Where Am I Headed?

origins from Robert Showalter on Vimeo.

It’s not about where we came from. It’s about where we are going. 

Maybe you come from a bad childhood. Your parents were hostile, maybe abusive. You were possibly neglected.

For everyone that lets their past dictate their life, you can also find those who overcame. 

Tracy McMillan, who has written episodes for Mad Men, Life on Mars, and other television shows, grew up with a drug dealing pimp named Freddie for a father. Freddie, a convicted felon, spent most of Tracy’s childhood behind bars. And her mom was really no better. She was a prostitute who gave Tracy away. But Tracy made something of herself despite the circumstances. 

In an article on CNN.com, 7 tips for moving past a rotten childhood, Tracy McMillan wrote:

“There are two ways for me to look at my childhood story. In one, I'm a person who is so unloved and unwanted, my own mother gave me away.

In the other, I was born, took a look around at my prostitute mother and criminal father, and said to myself, "I can totally do better than this. Get your stuff, we're leaving." In one I'm a victim, in the other, I'm in power.

Guess which viewpoint got me the career I have today?”

Most of us have bad events in our past. Some like to pretend that their past is the worst past imaginable. And for one person, that is right. Their past is worse than everyone else's. For the rest of us, we can recognize that we are not alone.

Our bad events may not be from our childhood, but they’re still there. We can’t ignore them. From time to time, the memories and emotions creep their ugly cesspool-laden heads out and try to destroy us. The memories are used in an attempt to get us to focus on the pain and mistakes of the past rather than the plan and calling God has place on our lives. 

But God has a plan for you, and he has a plan for me.

It’s not about where we came from. It’s about where we are going.

The past is useful in that it instructs us if we allow it to. It shows us how we arrived where we are at. If we allow ourselves to look at our past without prejudice, we will then discover the mistakes we made that have distracted us from where we are supposed to be. Mistakes we should learn to not repeat. We will also see the great things that freed us from sin, depression, and/or hopelessness. Great things we should turn into regular practices in our life. It is only through what we have learned in the past and the Holy Spirit’s guidance that we know how to live in the now. 

So where are you headed? Are you headed backward? Or are you headed into the beautiful landscape God designed you for?

The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps. Proverbs 16:9 (ESV)

It's For The Better

You have probably heard the phrase, “It’s for the better.” We hear that after something tragic or terrible happens, after a broken relationship, or a failed attempt. The person trying to comfort you proclaims, “It’s for the better.” And then everything is better, right?

What if everything isn’t always for the better? What if that isn’t the way God works?

Take Saul for instance. God appointed Saul as the first king of the Israelites. Yet Saul disobeyed God. His greediness got in the way convincing him to not follow God’s directions to destroy everything that the Amalekite’s had. His disobedience led to God becoming angry and Saul’s removal as king. His unfaithfulness did not bring about the better.

Or Achan. After God miraculously delivered Jericho into the hands of the Israelites, the people were not supposed to keep any of the items. But the treasure was far too tempting for Achan. He secretly stashed away gold and silver. This made God so angry that he punished all the people  eventually leading to Achan’s demise. It surely was not for the better.

It’s never better to step out of God’s will. Never. Ever. It’s never better to cheat on your spouse. It’s never better to get pregnant as a teen outside of marriage. It’s never better to steal from a store, an employer, or a neighbor. It’s never better to consume too much of the wrong things and destroy your body. It’s never better to call people names and destroy relationships. It’s never better to take vengeance into your own hands. It’s never better to be lazy and not work. There are many things in life that are never better. The list could go on and on. We bring about a broken and failed reality when we give in to our own selfish desires. The end result is that we see a fallen world rather than the hand of God transforming our world into the better God has destined it to be.

How I long for the better.

What about the better that you would have experience if you hadn’t of slept around outside of marriage? Or that better that God has planned for you but your diet and disease prevents it from happening. Or that better he had in store for you but you failed to wake up and attend class. Or that better if you would have been loving toward someone rather than hostile. Or that better. Or the other better. Or that other better. It’s hard to live in the better because the impact of sin in this world is far-reaching.

It’s not always for the better. That’s what sin does. It destroys the better.

But here is the reassuring truth. When we are faithful, then we will find ourselves in the better. Though it doesn’t work with as well with just one being faithful. We all should be faithful. Our churches, our families, our workplaces, our communities, and our nation won’t reach the better that God has in store for us if only one or two of us are faithful. We all must be faithful.

This is not to belittle grace, forgiveness, and hope. When things fall apart and crumble, the Great Potter can build a new better. This actually brings those concepts into our fallen world. Nobody needs grace, forgiveness, and hope if they are always perfect. We need them when we are fallen, broken, and hurting. When we face hopelessness and despair. Grace, forgiveness, and hope are there in our darkest hours. Always.

So don’t be discouraged when things are in shambles. God has a new better. But be aware that the new better can be destroyed just like the old better was. By sin. By not doing the things God wants us to do and by doing the things that God knows we shouldn’t do. Sin destroys. God builds the better. God guides us toward the better. Remain faithful. Live in the better.

“For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness” (Psalms 84:10 ESV).

What Is He Thinking?

A few months back, Dooley Funeral Home in Antwerp started to destroy the nice stairway in front of their building, a stairway that they had just had refinished a few years back. Heck, I would say that it was the nicest stairway in Antwerp, yet Shawn Dooley had the audacity to destroy it.

I was asked by people, “Do you know why they are destroying the stairs?” “Didn’t they just get them redone?” “Those were nice stairs, why would he do that?”

This situation with the stairs reminds me of the way we interact with God. We are often on the outside of knowing the big plan. Things are going on, yet we are often left confused. What is God doing? Why is He allowing me to go through this bad health, these bad finances, this troubling situation, these distraught relationships?

A few years back, I had melanoma. I had to go to a plastic surgeon in Toledo to have it removed from my face. There is this period of extreme stress between having it removed and having further tests done to see if it has spread through my body. For melanoma, once it has moved beyond the skin and entered the system, is as deadly as the most deadliest forms of cancer. So I was worried. Something I shouldn’t have been. And I talked a lot with God. Something I should do much more, even during normal, sunshiny situations.

After all the testing was done, I was given the all clear. Thankfully, I have not had a recurrence of the melanoma. The thing that shocked me the most through the whole situation is that with my melanoma also came the greatest increase in my faith. Through the whole experience, my faith grew tremendously. Actually, I do not think I would be a pastor here in Antwerp if it was not for my melanoma. My melanoma was a blessing, for it was used by God to shape me who I am today. My melanoma changed me.

Do you let your hardships change you for the better? Our times of confusion—our valleys—are much more than just moments of disease. We struggle through broken relationships. We face tough finances. We despair at the loss of loved ones. Life is full of one hardship after another.

Here’s the thing though. With the stairs being destroyed, Shawn knew what he was doing. He had a plan for his nice, new steps that would have access on both sides to accommodate the people who would park in his new parking lot. The destruction of the nice stairway made since to him the whole time because he knew the end goal. Shawn had the whole picture. To many of the people watching, it made no sense. But then in the end, they could also look at the Dooley Funeral Home and see that what was confusing before makes perfect sense now.

G.K. Chesterton wrote, “One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”

That is what we have to remember. God is using our valleys to show us something that we would not be able to see without them. Are we willing to see? If we are not, then all that pain and suffering is for naught. But if we go in with our eyes, ears, and heart open, we will come out on the other side of every situation more of who God wants us to be.

Sadly, sometimes our valleys lead to death, but we must remember that for those in Jesus, death is only temporary. It is just a passing, fleeting moment. It is the time when our physical shell is broken and the spiritual seed inside can finally grow into who we are destined to be.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9 ESV).

We need to reach a point of trust. We need to be willing to be vulnerable with God. His thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways our not our ways. But they should be. The more we align ourselves to His way of thinking and His way of living, the more we will live the fulfilled life we were created for. We need to rest assured that no matter what happens, He has our back. What is going on now, even though we have no idea why how it will make things better, will be used to bring Him glory.   

A Blessed Life

Ronald Reagan, in his official declaration to run for President of the United States in 1979, stated, “Our leaders attempt to blame their failures on circumstances beyond their control, on false estimates by unknown, unidentifiable experts who rewrite modern history in an attempt to convince us our high standard of living, the result of thrift and hard work, is somehow selfish extravagance which we must renounce as we join in sharing scarcity.”

The thought that our prosperity is a result of ourselves is fairly common still today. Once we fail to acknowledge that we are a blessed people because of a gracious God, we begin to teeter on a dangerous precipice. God is love, and He is loving enough to everyone that he will sometimes rid the world of a poisonous person, group, or nation in order to help everyone else. If love were a coin, one side would be grace while the other side would be wrath. God’s wrath is part of love. God is wise enough to understand that one bad apple, if ignored, will ruin the whole bunch.

The prophet Jeremiah declared a message from the Lord to the people of Israel: “If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it” [Jeremiah 18:7-10 (ESV)].

The nation of Israel had a special place in the eyes of God, yet God punished them. God’s special, chosen people were not exempt from punishment when they stopped living a life focused on loving the least in society, walking the trail of the Lord, and treating people justly. The very fact that his chosen people received His wrath when they failed to live their lives the way he designed them to live should be a warning to us.

No name on our church building, no ritual that we have participated in, no prayer uttered, no weekly attendance, no participation in the sacraments – nothing outside of a heart currently and totally surrendered to God matters. If a special place of election did not prevent the nation of Israel from the wrath of God when they strayed from His plan, nothing in our lives should give us a false sense of invulnerability.

God said, through the prophet Jeremiah, that he will relent from punishing those destined for punishment if they would change their ways. If you feel that you are under a curse or punishment because of some terrible act that you have done in your past, this passage should provide a great, liberating hope. The principle is that your burden can be removed if you turn toward God.

There is grace. Jesus paid the price for all of our sins on the cross. Because of that act, those who are God’s do not receive the wrath and vengeance that we deserve. But we must be careful to avoid taking that for granted. We cannot fall prey to a life of selfishness, materialism, and pride that will cause us to be more of a poison to our family, our neighborhood, our community, our nation, and our world.

We are called to be a blessing. God has plans for us to turn away from the allure of this world and to live our lives for Him. That is difficult to do when we are bombarded daily with million dollar marketing campaigns that have been devised to deceive us into believing that the way of this world is the best way.

I began this article talking about America because we struggle with being a prideful people who take credit for the blessings that God has given to us. That is a dangerous place to be because once we think our prosperity is a result of ourselves, then we can lose sight of God. When that happens we move closer to losing the very blessings that we have been showered with.

As individuals, we have the same struggle. Are we people who think that we are unstoppable? Are we people who think that we have achieved our position through our own intelligence and hard work? Are we living our lives our way without any regard to the plan and call of God on our life?

To be fair to President Reagan, he concluded his speech on a spiritual note: “We who are privileged to be Americans have had a rendezvous with destiny since the moment in 1630 when John Winthrop, standing on the deck of the tiny Arbella off the coast of Massachusetts, told the little band of pilgrims, ‘We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.’”

This passage in Jeremiah should be a wake-up call, both to those who feel they are under a curse and those who feel they have been blessed. God wants both types of people to realize that their future blessings will be based upon their current living, not their past. God gives a clean slate, a slate free from all of our faults. A slate also free from all of our accomplishments. There can be no pride. Just you and an honest heart. God will reward you greatly when you choose to align your heart, dreams, plans, and living to His will. That is a promise that is not empty like the manipulative marketing ploys of the businesses in this world. That is God’s plan for your life. A life filled with the good that He plans for it. Will you take that life? Will you give up everything for it?

Is Lady Gaga Right?

Lady Gaga has another runaway hit with her song “Born This Way.” The song was the fastest song to reach a million sales on iTunes, and the album had the best opening week of album sales since 2005 with 1,108,000 copies sold in a week.

In the pre-chorus, Lady Gaga sings, “I’m beautiful in my way. ‘Cause God makes no mistakes. I’m on the right track, baby. I was born this way.”

Is that true? Is the way we are born the way we should live? Are we completely beautiful from birth without any mistakes in who we are?

For Catholics, this is an easy one. The concept of original sin would state that we are born in a sinful state, that is a state of marred beauty. In it, we are born flawed into a sinful world.

From our church’s perspective, Lady Gaga is still not expressing good logic. Although we believe children are conceived without sin, babies are immediately brought into a fallen world that tarnishes them. We are born children of God, but we have become children of this world. Again, we are people of marred beauty.

In the end, the result is the same. Flaws, whether we are born with them or not, need to be conquered. If I had a tendency like Jeffrey Dahmer’s and desired to eat people, that would not make eating people the right thing to do despite being true to my fallen self. That might be an extreme case, but the logic of indulging the tendencies we have will lead us to extreme distortions of what humanity should be. Just because we have had an inherent tendency since birth does not make following through with that impulse a right course of action.

I am not joining in on the original sin debate here. It’s periphery to this discussion because both sides agree on the practical implications with this issue. The one side believes we are born in sin; the other believes that we are not held accountable for our sin until we reach a certain age. In both views, there is sin present in life from birth. Sin that mars us from being the perfected image of God.

God has a plan for us, but we all have tendencies, desires, and actions in our lives that are distorted from what we should be, from that ideal plan. However, we are called to join in with Jesus on the restorative process he is doing in us and through us.  The idea that we are perfect the way we are will allow us to indulge in sins that come naturally to our sinful state.

The concept that God does not make mistakes should not empower us to indulge in all of our natural impulses. We are called to join in with Jesus, through the work, guidance, and strength of the Holy Spirit, in perfecting ourselves and the world around us. The very concept of transforming ourselves and the world into the image of God means that it is currently tarnished. To live by the principle that an impulse should be gratified just because it is an instinct will lead us to living a life outside of the fulfilling life God has planned for us.

In the end, this is why we need Jesus. His death on the cross brings forgiveness to our sins. His life that he lived shows us that there is an ideal we need to strive for. His resurrection brings victory. To say that we are fine the way we are is to reject Jesus’ sacrifice and plan for our lives. May we learn to live humbly, to recognize the sin in our lives, and strive, through Jesus, to be who God destined for us to be.

Miracles, Mary, Perceptions, Getting Scared, and God's Plan for our Lives

Seeing an angel appear at the foot of my bed and speak to me would be terrifying. I’m a little paranoid and am scared to death of certain things. This year, while mowing, I encountered a garter snake and screamed like a grown man. I was riding my mower, noticed a snake crawling beside me, and screamed at the top of my lungs. I didn’t even know that I was scared of snakes, but I guess I am.

During my freshman year of college, I would go to bed before my roommate, Josh. He would stay up and watch Letterman, Conan O’Brien, or work on homework. I was usually in bed by 11. He had a tendency to leave the door unlocked. One night I woke up from someone tapping me on the shoulder. I rolled over, expecting it to be Josh, and looked to see what he wanted. What I saw was not Josh. Instead, I encountered a big, giant, scary mask staring me in the face and was greeted by a loud, “Boo!” I sat up in my bed and screamed at the top of my lungs. That night the two big 6’10” linemen - that’s the big guy position in football for those who don’t follow football – decided to sneak into all the unlocked rooms and scare people. As I was laying there in my bed, trying to calm my heart beat down, I could hear screams of fellow students previously asleep behind unlocked doors echo down the hallway.

Apparently Jesus’ mother Mary had a similar reaction to Gabriel, for Gabriel’s initial response to Mary was, “Do not be afraid.” Encountering an unexpected person in what is supposed to be a safe place would cause some fear. But Gabriel was there, not to terrify her, but to tell her that she had found favor with God and would be blessed by him.

So what was the big blessing. You know it. Mary, being a virgin who was engaged, would become pregnant. Imagine the conversation between Joseph and Mary. “So Mary, you say that you are pregnant from the Holy Spirit? Sure.” As we see in the book of Matthew, he was going to divorce her over her pregnancy. It took an angel of the Lord to convince him not to. Now, he was left to decide whether Mary had some very good friends talented in special effects or whether the message from the angel was the real thing.

A lot of times, God’s blessings can be viewed either positively or negatively. Here was Mary, pregnant and a virgin. If she had a negative outlook on life, she would have said, “I can’t believe this. It ruins my wedding night. I was saving myself from Joseph, now he won’t even believe me that I am pregnant because I found favor with God. What kind of blessing is this anyway? Now, all my neighbors and friends will also think I’m a slut.” Even after Joseph received the message from an angel, I am sure the neighbors and friends still thought Mary was unfaithful. Who, in their right mind, would believe that God impregnated a woman?

But Mary did. Joseph did. Miracles are seldom seen by others as being miraculous, but those who experience them know what they are. We can sit around, be Mr. or Mrs. Negativity, and condemn all of the great miracles people believe that God has done in their lives. We can say miracles are no longer done because we don’t experience them, but that would be allowing our experience to speak rather than Scripture. A respected professor and minister in the non-instrumental churches of Christ made a comment to me this year: “We have made the mistake of saying miracles were gone with Apostles.” I know Lindsay and I have experienced tremendous blessings from God. The same with the church we are part of. People outside of God would just say that they were coincidences. I am baffled by how many “coincidences” Christians, who are willing to give their lives over to God, experience.

Jesus would be the result of Mary's sacrifice; a sacrifice she would view as a blessing. The king of the long-awaited Kingdom of God would finally come. The Messiah that the Jews had been waiting for and that the world needed. And this blessing would come through Mary, a woman who had her world rocked. She was pregnant before being married, Jesus' arrival would not be painless, and raising him would change her life. But in the process, her sacrificing her own rights allowed the world to be changed. That is an essential characteristic of those who are used by God; they have to be willing to be a sacrifice.

I think Mary’s story tells it best. She sacrificed her plans for her future for the sake of God’s plan for her. When we encounter God and allow him to direct our lives, that is usually what happens. We cannot go on living the way we have always lived if we want to be who God wants us to be. And that is true whether we have been following God our whole life or are just starting to take our first steps. God’s plans will crush our own plans, but that’s okay. When we allow that to happen, our lives, and our world is a better place. We have to realize that. God’s plan for our life is better than our own.