My Story... (Part 1)

There is something that I love listening to: people's stories about themselves.  My Grandpa Bob loves telling stories about things that happened in his past and I will sit there in rapture visualizing the various scenes that he shares.  We all have stories.  I have a story too!  I thought that this week I'd share a part of my story (if I were to share the whole thing, we'd be here for quite a while... 😁).

I grew up with a single mother and one brother.  We lived in a one bedroom house and my mom had to sleep in the living room to give us all the space we need.  We went to church--often for both services Sunday morning.  My brother and I did many things there.  We were acolytes--cute young kids who lit the candles during the service; we went to Sunday school, Vacation Bible School, and other events held at the church; we were at church during meetings that our mom went to; and for a while we just hung out when my mom did some janitorial work.  I was baptized there and sung in the choir for kids.  They held many concerts there too, which were a mix of fun and boring ones.  It was at this church that I learned about going to church as part of religion.  Something that we do without thinking much about what it means in our lives. 

I had made surface relationships with people throughout the church but never learned that what we learned should really be applied to our personal lives.  I knew God, but nothing about the Trinity.  There was no real exploration of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the persons of God.  I learned here how to best seem like I was a "good boy."  It seemed that everyone thought that I was a good boy and treated me that way.  I seemed to like that best.  I could "know" people without really knowing them.

This was something that I learned to lean on as I grew up: I knew how to act like a good person but then could do whatever I wanted to on my own.  I wasn't a bad person, but I definitely made some bad choices that ended up hitting me later in life.  I'd lost my virginity and became addicted to pornography by the time I ended my freshman year at high school.  I'd given up my religion and spent time studying Wicca through the beginning of my sophomore year.

Things changed for me in later high school as well: I met Jesus Christ and gave my life to him during my sophomore year.  I'd been dumped by a girlfriend because she said she was looking for a Christian to be with and that made me question what it meant to someone to give up a great relationship (humble of me, right?) because of their beliefs in Christ.  That led me to some of my friends and their youth group.  Ultimately that led me to confess my belief in the fact that I was a sinner and needed the grace that Jesus provides to us through his crucifixion and the everlasting life provided through his resurrection.

My life opened up for me at this point.  I had taken all the mess and uncomfortableness my life had become filled with at this point and gave it over to Jesus.  I no longer needed to worry about being a "good boy" on the outside.  I no longer needed to worry about the consequences of my actions.  I had Jesus' forgiveness on my side.  I had a new view on my life and what it could possibly become.  I had started to find out more about the Trinity and what that might mean to me.  I had received relief and help in my life.  I knew that I had a God on my side that could and would help me to grow and change.  It felt supremely freeing to me.  I had begun to grow.

However, what I'd learned earlier in my life about looking like a "good boy" would still persist and come to make things look good in my life while I was still secretly dying too.  But more on that next time!  What I'd received here was a realization that there is a God in the world who loves us so much that he sacrificed his own life for us.

Difficult Endings: Death. How do I follow God through this?

My Grandma and Grandpa, years ago... :-)

Do you have anyone close to you?  Do you have anyone close to you that is also close to leaving this world?  Dying?  I do.  My grandmother.  Mom's mom.  Grandma.  She has been struggling with cancer for the last several years but has now reached the point where medicine cannot help her anymore.

I visited her yesterday and shared some very precious time with her.  She had been told a few days before by her oncologist that there was nothing left.  That news was so crushing to her.  Crushing for me too.  My Grandma is only a little while from the eternal.  I have been having a hard time normalizing that in my mind.

This woman is almost like a mother to me in my realm of people that I care about.  She's been there when times had been tough for me.  She's been a cheerleader for my best the whole way through.  She constantly asks me questions about what I am doing and what I am planning on doing.  Questions about how I think about this news story or that person in government.  Questions about my favorite sports teams.  She has promised me that if I ever needed physical help or finances that she and Grandpa would be there for me.  I have been able to trust her to be a safe person to listen to me.  And this wonderful woman is leaving now...

I have been thinking about my own needs coming up, and the needs of my family at home and my larger family.  I have been thinking about my Grandpa and how he might react.  The entire time I have been mulling over the future in my mind I have also been praying.  My wife has been awesome too because she knows how important Grandma is to me and she has blessed me.  But I have relied upon the strength that God gives me to make it through.  Heavily.  I cannot point to a scripture and say that "this Bible passage" helps me.  I do think about what I read in II Corinthians 4:16 which says, "So we do not give up.  Our physical body is becoming older and weaker, but our spirit inside us is made new every day." (NCV)  Paul writes about how all of us wear down over time.  Although I don't like that fact, I can trust it's true.  But our minds are made new by Christ's graceful gift to us.

So what have I been doing?  Something of everything to be honest.  I feel the desire to hide, to share, to pray, to cry, to shout in anger, to expect the worst, and to tremblingly hope.  She is still here and she still is my Grandma.  All I can do otherwise is trust and have faith that God knows what He is doing and will bring her home before too long.  Please pray for her and for those around her.

Sensational Easter Sunday!

He is risen!  He is risen indeed!

Wow!  I love Easter Sunday!  Especially this last service that we had at my church.  The pastors had worked really hard in preparing us these last several days.  It started with a very experiential Good Friday service where we looked at and felt several parts of communion and Jesus's "last days."  We left that night with no "promise" of an awesome Sunday.  As far as we were left, Jesus was dead.  Gone.  Buried.  Ended.  I was able to leave that service feeling a little bit of what the disciples felt: a loss of a great teacher, mentor,
and friend.  I was able to think of what that must have been like for them, which is not something I had been able to really accomplish before.

Then we came in on Sunday morning and that service picked up where the Good Friday service ended.  With a dead Jesus.  But we continued the story through how those nearest to Jesus were able to pick up hope person by person.  It was absolutely amazing to notice how Jesus went and visited with people personally and talked with them until they realized that Jesus was really
alive and was talking to them.  Not a big event, but lots of little ones that individually would have been absolutely spectacular!

That hit me right where I tend to hide.  When I hide, I do my best to isolate myself, put up a shield of "no one passes," and wait until I come out and hope everything has gone away.  I have been wrestling mightily with that character defect for a long time.  I have to intentionally release myself from that so that I can function as a more healthy individual.  So when I thought about the fact that Jesus came for all of us,  I realized I was adding the fact that he came for
me personally and individually as well.  Same thing for you too!

So, the next time that I think that I can hide from other people and God I have something to connect with and think about. I was not created to be alone.  Jesus died so that I wouldn't be alone.  He gives me grace so that myself wouldn't be alone.  He gives me his Love so that others wouldn't be alone either.  What a sensational Sunday!

14 “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert,[b] the Son of Man must also be lifted up. 15 So that everyone who believes can have eternal life in him.
16 “God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son so that whoever believes in him may not be lost, but have eternal life. 17 God did not send his Son into the world to judge the world guilty, but to save the world through him. 18 People who believe in God’s Son are not judged guilty. Those who do not believe have already been judged guilty, because they have not believed in God’s one and only Son. (John 3:14-18 NCV)

18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All power in heaven and on earth is given to me. 19 So go and make followers of all people in the world. Baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. 20 Teach them to obey everything that I have taught you, and I will be with you always, even until the end of this age. (Matthew 28:18-20 NCV)

 3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In God’s great mercy he has caused us to be born again into a living hope, because Jesus Christ rose from the dead.  (1 Peter 1:3)

 Amen!

"Good" Friday???

So its Easter week this week.  Yay!  I love the part where Jesus comes out of the tomb and...wait!  What is today?  Good Friday.  What happened on this day that we celebrate so much?  Christ's death.  How is the trial, humiliation, torture, and crucifixion of an innocent man to be considered, "good?"  How can we look at the great sacrifice of God in His son, Jesus Christ, and call that horrible day good?

When I think about acts like that, thoughts about the terrorism and the degradation of humankind involved in this act, I feel empty and lost.  Then, when I think that Christ willingly chose to do that for me I shudder and weep because of that cost.  When in the garden of Gethsemane he asked God to choose something else for him. Yet at the end of his prayer, he affirms that God's way is the best way.  Knowingly choosing an extremely painful death. Yet we call this act "good" on the Friday before Easter.

He endured an extremely painful torture session where they robed him as a "king" in jest and then beat him and whipped him.  He was forced to carry his (extremely heavy) cross from that place up to the top of Golgatha, being mocked and whipped along the way.  And he did this willingly!  He could have stopped it at any time and choose instead to be rescued by angels, but instead, he sacrificed himself to this awful scenario and kept enduring it for a reason greater than himself.  And yet we still call this act "good" on the Friday before Easter.

On the top of Golgotha (a name which means the place of the skulls), they nailed Jesus to the cross and lifted him up to hang there.  The weight of his body would be pulling down on the nails in his hands and feet, suffocating him as time wore on.  Yet he stayed there.  Suffering.  In tremendous pain.  Dying.  He was a man who had done no wrong in his entire life. He had lived a perfect life.  He should have been honored, not crucified.  Yet here he was, dying with guilty men.  The real good man being punished with sinners.  And we still call this day good.

It was on the cross that Jesus was finally able to cry out at the end of his life the words, "It is finished!"  His life was at its end.  His suffering on the Earth was finished.  His work to pay the price for all the sins that everyone else committed was finished.  He died shortly after saying those words.  They took him down from the cross and laid him in a tomb.  It was finished indeed.  And yet today, Christians all over the world celebrate the work that Jesus had done and call today, "Good Friday."  Why?

With Jesus's body lying in a tomb after having been tortured wrongly, he had paid the price for our sins.  For our mistakes.  I can hold on to freedom from all my sin because of his payment for me.  I am free because Jesus died for me!  You are free because Jesus died for you!  We can live lives free from shame because Jesus had paid the ultimate price for us.  And we did nothing to deserve it.  The acts themselves were terrible, but we are free because of them.  It is a very dark day, but for us, it is a good one.  That is why today is Good Friday.  Amen!

³ He was hated and rejected by people.
    He had much pain and suffering.
People would not even look at him.
    He was hated, and we didn’t even notice him.

⁴ But he took our suffering on him
    and felt our pain for us.
We saw his suffering
    and thought God was punishing him.
⁵ But he was wounded for the wrong we did;
    he was crushed for the evil we did.
The punishment, which made us well, was given to him,
    and we are healed because of his wounds.
⁶ We all have wandered away like sheep;
    each of us has gone his own way.
But the Lord has put on him the punishment
    for all the evil we have done.

⁷ He was beaten down and punished,
    but he didn’t say a word.
He was like a lamb being led to be killed.
    He was quiet, as a sheep is quiet while its wool is being cut;
    he never opened his mouth.
⁸ Men took him away roughly and unfairly.
    He died without children to continue his family.
He was put to death;
    he was punished for the sins of my people.
⁹ He was buried with wicked men,
    and he died with the rich.
He had done nothing wrong,
    and he had never lied.

¹⁰ But it was the Lord who decided
    to crush him and make him suffer.
    The Lord made his life a penalty offering,
but he will still see his descendants and live a long life.
    He will complete the things the Lord wants him to do.
¹¹ “After his soul suffers many things,
    he will see life and be satisfied.
My good servant will make many people right with God;
    he will carry away their sins.  (Isaiah 53:3-11 NCV)

Is Jesus really the only way to heaven?

Is Jesus really the only way to heaven?  How would I know?  What would convince me?  What about the other explanations out there?  There are a ton of explanations out there for how to get to heaven, and what that means to us.

This is something that humankind has thought about, argued for, and fought over since before we even were able to write.  From the polytheism of the Ancient Egyptians to the monotheism of the Israelites, to the whatever you want from the New Age movement, to the "There is no God" non-theism of secular thinking.  We are always asking the question of, "Where will we go in the future when we die?"  Whether we think we are going to float over a river in the afterlife and have to "pay the boatman" or just cease to exist, we all believe something.

Wait, we all believe something?  Yes, we do.  But what if I say that, "I don't believe that there is a god, or that I am not sure?  I don't believe in anything then, right?"  No.  The belief itself may not be a strong one, but whatever we would say is the answer is still a belief.  Even if it is, "I don't know." And belief is something that we have faith in–and faith, in the end, is our own choice.  We may have good reason to believe something, but at the end of the day, we still have to make a choice.  Even if the choice is to be unsure and "not choose" an answer.

So, what do I believe? I believe that Jesus was real and that what he taught was true.  Which then means that I believe in the scripture that presents Him, the Bible.  Which means then that I believe the whole Bible is true.  Which then means that I believe that God created the "everything" and that I follow Him.  Which also means that I believe Jesus died on the cross, was buried, and came back to life, so that He could send us His Holy Spirit and that we could be with him in heaven.

But, is Jesus the only way to heaven?

Jesus, himself, had said that he is the only way to heaven.  "Jesus answered, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life. The only way to the Father is through me.'" (John 14:6 NCV)*  Which I have heard many people state that if we believe Jesus is a trustworthy person, then we cannot just brush past what he said here.  I know that there are people out there who might say otherwise, but if I believe in Jesus, then I need to accept what He told us.  And others in the Bible agreed.  I found that the apostle Peter in Acts 4:12 says, "Jesus is the only One who can save people. No one else in the world is able to save us."  (NCV)*  The apostle John has written many books of the Bible, including the above quote (John 14:6).

So that is what I believe, but do I have any stories confirming my beliefs?  Yes, I do!  There have been many times in my life that I have felt God's hand upon me and my family.  There have been times where my family didn't have enough money to pay for food to eat or to keep the electricity on.  Yet, just at the right time, some Christian had brought us hope and just enough to get by with.  There have been multiple times where I truly believe that God saved me from death.  I also have seen Him working in my children as they have been learning about faith and Jesus.

So what does that really mean?  What am I saying when I believe in Jesus?  The truth is that believing in Jesus is more than just saying a prayer and thinking, "Okay, got that one taken care of!"  Believing in Jesus is actually developing a relationship with God.  Through prayer, reading scripture, celebrating with a group of fellow Christians, and doing works in response to the love I've experienced from God.  Does confessing my sin to Jesus and indicating a reliance on Him save me?  Instantaneously!  But also, I need to continue that relationship with Him.  Just like getting married means that I have a wife.  Just talking to her once per day or per week, (or longer...) and sharing my needs without listening to her just leads to a crappy self-centered relationship.  Who would want to live long-term with someone like that?  The same applies to our relationship with God.

This is not an "either-or" situation.  It is a "both-and" situation.  I need to pray for God's grace through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; AND declare my love for God through my actions in response to His love for me.

So, what do you believe and why?

Just remember that this coming Sunday is Easter... :-) 

*Scriptures found in a similar post, https://www.gotquestions.org/Jesus-only-way.html

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."

The Usual Suspects (1995) is a movie where the people who watched it, enjoyed it much more than the critics who rated it.  It's a whodunit that eventually reveals itself to be something different.  But the key line from this movie is "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."

Now putting the movie itself aside, this quote totally reminds me of C.S. Lewis and a book he wrote titled The Screwtape Letters.  This book is a series of letters sent from an "Uncle devil" to his nephew and gives him tips on how to lure people away from God.  At one point he said something very similar to his nephew, "Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves."  And he talks about the difference between now and other times lamenting the difference.

So what about me?  Do I believe there is "the devil" out there?  Do I believe in a force that opposes God and works against him?  Do I believe in demons and spirits that can infest a person, possess, or oppress them?  In short, yes I do.

Do I think that the devil is a red fleshed character with a tail and horns that laughs at and screws with people from a fiery hole somewhere?  Not really.  But I have experienced his workings in people as I have prayed for them.  I have felt his oppression in my own life.  I have experienced troubles and pains during times when God is working well in the area around me.  I have been distracted and caught up in meaningless squabbles during times when my focus needed to be with God.  I have prayed for others to be released from possession and oppression in the name of Jesus Christ and watched as they were freed.  I, myself, have been prayed for to receive protection from God.

So what do I do about it?  I trust in the Lord that His power is more magnificent and powerful and eternal than those who oppose Him.  I trust the Bible when it says that despite the current "battle" and where it is headed, God has already won the war.  I know that if I need protection I have brothers and sisters in Christ that can and do pray for me.  But I do not ignore the presence of those things that can pull me away from God.

'Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so God can heal you. When a believing person prays, great things happen. '  (James 5:16 NCV)

 'I can do all things through Christ, because he gives me strength.'  (Philippians 4:13 NCV)

'“I told you these things so that you can have peace in me. In this world you will have trouble, but be brave! I have defeated the world.”'  (John 16:33 NCV)

So, what about you?  What do you believe and why is that?  I have shared my experience but I would love to hear yours!  For or against, I believe we all have something to say.

"Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope." -- Princess Leia Organa

Do you recognize this?  Probably.  This is from a movie that I personally LOVE!  Star Wars, Ep 4.  Here Princess Leia is asking for help from Obi-Wan Kenobi for the situation of her planet and the revolution.  It is found with the help of Luke Skywalker who seems to be pretty handy with droids.

Ever feel that you are facing a situation that doesn't seem to have any answer that you can provide?  I know that I have.  Ever feel that there is nothing that you could do to change the situation, but you do not like where you are headed and desperately want out?  I have.  Have you wished that you owned a nice little droid named R2-D2?  I totally have.  😄  That little bot is so awesome and helps the team get out of so many different situations...

But I don't have a helpful R2-D2 rolling around my house.  I have to face problems with that kind of help.  I know that I used to be someone who would Google everything, look it up on YouTube, or find something in the library.  In fact, I still think of those answers first.  I have a personal thought system that makes me want to be "the man" and be the one with all of the answers.  I tremendously struggle asking others for help.  Which is fine if you are trying to build a new chair or paint a room.  But imagine making mistakes with another person.  You said something that was a lie, or misrepresented them, or talked about them behind their back.  I have done all three of those, and more too.  Now imagine facing that person who is asking you if that was true, and the only real answer you can give is, "Yes."  Further, imagine seeing the hurt you have caused them running through their face and all you can think is, "I hurt that person, there is nothing I can do to heal that, and I suck."  Been there.

What do you need here?  A friend that you can trust with deep, intimate ideas--like this conundrum.  I have found that I cannot face life's challenges and pains without someone else.  I can try on my own, and I sure have done that way too many times, but that usually ends up making the situation worse.  The truth though is that I have been most successful when I went to a friend and explained what went on and how I thought and felt about the whole situation.  It helps to have someone who loves you enough to hear your sins and still be there.  I am not specifically referring to a spouse, but they should be that kind of person too.  I am one who finds this kind of help difficult to find, but it is very much like Leia's cry out to Obi-Wan.

'Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so God can heal you. When a believing person prays, great things happen. '
James 5:16 (NCV)

Do you have an Obi-Wan in your life?  If not someone who can wield a light-saber, someone who can listen to you, love you and push back when they need to.  Someone who knows you and shares themselves with you in return.  Someone who will pray with you.  Someone who is a great friend.  If not, time to find an Obi-Wan.