Struggles – Page 3 – A Work in Progress

Sometimes You Just Need to Bitch

It’s only been a week and I’m at defcon 4 frustration level with the recovery process. Hating this sling:

Hating my damn repaired shoulder:

Hating the fact that the damned Percocet works, but makes me feel sick and gross.

Hating the fact that the damned shoulder exercises hurt like a m————, but probably works pretty well, too.

Frustrated, tired, uncomfortable, with my shoulder buzzing like a cloud of hornets.

But.

I trust in You to make something of this. Something you can use. Something I can use. Something worthwhile. The dr was not kidding when he said the recovery process would be painful. It has been on several levels.

I guess feeling this way is just part of maintaining faith in a world where faith doesn’t make sense. Where I can sit on my couch at 0344 and bitch, when some really hard stuff is going on in the world.

But in the interest of full disclosure, God doesn’t always take stuff away. Sometimes you just have to get through the bad stuff, and take comfort in the fact that no matter what your level of conviction, inspiration, or faith, Isaiah 42:3 is still true and you will get through it. I’ll get through it.

a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.

So Begins Healing/Recovery

Made it through the first day, and I have to tell you it was a really strange experience. Just took my 2 am meds and now I’m sitting here in my anti-embolism “stockings,” boxers, and tank top with my arm in a “super sling.”

The surgery experience was strange. The operating room was freezing. I took about 3 breaths of the anasthetic and I was gone. I’m told Dr Peare did the arthroscopy and shaved off the bone spurs. Also a rotator cuff “cleanup” and had to stitch some tendon, which was 70% torn.

Waking up in the recovery room was not much fun. My throat was scratchy from the tube and my shoulder felt tight and under a lot of pressure. And it hurt like a bitch. Then the drain in my wound began doing its thing and that helped a lot. So did getting my wits about me again.

Through it all my wife has been nothing less than extraordinary, and the pain has been manageable, though intense at times. The meds help a lot with that, but keep me pretty high and sleepy. Jen has to dump the little bladder attached to my drain every few hours.

That’s about it. Can’t really do much of anything, but that’s ok. Working on getting BP down is the next thing. That will come, too. I know God and my family has my back. I’ll get through it ok.

For now, I’ve got a loaded iPod and plenty to read. Got 3 Rend Collective Experiment records to listen to, and so far the one I like best is Homemade Worship by Handmade People. They sound a bit like Mumford & Sons.

Gonna try to go back to sleep. Feeling blessed and reading to get to healing and rehabbing my shoulder.

For those that were and are praying, keep it up! It helps. Next target: rehab.

Thanks and God bless. I love my family and friends.

When My Son Taught Me About Love

Our small group went to a Ken Davis comedy concert last night, and it was pretty good. Davis was funny, but he also talked about being married, and having kids. Above that, though, he talked about sharing the Good News of Jesus with people, and he did it well. He talked about raising kids, and grandkids, and about how fast it went.

He’s right. We got home after the show, and I looked at the boys, and it seemed like yesterday I could pick David up by one foot, and cradle John in one arm like a football. Not anymore. All of a sudden, David is a pre-adolescent, and the size of some adults. John is a tough little 3 year old. Damn, it goes so fast. I’m up with John right now and I can’t stop looking at him, waiting to see if I’ll actually be able to witness his growth. And now I’m also sitting here thinking that it’s so interesting how much we learn about ourselves and about God from our kids. Happens to me all the time. I wrote this piece a few months ago, and I read over it again this morning. I have great kids.

This morning I was thinking about my kids again. Not unusual for a parent, I know, but what I was thinking was that sometimes I wish they would be like other kids. I wish they would obey better, and not get in so much trouble. I wish they would be quiet when I’m trying to do school work. I wish they would be kinder to each other, and not be so obsessed with things.

And just now, sitting here in an air conditioned building miles into the desert, I realized I am no different, so how can I expect them to be? If what I see in them is not Jesus, isn’t that because they don’t see Jesus in me?

When I see them being selfish, or fighting, or not respecting the wishes of their mother and I, how am I any different from that with God? Do I love them any less because of what I perceive as their flaws? Or course not, though sometimes I act like it.

There can be no condition to love, or it is not love.

Brennan Manning wrote that God loves us as we are, and not as we should be. For all intents and purposes, I am Jesus to my sons. In that I represent him to them. So when they mess up because of some bad decision. or break something, or act other than Godly, I need to forget about who I think they ought to be and just love them for the imperfect creations they are.

My two year old taught me something about that just yesterday, and it breaks my heart to think of it again. I gave him a bath yesterday, and I usually take off my shirt when I do that, because he splashes around like a hooked fish, and will kick his feet and say “I swimming, daddy!”

Swim time was over and I still hadn’t put my shirt back on. I was sitting on my bed and getting John dressed. He stood at the foot of my bed and I noticed he was looking at me funny. This is where I should mention I have some moderate to serious skin issues with psoriasis. When I am able to get some sun on it and remember to treat it with ointment, it isn’t so bad. When I forget, it looks like this (I am only posting these as a frame of reference for what comes next)

The top picture is on the side of my abdominal area, and the other is my right forearm. I have more on my calves and the other side of my abdomen. Consequently, I seldom take off my shirt in public. I hate the questions, and the looks. At first I thought John was giving me the look, which seemed strange because he’d seen my scars before.

What he did was just look for a moment, then slowly reach out his hand. He gently caressed each of my scars, and then leaned looked up at me and said “What’s that, Daddy? Owwies?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s daddy’s owwies.”

Then he leaned forward and kissed the scars on my sides and my arm. “All better,” he said. “Love you, daddy.”

That was what undid me. I covered my face for a minute so he wouldn’t see my tears, but then I just picked him up and held him. And I thought that he didn’t care that my skin was ugly and scarred. He just loved me, scars, bad skin and all.

As I was, and not as I should be.

So today, my resolution is this: just love the boys, scars, warts, and all. They are not perfect and they never will be.

Neither will I.

Strength in Weakness

There are sections of scripture that are troubling to me. Not because I don’t understand what the writer is trying to convey, but because I do–and it goes against everything I’ve learned over the course of my life. Take 2 Corinthians 12, for instance.

In verses 9-10, Paul talks about boasting in his weaknesses; even delighting in them. That was hard for me to understand, because I think it’s more natural to be ashamed of the ways we are weak. It’s hard for me to imagine feeling delight at my lifelong struggle against food addiction, the desire to binge drink, or my occasional struggles with lust (in the form of wanting to look at inappropriate things). Not that those are my only weaknesses: just what I struggle against most frequently.

Maybe what Paul is trying to say–according to my Life Application Study Bible–is that when we are strong in our abilities or resources, we are tempted to do God’s work on our own. That can lead to pride.

For me, that means if I was talking to someone about resisting the urge to empty a 12 pack or click on the wrong web site and saying that it was easy not to do it, or that I could resist because I was strong I would be full of what my son calls “peepoo.”

I am able (mostly) to resist these inclinations and others because God gives me that ability. Left to my own, I wouldn’t even try to resist. So if I accomplish something in spite of the things I struggle with, it means so much more. And only then am I strong.

It’s interesting how that works, because it shouldn’t. I guess God knows more of my strengths and affinities than I do. Where I see a weak pile of desire, addiction, and sin, God sees something else. And in spite of my own callow nature he is somehow able to use me, and my weaknesses.

That’s pretty amazing.

Egg the Fat Kid

I usually try not to respond to or write about things out of anger, but just this one time I’m going to make an exception. My friend Justine shared an article a little earlier that was about the CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch and why he “hates fat chicks.”

The article explains:

“He doesn’t want larger people shopping in his store, he wants thin and beautiful people,” Lewis said. “He doesn’t want his core customers to see people who aren’t as hot as them wearing his clothing. People who wear his clothing should feel like they’re one of the ‘cool kids.’”

It made me remember my high school years, when I was definitely not one of the cool kids. We were not well off at all, and my clothes were never designer, and sometimes not even new. It shouldn’t have mattered, but kids can be more cruel than the Marquis de Sade so it ended up kind of making things harder.

I was bussed from Santee to Grossmont high school, and I remember how crappy the kids from that neighborhood were to those of us who could not afford the trappings of wealth many of them could, and who didn’t look the way cool or attractive people were supposed to.

That was me for sure. Overweight by the in-crowd’s standards. Average-looking at best. Generic or used clothing, for the most part. The “fortunate” kids were always kind enough to let me know where I fit in the scheme of things.

There was one time in particular that stuck with me–well, two. The first was one day early in the school year. I remember getting on the bus and feeling like the clothes my sister had purchased me looked pretty good for a change, and my new Payless shoes looked just like Adidas. I thought it might make a difference.

I remember one kid when I got off deliberately stepping on my shoes and making them dirty, while another berated the “Kmart specials” I was wearing. I was utterly humiliated.

The other time I was getting out of my car at the Parkway Bowl theater about a year after my mom died and I was wearing this rugby shirt I liked a lot and a pair of actual Levi’s I’d purchased myself. A carload of high school boys (football players, by their jackets) drove up and yelled “egg the fat kid,” which they proceeded to do. Thankfully, their aim was much worse than their probably beer-impaired judgment, and they only hit me once, right on the chest of my rugby shirt.

Egg the fat kid, indeed.

So when I read that article Justine posted, it made me think of the careless cruelty of my peers when I was the age of many potential A & F customers. I so wanted what they had, because I thought I’d fit in. Maybe even get popular friends.

The friends I did have had nothing to do with how I dressed or the how much weight I carried. They still don’t. Maybe that’s why I never really cared much for brand clothes as an adult.

It might be worth adding that by all accounts, the A & F CEO is supposedly a bit of a troll in addition to his PhD in douchebaggery. It seems evident he is attempting to make up for whatever he feels he missed out on in his youth.

He’s going to fail, and no matter how expensive the clothes are he wears, in his heart he will always be the fat kid, or the poor kid, or the kid with buck teeth. There is only one way to find healing for those kind of wounds, and it is not through wanton buying sprees and callow and superficial attitudes toward people who don’t meet some arbitrary fashion standard.

If it weren’t for Jesus, I would still be trying to meet those standards and trying to please people who didn’t like me for who I was, and would never love me for who I wasn’t. It was and remains ridiculous.

I’m writing this on my phone and I can’t see all the stuff I’ve written further up, so let me just say in conclusion that I have never been in an A & F store, and thanks to this article, I never plan to be. it sounds like I wouldn’t be welcome anyway.

This CEO (who shall not be name dropped by me) can go take a flying uh…leap at a rolling doughnut.

On Marriage and Sanctity

Just finished reading an article about Starbucks and their vocal and financial support of gay marriage.

Something occurred to me just now: you hear people speak about this issue all the time, and those against it often mention that legalizing gay marriage threatens the sanctity of the institution itself. Does it, though?

If two men or two women were able to marry each other, would it make me any less married to Jenny? Of course not.

Would they actually be married, though?

It depends on what you believe. If you believe it’s simply the law’s recognition of the institution of marriage that legitimizes it, then making gay marriage legal is really simple.

If you believe that marriage was created and defined by God then the whole debate gets a little more complicated. For me, I do not personally feel my marriage threatened by whether or not those two fabulous guys down the street can tie the proverbial knot. I just don’t.

The problem arises, I think, when the possibility of Churches or individuals who perform (or can perform) wedding ceremonies, and who do not believe gay marriage is solely legitimized by the law are compelled by that same law to perform that which their faith and their God tells them is not legitimate at all.

I think that is a real possibility, and if it happens would be an affront to the religious freedom promised by the constitution of the United States, which was meant to protect states from favoring one religion over another.

So if we, based on law alone, attempt to force people to comply with the viewpoint of secularism over Christianity, or Islam, or Judaism (none of which recognize gay marriage), we are favoring one religion over another, because secularism taken to that level is very much like a religion. Even worse, we are denying the constitutional rights of Americans.

Here’s the other thing I was thinking about: what if what threatens the sanctity of marriage isn’t gay marriage at all?

Think about it. People cohabitate for many years and often do not marry. Society accepts that, and it is now very much the norm. Men and women also frequently approach marriage like they would contract negotiations for a house or car, and it’s no wonder there’s a 50% divorce rate. What else should we expect with such low expectations.

I think what threatens the sanctity of marriage is making marriage about law and only law, leaving sanctification out of it completely (sanctification = holiness). Soon, we will simply specify a desired term of marriage, sign a contract, and that will be that.

Marriages will fail, or never happen at all. Kids will grow up with single mothers (a single mother, by the way, is a noble thing, but they were never meant to shoulder that burden alone), and never have any idea what marriages are meant to be and can be.

I think the sanctity of marriage is also threatened when we make it a business or political interaction and not a covenant.

Should gay people be allowed to legally marry? The law will decide that soon enough, and it won’t be the death knell of the church at all. What it will be is a symptom of the decline of freedom, and the further separation of “church” from “state,” which is really sort of false.

It’s false because as I mentioned before, secularism has become very much like a “modern” religion (or anti-religion) and is being used like a cudgel to beat down those who do not agree with its precepts.

If you don’t conform to the secular status quo, then you’re a relic of a time not fondly missed. Or maybe just a “hater.”

Let Me Sow Love

I should be doing homework right now. I have to read this Ezra pound thing and write about it. I have a book I want to finish, and the other day I made a new character on Star Wars, the Old Republic I want to play more.

Right now, I can’t do any of that. I can’t think about doing any of that. I went literally from my knees to this chair in my hotel room and all I can think about is that Huffington Post thing I posted earlier about the prayer of St Francis–that ball started rolling last week when I watched this:

If you have a little over an hour to watch that video, I promise you, you will not regret it. Anyway, the shirt Nick is wearing in this video had the words “where there is hatred, let me sow love” across the chest. I hadn’t heard that before, and I wanted to know where it came from.

It’s from something called “The Prayer of St Francis,” which as the Huffpost article pointed out, was probably not written by St Francis, though he certainly lived his life in such a way he exemplified it. Before I go any further, here it is:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
And it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
Amen.

So I was sitting here at this little desk in my hotel room and I was just idly looking at the Ezra Pound piece and I felt the uncontrollable compulsion to spend some time talking to God. It wasn’t really a question of whether or not I wanted to or if I had something I’d rather be doing, it was more like

nownownownownownownownownownownow…………………

So that’s what I did. At the end of that time the words of the Prayer of St Francis came to me again, and they seemed to me more valid than ever, and an aspiration each believer should hold dear:

make me an instrument of your piece.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

Not the whole prayer, just those two lines.

Is that for me, God? I asked myself that as I returned to my chair and opened up this window.

How can I be an instrument?

How can I be used in the furtherance of your kingdom? I am not an apologist. I am not a pastor? I haven’t been to seminary.

I’m just a man. I’m a man that sometimes doubts, and occasionally goes for days without reading his bible. I lapse into old thought patterns and old sin patterns. I swear more than I should. I misuse my gifts.

How can I be an instrument? Don’t you have someone more qualified? Someone who knows what to say to people and what to do?

Where is there hatred that I can do anything about?

God showed me my own family. Sometimes the people I work with. Sometimes even the people I worship with. Yes, even them. Just because people go to church doesn’t mean they cease to have the same problems everyone else does, and respond to others while they’re deeply in the throes of them in a way which is often less than faithful.

How do I sow love? I love these people (love as a verb, that is). I love them in spite of their wrongs, real or perceived. I love them even if I don’t want to. I love them like God would love them.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…

Now I find myself in the position of beginning a task I am not comfortable with. It doesn’t matter that I feel there are other things I have to do. It doesn’t matter that I feel there are other things I am better or more skilled at than sharing love–sowing love–with others, others who need it most. Oswald Chambers says God cares not at all for our natural proclivities, and I think he is absolutely right. God doesn’t care what we’re good at, though he does bless us with talents. I think what Chambers is trying to say is that God doesn’t care if we think we’re good at something. He can and will still use us.

I can say I’m not good at talking to people about Christ. I can believe I’m not good at talking to people about Christ. I might not even be good at evangelizing people in the way others are.

Yet to deny that God can use me and use my story in spite of my shortcomings is to deny God himself.

Tonight I was given a glimpse of the task ahead, and it is daunting. I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know how to do it. All I can think of to do right now is to pray these words, and trust God to supply everything else.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love…

My Northern Adventure

The first couple of days here were the worst. When we landed in Fairbanks it was -30ish Fahrenheit, and it was like nothing I’ve ever felt. We were as prepared as we could be, but there’s only so much you can do when it’s that cold. It’s colder than the inside of your freezer, colder than anything you can imagine. When we got up the next morning and were getting ready to leave the hotel in Fairbanks, we found out what happens to hot coffee in -40 degree temperatures:

It freezes before it hits the ground–it turns to vapor when it hits the cold air all spread out. It was amazing.

The other thing was the air itself. It’s so cold, breathing is…different. It feels strange to breathe; the air is that cold. It didn’t quite hurt, but if you had any moisture at all in your nasal passages you could feel it freeze, and that’s a really strange sensation. You wear a face mask because of the cold, and it gets ice crystals on it because of the moisture from your breath.

After those first couple days, it wasn’t so bad, temperature-wise. I think it was easier to acclimate to cold than it was to get used to the heat when I came to Yuma. I didn’t expect that at all. The other thing I did not expect was how beautiful everything was. My Goodness, I’d never seen anything like it, and probably never will again. It reminded me of the beginning part of the Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe–ice and snow everywhere. It was like being inside a snow globe, but infinitely colder. Just look at some of the things we saw. And this is only some–if you want to see more of the pictures, just look at my Facebook page.

I also went ice fishing, and that was way more fun than I expected. I got to use a giant auger to drill holes in a frozen lake, and I even caught a few fish, all about the size of this monster here:

I had a moose burger, too. One of the test officers here said her sister had killed it not to long before. It was really good. Nicely seasoned, and freshly barbecued. Awesome beans, too:

The thing I was most worried about was keeping myself together spiritually. I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to get to a church, and I was right. There was nothing nearby, and I didn’t want to drive around Delta Junction looking for one when it was all icy everywhere. Plus, I get lost going to the bathroom.

At first, it was really hard to maintain my spiritual discipline. We got up pretty early, so it was difficult to read or pray or journal early in the morning (much like it is at home). And I didn’t feel much like doing any of that when we got back to the hotel, either. So I mainly didn’t do anything in the way of devotional time.

Another problem was that one of my past…problems or…addictions as a single man was to look at certain types of things on the internet. I knew I’d be here with no one to hold me accountable but my own conscience, and that’s not really enough. So I messaged quite a bit with Zeb, and he mentioned this online MMO he played as a good way to kill time. I downloaded it and it pretty much did the trick. If I’m not watching a movie or doing homework on the computer, I’m usually playing Star Wars, the Old Republic. It’s pretty fun, even if I am not particularly good at it.

Still, I was having trouble reconnecting with God–and I fully knew the problem was me. God had not gone anywhere. Then there was this one day where someone had to stay with the test item while the soldiers went back for chow, and I told them I would do it. So it was that I was all by myself at this OP where there was nothing much around at all. I had a warmup room, so I was sitting in there on this little couch when I just started to pray, and ask God to show me something so that I could know he was there even if I wasn’t talking to him at that time. I needed to know that He was still God, was still on the throne. I hate that I got to that point, but it happened.

It wasn’t the first time, and it probably won’t be the last. So I prayed, and I listened to some worship music on my phone and then I got the sense I was supposed to go outside. It had just started snowing kind of softly, and it was about 2 degrees above zero. I looked around for a little bit and it just smacked me upside the head. God had not gone anywhere. He hadn’t moved at all. He was everywhere around me.

After that, things got better. Not perfect, because nothing is perfect. I just found a time and place where I could be alone with God for a little while when I got back from work. It wasn’t first fruits, but it was all kinds of better from what it had been.

The main struggle then was just missing these people:

I’m usually able to speak to Jen and the boys maybe once or twice a day. John called me this morning, as a matter of fact. Jenny said he grabs her phone and says “call daddy.”

Man, I can’t wait until next weekend. I miss them so dang much.

The thing I’ll most take away from this place isn’t the pay check, or the leftover per diem. It’s that one day at the OP when I realized that no matter where I was and no matter what was going on, God was still God, and always would be.

There’s no way I can look at those places–or even those images of them–and think they could have been made by anything but God.

A Prayer

Lord, I want so badly to sleep. I’m tired enough, but my mind is whirling like a light on a police car. The baby is asleep (finally), David is asleep and Jen is sleeping behind me right now.

I’m awake, though. I want my mind to quiet down, but Galatians 2:20 is on my mind

20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

and I am aware I need to ask your forgiveness anew, because dying to myself is no easy thing, not when I have to do it every day and my instinct is to live for myself.

I need to be forgiven, though, because it’s hard to forgive.

My discipleship is weak, and it needs to be strong. Forgive me my weakness and strengthen me.

Forgive me my impatience and quick frustration and speak your peace to my heart thirsty for it.

I’m thinking of this trip coming up for work and how easy it would be to slip into old patterns of thought and sin and addiction. But the thing is,

I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ living in me

and when I remember that, things make a little more sense.

But I still need your help, God, because like I said before, dying to myself is not easy. Not when I have this many shortcomings, and I feel like the 1st Lieutenant of sinners.

Forgive me my trespasses, and deliver me from evil.

And right now, God, Lord, Most High, I really just need one simple thing. Besides forgiveness, and deliverance, and strengthened discipleship, and so many other things, please just help me to sleep.

Tomorrow, well…today now, is coming really soon and there is much to do.

Stimulus and Response

When my older boy gets in trouble, he’ll go to any and all lengths to explain why it wasn’t his fault. He will happily throw anyone under the bus in order to divert any negative attention from himself. His mom and I are in the process of trying to teach him about responsibility (and accountability, for that matter).

What I’ve been thinking about lately is that so many people these days need to learn that lesson as well. God may well be creator, sustainer, beginning and end, but we have ultimate responsibility for our lives and the decisions we make.

We choose direction in our lives by how we respond to the circumstances that occur in it, whether they are positive or negative.

Concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl says:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

I think that is so true. I would also say that how we respond affects the lives of others and not just our own.

Frankl also says

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

That is also true. The other day I told my son about something that happened at work a couple years ago that very much could have affected our future, and certainly my ability to provide for my family.

I was driving to a remote test site down a dirt road, and I was last in a group of four or five trucks. Consequently, I was eating a great deal of dust. There was no wind and the dust just hung in the air. Everyone was also going very fast, and the main group began to pull away from me.

It was then several things happened at once. I realized I couldn’t see the sides of the road. I hit some bad washboards in the surface of the road and began to fishtail. I attempted to correct, overcompensated, and veered offroad, flipping my truck over and destroying a government vehicle.

That was bad. Had I not been wearing a seat belt, it could have been much worse.

I had to go before a review board and account for what happened. I could have tried to avoid blame and responsibility by blaming all sorts of things and people, but something told me not to, and I just told the truth: I was speeding, even though I couldn’t see well. How could I deny it was my fault?

I told my son (and I firmly believe) that what saved my job was that I accepted responsibility for my actions. The stimulus was the accident. My response was to be honest, even though I knew the cost could be great.

I’ve also been trying to admit to my son when I make mistakes, and to apologize when that is what’s needed. I think one of the larger problems these days is so many people have forgotten how to do that.

Rather, people blame their circumstances for things that happen in their lives, or to excuse the things they do. They blame parents, or teachers, or friends. They blame anyone rather than say, “Yes, I did it. I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry, please forgive me.”

We usually do not ask for the negative things that happen in our lives. We don’t have any control over the people that do or say hurtful things, or sometimes literally do hurt us.

But between the stimulus of what happens and the response we make lies a space…

We get to choose our response. With honesty and the acceptance of personal responsibility lies growth. With blame and denial lies stagnancy.

I think that’s where we are now as a society, as a generation.

Our place in life may not be our fault, and sometimes that place truly sucks. Or it could be completely different. Maybe everything is great.

It’s how we respond to those circumstances that determines the true course of our lives.

Life can and often will be so tough. Mine was, at times. I believe what brought me through it to the place I am now is the millennia-old sacrifice of a Nazarene carpenter a world away from Arizona.

I didn’t know much about Jesus at the time I was going through certain things. Yet when he brought healing to the person I am now he also brought healing to the person I was then.

Or think about it like this:

The stimulus was God saw what the world was becoming and had become. It was a fallen and often Godless place, and it needed something to change or all would be lost.

The world needed a savior (and it still does).

God’s response was to send his son as propitiation for the world’s sin and brokenness–for its fallen nature. That response gives us freedom.

If we look at the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalves as stimulus, I wonder how we will choose to respond?

Would that affect our willingness to accept personal responsibility for our actions (and reactions)?

I believe it would.

What would happen if we admitted our wrongs, or gave thanks for our “rights?”

What would happen if we were able to say “Yes, I did it. I’m sorry, please forgive me?”

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1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31