Where is Your Joy Hiding?

So it's searchable:

When you're looking for joy, you will always find it hiding in your gratitude.

-- Ann Voskamp

Poverty of Spirit

It seems we must know a kind of poverty, in our spirit, in order to know God.  This may be true because it is one of the key ways we learn that we really are in need of him.  We often don't know this until we have experienced the dearth of our own ability to provide what we want for ourselves, without God.

It is an unavoidable path, not because of God, but because of us.  But the secret of it is that it reveals to us our deeper desires. We discover our true hope once we have exhausted all the other things we discover we are still hoping in.

We should, therefore, deeply respect periods of this kind of poverty within us, and within others.  It is not only of no good, but also unhelpful, to rush out of our experience of poverty.  Nor is it good to to hurry this process along in others.  We must be willing to wait, to yearn.

I am watching this process in a couple of people these days...it is difficult, but I am reminded about what it is that I am actually watching.  Like leaves turning color, I am seeing a slow changing, beautiful to behold.  Poverty is delivering them...and me!

If Necessary

Preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words.

-- St. Francis of Assisi

Give Thanks - For He Is Good

Thanksgiving:

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
    his love endures forever.
Cry out, “Save us, God our Savior;
    gather us and deliver us from the nations,
that we may give thanks to your holy name,
    and glory in your praise.”

-- 1 Chronicles 16:34

I am grateful today for the wealth of the Lord...I have been given much.  Cherished family, good friends, community, more comfort than I need or deserve, health, meaningful work...and much more, like these kinds of things, identified here by Linford Detweiler:

- Our accumulated memories and stories
- Our sometimes loneliness
- The gift of learning to be astonished
- The gift of learning that through our imperfect world runs a deep current of love that refuses to be contained or extinguished

Even more, I am thankful for the endless goodness of God. He was making a way for me and for those I love, even before I knew what I needed from him.  The glory of his ways is without measure...not only for salvation, but also for the beauty and joy of relationship with Him.

Thank you!

Move

Familiarity creates comfort. But comfort is often the enemy of improvement.

When the fear of moving is the only thing holding you back, move.

-- Jeff Haden

Doubt's Opportunity

Turn your doubt into curiosity.

It's not that doubt is a problem, though it certainly can be inconvenient (but, so can the things that create it!).  It's what we do with doubt that is important.

Youthful Sacrifice

Add to this that he was partly a young man of our time -- that is, honest by nature, demanding the truth, seeking it and believing in it, and in that belief demanding immediate participation in it with all the strength of his soul; demanding an immediate deed, with an unfailing desire to sacrifice everything for this deed, even life.  Although, unfortunately, these young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish -- such sacrifice is quite often almost beyond the strength of many of them.

-- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brother Karamazov

Free Forgiveness

The gospel is a doctrine that teaches a far higher matter than the wisdom, righteousness, and religion of the world; it teaches free forgiveness of sins through Christ.

-- Martin Luther

Pleasing God Is Not

Pleasing God is not a means to our godliness, it is the fruit of our godliness.  For it is the fruit of trust.

-- The Cure

Snowman!

Wow, Frosty is already here and well fed...and before Thanksgiving!

Only Constant

The only constant in life is change.

-- Heraclitus

Feedback

Customer feedback is great for telling you what you did wrong. It's terrible at telling you what you should do next.

-- Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote

Starts to Pay Attention

Research seems to show it takes seven to twelve points of contact before the receiver of your message starts to pay attention.

No One Really Cares

In reality no one really cares how we look...except us. 

So do this. Undress and stand in front of the mirror. (And don’t do the hip-turn shoulder-twist move to make your waist look slimmer and your shoulders broader.)

Take a good look. That’s who you are. Chances are you won't like what you see, but you'll probably also be surprised you don’t look as bad as you suspected.

Then, if you don’t like how you look, decide what you’re willing to do about it and start doing it. (Just don't ever compare yourself to other people; your only goal is to be a better version of the current you.)

Or, if you aren’t willing to do anything about how you look, that’s fine too. Move on. Let it go. Stop worrying about how you look. Stop wasting energy on something you don't care enough about to fix.

Either way, remember that while the only person who really cares how you look is you, many people care about the things you do.

Looking good is fun. Doing good makes you happy.

-- Jeff Haden

I Pray

I this pray for someone I love:

God, before all is said and done, I pray that you would find him.  I pray that he would find you.  I know the road won't be easy; it hasn't been for me.  But, I pray that in your great mercy, in his own way, and in your own time, that he would come to love you deeply.  Whenever that happens, I will be most grateful.  Between now and then, whether sooner or later, help me to represent what I can of you...for his sake.  Help me to realize that the work is really yours, not mine.  That the choice is really his, not mine.  Help me to be patient, willing to love over the period of time this will take...a lifetime even, just as it has been for me.

First Date

I Am Proud Of YOU

I am proud of YOU.

What goes through you head when you hear that?  If it is offered to someone else, is it something like, "Why doesn't anyone say that to me?"  And, if it is offered to me, is it something like, "Really?  Why, what did I do?"

We want it and don't expect it, at the same time.  And, we tie it to something that has been or should be done...in order to deserve it.  What happens when we think about it without attaching whether we deserve it or not?  Why is it that when we offer such a statement to someone else, we don't necessarily want to add the reason for it.  We express it, because it is true, like a parent to a child, not based on whether or not it was earned.  But, when we receive it, we feel the need to know...why?

I am proud of you communicates that I accept you, that I enjoy you...no strings attached.  And, I want you to know it, especially in a world that only offers it with the condition of continued performance.  That's not what I want.  Perhaps, that is why I am curious about the reason when it is offered to me.

It is both disorienting and relieving to hear such words of acceptance and pleasure from someone else.  Perhaps, God said it best when He said about His Son, "This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased." ...because he was doing a good job?  No, because He loved him so.

Like the beauty of this morning, with its snow flurries dancing in between me and the sun behind them, I want to offer my "I am proud of YOU" to someone I love today.

We Need Them

“They said this would be easy. But it’s not. Unexpected things happen that change everything. This is too hard for me.”

Sometimes our people look different than we imagine.
Sometimes they are only in our life for a train ride.
But we need them to get us through the unexpected.

Just before exiting the train, a businessman sensitive to her embarrassment gave her a wink:

“I didn’t see a thing, Beautiful.”

Continue...

What We Do Have

We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.

-- Frederick Keonig

Great Oxymoron

No one matures in bitterness.
No one gets free in isolation.
No one heals rehashing the testimonies of bad religion.
No one gets to love or be loved well in self protection.

Self-protection is one of the great oxymorons. We're the only person in the world we don't have the potential to protect. And once we hide from trusting God and others, we may become more enflamed, more self-justified, more calloused in repeating our blame.

-- The Cure

Reminds me of this passage:

“Your eyes are windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar. If you pull the blinds on your windows, what a dark life you will have!"

-- Jesus, Matthew 6: 22-23 (MSG)

Continue here with some further thoughts on trust from Donald Miller.

False Absolutes

Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.

-- Pope John Paul II

CT: God Is Not A Candy Machine

At the end of the day this is a mystery, and God is not a candy machine. We have to live with that.  If people are insisting on a system, they are misunderstanding God.

If God really invented the universe and created it out of nothing, my goodness, it’s like an ant arguing with a human. It reflects our inability to grasp the greatness of God. We demand a kind of pint-sized logic of him.


We demand a user-friendly God, and that’s simply not who he is. He created the galaxies. If he deigns to talk to you, ever, or do anything for you, ever, you should just be grateful and shut up. Don’t demand that he now has to do whatever you demand him to do. It really boils down to humility.

To certain questions the first thing we have to say is, I don’t know. It’s a profound mystery.

The Bible tells us we are supposed to pray, and it’s God’s business what he does with the prayer.  Continue....

-- Eric Metaxas, fron a CT interview about his new book, Miracles

Funk of Fear

So I'm up unusually early this Saturday morning.  I couldn't go back to sleep after a bit of an all-to-vivid dream.  It was about a combination natural-disaster in our area and the resulting chaos of failed law-and-order.  ...somehow I ended up fleeing Warsaw to Columbia City and everyone had knives or swords and was just running around stabbing people, as if to establish some kind of order to protect what they thought they would need to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.  Strange stuff...to be dreaming about.  But also, I suspect, a reality that lurks beneath the surface of our collective psyche.

The news from around the world does sink into us somewhere, despite our efforts to turn it off.  Our state-of-things is shockingly tenuous.  It wouldn't take much for us, here, to be in a similar state.  It wouldn't take much to send us all into a funk of fear.

I write this for 2 reasons.  One, it reminds me that there are a lot of dependencies in life, and not nearly as many independencies as I would like.  And two, ironically, it is in our dependencies that we have opportunity to find real life.  Such deep-rooted fears inside of us can break way for us to acknowledge that we are truly needy and humble people.  Life is mystery and we must learn to trust in our dependencies, rather than in the things we stay so busy at trying to protect ourselves.  This, actually, brings us to an unexpected kind of relief.  We have to trust something anyway.

The good news is that we have Someone who is trustworthy...even in a fearful world where we can't really trust much of anything or anyone.

Ordinary Love

We can't reach any higher
if we can't deal with ordinary love...

-- U2

...click image for video.

Attracts More

Feeling grateful or appreciative of someone or something in your life actually attracts more of the things that you appreciate and value into your life.

-- Christiane Northrup

Soul Quake

Sometimes you need a soul quake to find the fault lines in your life.

-- Ann Voskamp, A Holy Experience

Imagination

To our brains, safety is largely based on familiarity.

This works against us in many ways now. Most people fear or resist change, even when they aren’t aware of why. Even people who embrace change have a hard time in the midst of it. Imagination is a tool that lets us hack reality and reshape it to our vision. Imagination is often viewed as a solitary activity, but it is most powerful when a group of people can stand together behind a shared mission and make it real.  Continue...

-- Rita King

Cold Fall Morning

It was a beautiful start to an even better Fall day in Winona Lake yesterday!

Unchastity

If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins…. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

-- C.S. Lewis

Blood Oranges In The Snow

It could be the colder weather...or the fireplace fire last night...or all the shoes by our back-door from all the kids being home again with their friends.  Or, it could be that tender time of year we now embark on, where some of the things that matter most are more clearly in view.  Whatever it is, I'm ready for the new music above, from Over the Rhine; hoping it sinks into the deeper places and rests there like it usually does, awakening me again to myself and the goodness around me.

...click image to stream.