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.

Lessons from My Pinkie Finger

I haven’t known where my left pinkie is in about ten years.

I know it is there, but as to what it is up to I usually have no idea.

For most people it isn’t hard to keep track of a finger, especially when it belongs to your own hand, but it is different for me.

It all began one summer night in my driveway when I was about ten years old. One minute I was throwing a kickball up against the wall with my best friend and the next minute I found myself trying to catch the ball and slipping in a puddle. Then I saw a glass  window moving toward my face, or really vice versa, and began replaying my whole life. Seeing my life flash before my eyes didn’t last very long on account of the fact that I was only ten and hadn’t lived that much life at that point and that my brain had finally kicked in and told my arms to do their job and protect my face from certain disfigurement.  So I continued falling, heard a loud crash of glass and found myself half way through the window in my garage certain that I was about to get into a lot of trouble for breaking this window.

Turns out that my body had just gone into shock because my arm had actually been completely sliced open.

A huge freak out, a quick ambulance ride and a total of around 96 stitches later and I was a fourth grader with a scar from his elbow to his wrist and nerve damage in half my hand leaving my poor little pinkie without any feeling at all.

[Insert profound transitional sentence that relates a childhood experience to some hopefully deep spiritual truth in only few words here]

The sad thing is, I know a whole lot of people that are just like my left pinkie.

Somewhere down the line somebody or something hurt them and they have lived through so much pain that they have chosen to not feel anything. Not feeling anything is easier than feeling hurt.

We all know these pinkie people, we might even be one without ever knowing it.  Here are some things I have noticed about pinkie people.

Hurt people stay hurt. Within a couple years following my accident I broke that same pinkie twice. Now it is shaped kind of like a lightning bolt, which is pretty weird. Some might say it was coincidence or just bad luck but there is something to be said about the mental disregard for things we can’t feel.  When we can’t feel something, we are less likely to protect it. The places in our heart that we block out from the world and try to forget about are the ones that will be the easiest to attack. Choosing to not feel anything, then is really just a choice to consistently feel more pain.

The scar on my arm is a normal part of my life and I have gotten used to half my hand feeling like it is asleep all the time. The scar is still there though, and it still freaks people out when they see it for the first time, because no scar has ever been erased by just forgetting about it.

When our life turns upside down we usually only consider one of two options. We either chose to end our life by our own means or we choose to do the best we can to just move on. Surprisingly, neither of these are the right answer because both cause insurmountable amounts of pain to other people and thus continue the cycle of decay in Creation. “Moving on” seems legitimate but it requires a whole lot of effort to bury and forget whatever has happened to us. We spend all of our power trying to hide and keep hidden the pain that we don’t know how to deal with that we neglect the people in our lives and are rendered incapable of what we were created to do. Hurt people then, not only stay hurt, but create hurt in other people.

I think we forget sometimes what it really means to be a part of the body of Christ.  We forget that we are connected to each other as we connect ourselves to God. Your hurt is not your own and deciding to live with hurt not only will kill you, but the body you are a part of. My brain can’t just count my pinkie out of the picture and do everything it could do before it was hurt. A Body by it’s very nature has to do everything it can to heal itself because it feels the pain of its’ members as its’ own pain.

I don’t think people truly realize the pain they cause in the people that love them when they choose to live a life of numbness and indifference. Every person who has ever hurt us has done so because they first gave up on themselves. Who are we to think that nobody is affected when we chose to make a decision that will lead to death because we don’t want to feel anything anymore?

Something else I have noticed about pinkie people is that they always know when a storm is coming. Since the day when I went through that window, I don’t think one thunderstorm has ever gone by that I didn’t already know was coming. I thought it only happened in movies and old people but every time a storm is about to come my left arm turns into a human barometer and starts convulsing letting my whole body know something is about to go down.  Though somewhat convenient to have a built in meteorologist, it doesn’t feel too good.

When times look like they are about to get rough and God is about to move (because usually they are the same thing), hurt people are the first to abandon ship. They know that they are barely hanging on as it is and will not be able to stand anything else coming against them so they do what they think is best and take themselves out of the game leaving the Body hurt and confused and usually feeling personally betrayed. The Body doesn’t understand the deep hurt of its’ member and the member doesn’t understand the inseparable bond it has to the Body. 

What is the answer then? What are we to do with a pinkie that feels nothing? What do we do if we are a pinkie that feels nothing?

The Body was created to love, we have to know that above else. It is our job and responsibility to bear each other’s burdens.

When I was teaching myself how to play guitar, I tried my best to avoid playing chords that required all five fingers. I would do the best I could to figure out a way to rearrange the chords so I didn’t have to use my pinkie and it worked for awhile but eventually I got to the point where I could not learn anymore if I was going to continue ignoring that little finger. I had to decide if I wanted to just give up and put the guitar down forever or find some way to just make it happen. I discovered that if I used the fingers I could feel, I could guide the one I didn’t where it needed to be, since I would have no way of knowing what string my pinkie was on otherwise. Now I use what feeling I have to let me know what that which I can’t feel is doing.

That is the duty of Christians, and I think the Church needs to see a rise in people taking on the mantle of Big Brother or Sister. We need to attach ourselves to those hurting and wounded and do everything we can to restore them back to their purpose by doing it with them. We can’t make anybody do anything, but we can leave them with no excuse for not being what they were created to be. One thing that is hard for me to grasp, though, is that I can’t fix everybody. I could do everything in my power and with the greatest wisdom possible for someone but when the rubber meets the road everyone still has to make their own decisions and choose the life they want and even God won’t make them do something they don’t want to do.

I am realizing that the Body of Christ is more like Frankenstein’s monster than anything else. Each member has a story and a history of pain and death but we have been brought together and sewn up so that we can experience real life. We have to understand where we each come from and what we each have been through and we have to be willing to admit that we can’t do it on our own, which is where the pinkie people come in.

If you have been deeply wounded and scarred then quit trying to forget about your past. Quit trying to just move on like nothing ever happened. Simply, do nothing. Stop everything and let God completely heal you. Your scars may never fade, but neither will His. Jesus came down to this earth for the purpose of taking away your pain, don’t mock His crucifixion by trying to hold onto it.

Choose to feel again. Choose to care.

Imagine what life would be like completely healed, and then let it happen. Let God transform you inside and out make you new.

The Body of Christ needs you back.

Emmanuel

There are some things that aren’t even worth doing if you only do them once a year. Like taking a shower.
Or brushing your teeth.
Or changing your underwear.
Or celebrating Christmas.
Wait! Did I just casually transition from a supposedly humorous random statement to a public service announcement about  the evils of holiday consumerism and the fleeting nature of a traditional happy American Christmas? No, at least I don’t think so.

Christmas is over and nobody knows what to do. How much longer do you have to keep you tree up? Do you have to slowly wean yourself off Christmas music or can you just do a clean break and get back to real life? Is it appropriate to wear your ugly Christmas sweater a couple of days after Christmas? The answer to the last one is easy, no.
Though nobody really wants to admit it, the general consensus immediately following Christmas seems to be a big sigh and a silent “I’m glad we made it through that one” muttered under our breath. I am not saying that we all don’t enjoy Christmas but I think we can all agree it takes far too much effort to do it any more than once a year.

There is a word though, or really a name, that we associate with Christmas that should be a part of our daily vocabulary.
Emmanuel.
Or Immanuel, whichever floats your boat.
God has a bunch of names and they all mean something different which is cool because it just shows the great vastness of who God really is. Throughout Scripture, God revealed these names to His people at the exact time when they would need to know that specific characteristic of God that would deliver them from whatever was coming against them. God knew the exact name he would have to be known by for His people to trust that He had everything under control and knew what He was doing.
In the book of Isaiah chapter 7 we find yet another wicked king refusing to listen to a godly prophet. Judah is surrounded and King Ahaz is refusing to seek guidance from God. The prophet Isaiah keeps telling the king “Hey, God wants to bring victory and defeat your enemies, quit being a pansy and man up a bit. God’s got it so you can stop freaking out” (I may have paraphrased a little, that might be the Message version). 
King Ahaz still isn’t convinced so Isaiah tells him “The Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”₁ 
One quick glance at the footnotes in my handy dandy NIV Bible tells me that Immanuel means “God with us.” God was telling the king in this book that soon they would go through the worst times they ever thought possible as punishment for their sins but soon, He would actually be with them. Someday there would be peace, hope and a Savior from all that oppressed them. God would be with them like He was with Adam and Eve in the garden. He could walk with them in person.
And that is what we know as the Christmas story. It all boils down to the fact that God, Creator of the Universe, came down in human form and was actually with His people in a way they could see and touch. He wasn’t like the other gods that could only be reached by ritual and sacrifice to the elite. He was a living, tangible being that wanted to live life with His people. in every other belief system, members of that belief do things for and to their god. God gave His people the opportunity to do things with  Him.
I think it is amazing how many people God chose to be with the moment He entered the world. Just look at your nativity set, that is, if you haven’t already taken it down. Everybody in it got to be with God in a way that only they could understand. Joseph the carpenter found Him in a wooden stable. The shepherds were experts in livestock and found their Savior in a feeding trough. Three Wise men found their Savior in the city of Kings, where King David and a good portion of his descendants were buried.
And then there was pregnant Mary.  The Father was with His child, who was “with child” with the Father.
If it ended at Christmas then there would be no point in celebrating it at all. Sure we could acknowledge it and say “Hey remember that one time when God was with us? That was really neat,” but that would be completely missing the whole point of what God was doing in history. Emmanuel doesn’t mean “God was with us.”
God is with us now just just as He was two thousand years ago in a stable.
What would our year look like if we actually lived like we believed God was with us? We pray for His “presence” a lot like it is the catchword we have to say to start feeling good about our worship.  When we  commit ourselves to actually having a “quiet time” we want to get that nice warm feeling inside like we just talked to the Creator of the Universe and enjoyed the conversation. Praying for God’s presence is the easiest way to do that.
Sometimes we forget about the word “omnipresent.” God is already here whether or not we get that bubbly satisfaction of feeling spiritual.  He is here because He is Emmanuel.
He is with us.
When we work, when we play, when we argue, when we dream, when we feel it and when we don’t- He is with us.
The hope of Christmas then, is not that we could have one day a year when the whole family can get together and be nice to each other. It is not that we would become extra generous and catch the spirit of giving for the month of December. The hope of Christmas isn’t even that we remember to make Jesus the “Reason for the Season” by deciding to talk about Him twice as much as we talk about Santa just so that everyone knows where our priorities are.
The hope of Christmas is that we remember that God is with us. That no matter what this next year brings we can hold our head up because we know that God Himself is with us. Not only is He guiding and directing, but He is on His hands and knees digging through the trenches with us. He was with us during everything that happened last year and the year before that and the year before that.
Life would get lonely if we only recognized that once a year. So how about another round of Christmas for everybody?

1-Isaiah 7:14 NIV