visiting now. There will be still more that I am ready to face in a while and well…you get the idea.

RENEWING

We pick up a lot of labels in our lives and many of them are related to negative personality traits. He/She is angry, depressed, unmotivated, an addict, abusive etc. You get the idea. I was speaking to someone recently about some of my own weaknesses. She talked about learning to manage those weaknesses and how to compensate for them. It was very productive but felt incomplete somehow. Like a first step towards an unidentified destination.

The world does not believe that the mind can be renewed. It seems to believe that it is concrete that is poured, set, and then slowly deteriorated by the elements. Second Corinthians 3:18 say that we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. Romans 12:2 says that we are to no longer conform to the patterns of this world but to be transformed by the renewing of our mind.

So we are transformed from one degree of glory to another by the renewing of our mind. Jesus gives hope for something more than just a losing fight against the psychological and genetic elements. Constant movement forward towards Christ is our day-to-day journey and His image is our destination.

THE ASH HEAP

The Church is a bit of an ash heap. Jesus describes the Church as the bride of Christ, spotless and radiant. He must’ve known that we would drag her through the mud and sully her reputation but He made her His spotless bride anyways. He’s in the business of redeeming things and He says she is the hope of the world. I believe Him. So we all keep working to see Jesus’ Church alive and well inside the often beaurocratic religious institution of the church.

The ash heap is where we are ready to learn. The false comforts that create the illusion of self-sufficiency are finally pried from our hands and we are finally ready to receive something eternal from God. Job was always a man of faith but I’m willing to bet that even he didn’t know how unshakeable that faith really was or how fundamental it was to his character until he sat on the ash heap, scraping his sores with a piece of broken pottery. I have found this to be true in my life. Never easy, but true, and in the end it has always led to a better way to live.