Wednesday, May 12, 2010

My first REAL Date

Well, it was a great many moons ago now. Charity and I had been group dating a few times and I was brave enough to orchestrate a real date in which we met up in Mount Pleasant, MI watched a movie, and had dinner. Little did we know this would turn out to be the only thing we would call "dating" for the next 8 years of our relationship. I believe the film we wanted to see was going to start too late and I had to be back in town to be Jesus in our Easter Cantata practice. So we sat on the side of the road and made fun of the funny people walking by in the college town, which made us look more like hicks than anything else. Well, time came to pass and we were hungry so we took our extra money from not having watched a movie and went out to the Red Lobster. This too was the beginning of a beautiful trend of habits for us and our dating lives. I ordered one of my old fav's the fried shrimp combo with a double portion of the fried shrimp. Charity on the other hand had a full order of the shrimp linguine alfredo. I couldn't finish my meal, but to my surprise Charity put that alfredo away like it was water and she'd been walking in the desert for a week. This did not bother me, but like I said it was the beginning of long line of repeated favorite dates and she has yet to stop surprising me.

The Chase

Last night I dreamed of being chased. I wasn't quite sure what I was running from but I knew it when I saw it. I noticed a few different things while in this dream. The world was enslaved by fear. Everything they did was under strict control of what was chasing me. They knew me when they saw me, and yet they functioned as if I had nothing to do with them. Occasionally the dream would shift and I would try to perform my normal pastoral activities like having youth group or youth events in the area, but these were all under close watch and we were all careful about what was chasing us. We were careful in the sense that we were aware, but the chaser didn't come anywhere near our youth group. Instead it sent people who were still under his control, the slaves, to try to disrupt what we were trying to accomplish. Long story short the chaser caught me trying to get someone from among his slaves and soon I found myself fleeing for my life because I knew the truth. Right before I awoke I dove behind some brush to hide myself from the people searching the house I had ducked into. I no idea where I was running to, but like I said I was being chased because I knew the truth.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

The Failure Weapon

How often do we feel like failures? How often should we feel like failures? Is there ever an appropriate time to indulge in failure? The truth about failure is that we have this insatiable desire to be successful. For pastors like myself success is full of pressures. The pressure to convert millions of people, the pressure to fill seats on Sunday morning, the pressure to produce messages that will make people want to stand and applaud upon its conclusion. So the real question is not should we ever feel like failures when we have obviously failed to measure up, but should we redefine the ideaology of success?

Failure and success though antonyms by nature march hand in hand as a weapon of the enemy. Neither should be a problem for Christians, and yet we daily, moment by moment, measure ourselves by some misguided sense of success and failure. Most of our encounters with failure seem to revolve around our goals. Sometimes we don't even realize that a goal exists in our hearts until we missed it and we are stricken by the failure seizure.

The realization of failure is like an epileptic episode where the individual it seems is frozen in time. Now endowed with the innate ability to perceive the past with crystal clear vision, the consequences that are so often associated with failure also start to come into view. This moment of suspended animation is a moment of complete terror longing for the chance to make it up and change the past in order to avoid the defeat and disappointement to come. Painful as it is, the failure seizure passes when reality strikes, goals are lost, and despair attacks full force. Failure is a weapon that the enemy uses to try to diminish self worth, and without self worth the indiviual is blinded from his or her purpose for living.

What we need to remember is that God knows we have already failed, it's how we were born. He also knows what needs to be done in order for us to defeat failure. So instead of us needing to be successful, He just takes all of our self worth, our goals, our dreams and puts them on his shoulders. He then holds out his hand and asks us if we would like him to carry our burdens. If we are ready to admit that we are failures He's ready to show us how to succeed.