Grits

I do not claim any Southern heritage.
I spent a large majority of my childhood in Central Florida, which is geographically in the South but far from being a Southern place. Everybody there is from somewhere else.
When I was eight, we moved just south of Atlanta and I discovered for the first time that it is possible to go North to go South.
I was then bombarded with a plethora of foreign foods that I had never even heard of. The school lunch trays now had these fried balls of green grossness they called okra and hot sauce was served with every meal. I found onions and peppers in my corn bread and the only thing people drank was liquid diabetes in the form of sweet tea.
Over the years I have grown accustomed to everything I am served being deep fried and covered in salt but there is one southern food that I have never really been able to come to terms with: grits.

Jedi Knights of the Public Restroom

It is no secret that I like Star Wars. A lot.
I do not remember a time in my life where being a Jedi Knight was not a secret ambition of mine, and  sadly my childhood dreams have not in the least bit faded over time.
Unfortunately my blood donor card makes no mention of a high Midi-Chlorian count which would signify that have the genetic possibility of becoming a Jedi so I just have to pretend. If you aren’t nerdy enough to know what I am talking about, just look it all up on Wookieepedia.com, the Wikipedia of the Star Wars Universe (I’m not joking, it is real…and rather informative).
Fortunately for me, advancements in bathroom sanitation technology have made my Jedi Knight role playing all the more fulfilling.
Everything is automatic.

Following the @SavioroftheWorld

Sometimes I wish following Jesus was like following somebody on Twitter. With just one click of the button you could subscribe to everything He had to say about anything.
It is obvious, however, that Jesus had a completely different idea in mind when he asked people to follow Him.
To see what He did mean, I got nerdy and went to the Greek.
Of the 23 times that Jesus mentioned the word “follow” in the New Testament, 22 of those times He used the Greek word akoloutheo. Strong’s translates this word as “to be in accompany with…follow, reach.”₁

Was Jesus a Republican?

Just when you think all the drama of middle school is over, we have another election year.
First we have mudslinging, name calling and rumor spreading by the men and woman we want to lead us into the future.
And then we have a guy named Jesus, a gentle Jewish carpenter- rabbi who lived two thousand years ago thousands of miles away from us.
And then again we have His people; church-goers from all walks of life who have had the responsibility of choosing sides and trying to figure out how exactly the teachings of this Jesus apply to the decisions demanded of them by the hundreds of campaign commercials they are bombarded with on a daily basis.

Faith Like Nike

A long time ago there was a race of people who were super athletes. They called themselves the Greeks.
They started this thing called the Olympics and it got pretty popular; you might have heard about it.
This race of super athletes was also a race of super warriors and one day as the Greeks were fighting against the Persians, they won. Communication did not come easily back in the day and word of the victory from the battlefield was sent by the fastest means of transportation available- human. I would think that a horse would be faster than a person, but then again I am not a super human Greek warrior.
So a guy named Pheidippedes was somehow elected to run about 26 miles to Athens from what was called  “The Battle of Marathon,” of which we derive the name of the race of roughly the same distance.

Upon his arrival, he shouted one single word to announce his message, a word that has been a part of our vocabulary for decades. It was a word that loosely translated meant “victory” and over years of translation and some spelling adaptations has come down to us simply as “Nike.” Then he fell over dead, which was kind of disappointing.
And so birthed the legend of Nike. Starting as just a shoe company, Nike has gone on to revolutionize American athleticism.
Beyond selling shoes, they have made a name for themselves by showing off to the world the athletes of every sport who took the company’s motto to heart and won victory. They just did it.
Pheidippedes didn’t question the distance he was expected to run to deliver such a simple message. He just did it.
Michael Jordan didn’t let the fact that he failed to make his high school basketball team stop him from lacing up and becoming the greatest basketball player of all time. He just did it.
There are heroes, and then there are the rest of us.
The rest of us let excuses plague us our whole lives.
We dream about who we want to be but wait for the stars to line up in just the way before we even make a step toward our dream.  We say things like “someday I will have the faith to _________” or “Someday I will be so strong in my relationship to God that ___________.”
If you have a goal, just do it.
There will never be a time in your life when everything makes sense and every circumstance lines up so perfectly as to just launch you into your dream life.
Just do it.
Many times God gives us what we understand to be an “end- goal” and we struggle to find how where we are currently could ever turn into what God is showing us. We know where we are right now and where we want to end up but usually have no idea how to get there.
Just do it. Don’t know how? Do it anyway. Sometimes failure with the right motive takes us further than success with the wrong motive.
What about those things that God has been dealing with us for years about that we haven’t really gotten around to fixing? What about that person that we have always wanted to be but haven’t gotten around to being yet?
Just do it.
I want God to have to keep giving me brand new dreams on a routine basis because I keep reaching all the other dreams He had for me. That can’t happen when I spend every moment reminding myself of why all the things I want to happen logically can’t happen. I will never run out of excuses but I will someday run out of time.
I just want to do it.
It is scary to think about the incredible amount of people who will live their whole lives without ever achieving a single goal but will collect a million regrets. Jesus didn’t die on a cross for me to experience a mediocre existence.
You don’t have to wait until January to make some resolutions. Rearrange your schedule, rearrange your budget and rearrange your life if you have to to take a step toward the destination you know God is taking you to.
Just do it.

Chasing Windmills

Ever had the sudden urge to start reading a 900 page novel?
The urge doesn’t happen to me very often either but it did happen over a year ago which compelled me to start reading El Igenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha  by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. I know I could have just called it Don Quixote  like everybody else but I like the way the original title sounds when it rolls off my tongue.
It isn’t like I was looking at my calendar and thought “man, I have absolutely nothing to do for the next six months, I think I will just sit down and delve into the fascinating world of 17th century Spanish literature.” In fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth because my calendar seems to have gotten busier since starting this book than it has ever been in my life. I started reading this book because I wanted to chase a windmill.
I knew almost nothing about this book when I started reading except for one thing: it is about some crazy guy who attacked a windmill.

Mannequins, Batman, and Fear Itself

Who knew that Batman was afraid of bats?
It sounds ironic but it makes sense when you find out Bruce Wayne once fell into a well as a child full of the mysterious flying rodents and was trapped there until his father could rescue him. Things like that stay with you for awhile and despite watching his parents murder, escaping to go travel the world and ending up in a third world prison, our hero could never get away from his childhood phobia.
When he returned home with a passion for justice and all the training he would ever need to kick criminal butt as a vigilante, he turned his fear on itself and masked himself in the persona of what terrified him. Bruce Wayne understood the power of standing in the middle of his greatest fear and be able to look it into the face, breathe deeply, and use his fear as his greatest weapon against whoever came against him. What used to cripple him became his greatest ally.
I am not really afraid of bats. I mean I don’t think they are the cutest of God’s creatures but they don’t terrify me like they did the billionaire Dark Knight of Gotham.
I am, however, afraid of mannequins.

Weenie Gospel (Analyzing the Credibility of our Own Theology)

I get a lot of different responses from people when I tell them I am a missionary student.
The most common response is to ask if I am a Mormon.
The next most common is usually an attempt to subtly let me know that they are a Christian as well. A lot of people feel it is important to get that message across because they enjoy the company of fellow believers but I have a suspicion some want me to know they are a real Christian so that I don’t try and witness to them. They ask me questions  that only a true Christian would know to ask like “So have you heard the new Chris Tomlin CD?”  or “What is your favorite Kirk Cameron movie?” so that I can know without a doubt that they are like me.
Another extremely common response is to share with me what I have come to know as their own weenie gospel.

Smelling Like the Living Dead

I have no idea why or how it happened but my generation has developed an obsession with zombies.
I have never been cool enough to know what was “in” until it was almost out but I can’t help but noticing that a whole lot of people have become infatuated with the living dead. T-shirts with brain eating zombies are everywhere and I even saw a book called Pride and Prejudice, and Zombies that just threw a bunch of random brain eaters into Jane Austen’s classic chick novel. The weirdest thing to me though, is that so many people have mentally prepared themselves for a Zombie Apocalypse, including the University of Florida which has issued a legitimate safety protocol should a Zombie outbreak actually happen. Go Google it, I’m serious.
All this talk of zombies and no one seems to remember the original walking dead man. I am talking, of course, about good ole Zombie Lazarus.

Mood Swings, Hot Flashes and Exploding Mines

If you were to line all of my school pictures in a row you would see a drastic evolution of hair.

It started out with the traditional bowl cut every boy had at some time in their life. Then it evolved into the “short on the sides flippy in the front with lots of hair gel” look. In 6th grade I got this idea in my head that I was a skateboarder and therefore needed skateboarder long hair (much to the disapproval of my Mom), so I grew it out to where I could stick the ends in my mouth and permanently cover my eyes like all the cool kids. After that I seem to have been horribly deceived into thinking that dying only the top of my head blonde would be a really good idea. Let’s just say it wasn’t.

Looking back, I realize that with as many phases my hair has gone through, my “spiritual” life has gone through that much more.

There have been many times when I was super excited and passionate about anything that would bring me closer to God and would stop at nothing to pursue him deeper. I would wake up early and commit hours to prayer and reading my Bible. I would make a consistent effort to look for opportunities to share the love that I had found and minister to those who needed it.   I would be determined and disciplined and just overall excited about life.

And then there would be the rest of the week.

There always seem to be more seasons of my life that I struggle to get out of bed than those times I get to turn off my alarm with a smile. There seem to be more times in my life that I have to force myself to have a “quiet time” than those times that talking to God is all I can think about. Sometimes inspiration comes effortlessly and sometimes I have absolutely nothing to say.

I feel like looking back on my life is like reading 1 and 2 Kings. One chapter everybody would be great with God and the kingdom would be at peace, the next they would be sacrificing their children to a cow and being ravaged by every nation around them.

Ok so maybe it is a slight exaggeration to compare myself to pagan idolaters when I am in a season where I don’t feel like going after God but I think anybody who has ever tried to stay in this faith for any period of time knows exactly what I am  talking about. The seasons of my life where I feel on fire for God afterwards only feel hot flashes- sudden, random, and just enough to get me all worked up before I cool down again.

If God had the same inconsistent level of motivation that has characterized my life He would not yet have gotten around to flooding the Earth. 

I can’t tell you how many journal entries I have written that should have been that pivotal moment in time where my life permanently changed for the good. I wrote them almost imagining someone researching my life and seeing those pages and marking them with a Post-It note that said “This is the time Kyle decided to tell everyone he met about Jesus” or “This is when Kyle finally committed to consistently studying the Bible.”

My hope was always that, in a season of clarity and motivation, that I would be able to make one decision that would determine all the other decisions I would ever make regardless of how I would feel in those moments. I wanted to decide right now the person I would be in twenty years. Now it is true that our choices now affect our lives later but that doesn’t change the fact that every day must be a decision.

Life is just a series of moments all strung together and each moment requires a decision. If I want to look back on my life and see someone who adamantly pursued God with consistency then every moment of my life has to be spent in conscious decision to disregard how I feel in that moment and set my eyes on God. That is a lot harder to do than saying a one time prayer and being set for life.

So what do we do when our mood swings the wrong way? What do we do when we don’t care to do anything and no sermon, book, or circumstance can inspire us with passion and conviction? What do we do when we wake up everyday bored?

Remember.

Remember who you are, who God is, and what He has created you to do.

That probably sounds like the worst self-help advice ever given because of course that is so much easier to say than do.

 

I won the game of Minesweeper  the other day on my laptop for the first time in my life I can remember. Now I have played this game on the computer since I was a little kid but to be honest with you, up until recently I had no idea how to actually play. I have spent my whole life clicking on random squares and hoping I didn’t click one with a mine underneath it that would set off all the other mines and end the game.

When I started writing this post, I lost inspiration very quickly. I got about half way through when my creativity deflated and my mood swung back into boredom mode. So instead of finishing, I did the American thing and gave up my work to play a game. FreeCell always confused me and Solitaire makes me feel like I have no purpose in life so that pretty much left only Minesweeper as an option. I started out with my usual strategy of random clicking but that soon got boring so I decided to actually read the instructions for the first time. I found out that those numbers that pop up when you click on a square actually have some significance (who knew?) and after a couple more rounds of trial and error I had it and became victorious for the first time.

When I look back on my walk with God I see a whole lot of random clicking. Everything I have done has been in the hopes that it would keep me in the game one more round. I could usually keep it going for a little bit, but landing on a metaphorical mine was always inevitable and I would be struck with impassioned boredom that would cause to me struggle with any kind of motivation at all. Then I would eventually start over and hope to keep it all going for a little bit longer than the last time.

Two things happen when you play a game like that for a long enough time: You quit, or you figure it out.

You remember.

You remember your failures and past mistakes and you know not to click there again. You remember where you were successful and what you did right and you eventually figure out how the game is played.

So if you are, like I am, in that season of boredom or lack of passion or motivation just keep clicking. Keep trying and keep moving. There will come a time where you figure out what your problem has always been and everything will make sense and you will know exactly what to do with whatever comes against you.

There will come a day where you figure out where all the mines are, but until then, keep clicking on squares. Go win some. Go loose some, but never give up any.