Implications

Implications

Sometime I forget

The implications of my being

A sheep

I see someplace

I want to go

I see something

I want to have

And wonder why

You say no

Sometimes I forget

The implications of Your being

A Shepherd

You see the places

I want to go

You see the things

I want to have

And You wonder why

I won’t let go

It is the shepherd

Who knows the path

And I ought to be thankful

For Your staff

Which often pulls

Against my will

And despite my wandering

Guides me still

Thank You Lord

For all You’ve done

And in my life

May Your will be done

I am Devoted

I am Devoted


I am devoted.
When you look at me
That is what you see.
Someone devoted
To something greater
Than myself.
I have given
My time,
My money,
My energy
At times even
My Happiness,
To be devoted.
I try to do right by people,
Do right by God.
I try.


I am devoted...
To something.
I carefully examine
Not the mirror,
But the image in
The picture frame.
My eyes look out,
But not up.
Make sure the me
That people see
Goes down easily.
Don’t cause them to stumble.
Don’t cause them to question.
Don’t cause them to examine,
The parts I ignore.

I am devoted?
To what?
Am I devoted to God?
Or is it something else;
A constructed Idea
Of what I think
God would want
Me to be,
Say and do.
He would want me to give:
My time,
My money,
My energy,
My own well being.
Sacrifice it all,
To make the...
Picture clean?

I am devoted,
But not to something greater.
It is myself
It is my ideas
My righteousness
My holiness
My self

I am devoted
To a lie.
The picture doesn’t capture,
The truth inside.
The mirror reveals,
What I am.
I am imperfect.
I am a sinner.
I am broken,
Incapable of fixing myself.
I am darkness.
I am dead.

I am devoted
To a staged picture
That hides the truth
Underneath a smile.
The mirror.
The mirror shows me
Who I am.
It reveals the truth,
About me,
And You.
The mirror shows me
God.
Not the fabricated god
Who cleans
Pictures and images,
But a God who sees
Everything.
Sees the brokenness
That exists even deeper
Than the reflection shows.
And a God, who in spite
Of a knowledge
And understanding
Of who I really am,
Covers me with blood.
Not my own,
(Like I deserve)
But His only Son’s.
And as He washes me,
Not just the pictures,
Images,
And reflections
Change,
But I change.


And Now,
I am devoted.
Not to an idea,
But to a person.
A person who,
In spite of me,
Sacrificed everything
For me,
So that I
Could be forever
Devoted 
To Him.

I am devoted to Christ.

Actively Believing

Silver dollars are one of the most frustrating coins. Not the cool gold ones they keep trying to come out with, but the old, slightly larger than a quarter, Susan B Anthony silver dollars. They aren't worth more than a dollar, but for some reason I can never bring myself to spend them. You might be wondering why this is such a dilemma, and it is because I have more than a few of them. So now the question becomes where did I get all these shiny coins? The most honest answer is, the Tooth Fairy. Apparently the Tooth Fairy had the same dilemma as me and instead of spending the silver dollars it traded them for my old teeth.

It was only after many exchanges of teeth for silver dollars that I started catching on to the realization that something was fishy about the Tooth Fairy. One time I lost a tooth and instead of telling my dad about it, I just quietly put it under my pillow. The next morning I woke and as I stretched back to life I remembered the tooth, and sure enough I looked under the pillow and there it was. Not the shiny coin, but my tooth. I told me dad and he started laughing and then informed me that I had to tell him because he had to tell the Tooth Fairy to come. This did not help my mistrust for the tooth exchange system in America because I knew my dad was cool but not cool enough to know the Tooth Fairy.

I have been studying the Gospel of Mark lately and in chapter 5 Jesus says "Do not be afraid, just believe" (Mk 5:36). This has prompted me to think about what it means to believe something. I have always thought of what I believe as my internalized belief structure or the ideas I hold true inside my head and carry around with me. I often view belief is an internal matter that affects the way I think and also the way I talk and what I profess, but perhaps it is supposed to be something much much more. I think Jesus is trying to take us a little deeper than this surface understanding of believing.

Another element that is tied closely to this topic of belief is that of trust. If I claim to believe something I should undoubtedly trust in it as well. There have been a number of changes in my life recently and through it all I am continually trying to trust God rather than myself, and it is hard to take that next step past what we think and know into the active realm of what we do. But belief, if it never affects the way we act and conduct ourselves is the most useless thing of all. It is really easy to think and claim we trust God, but until we actually let go of the control and pass it off to Him, it is meaningless.

When a tooth escapes from a child's mouth, what he believes about the Tooth Fairy is irrelevant unless they trust it enough to but the fallen tooth under the pillow and fall to sleep with the anticipation of what will greet them in the morning. This is the same with God. What we think or say about God can only take root and find meaning and value if we trust God enough to let it actually affect what we do. Because unless we let go of control and hand it over to God; unless we start acting upon our internalized beliefs does it even matter what we claim to believe?

The Peace of God

            I wonder if animals ever think about what it would be like to be a person. See, people spend a considerable amount of time wondering what it would be like to be a certain animal. I’ll bet animals make fun of each other. Lions probably make the most fun other animals because they are the coolest. Lions are probably always picking on chickens and wallabies and other animals calling them all kinds of names.  Then the wallaby could pretty easily make fun of a rat because nobody likes rats.  You might start feeling bad for the rats because they are the bottom, but don’t worry because they can still make fun of the millions of insects. Then the insects pick on the amoebas and amoebas don’t care because they aren’t able to think very well.

                That being said I would want to be a lion. Lions are the coolest animal and especially being a male lion would be awesome. First of all they have a giant beard, and I am a big fan of beards. See tigers would be awesome too, but no beard. A tiger would feel pretty self conscious if they were hanging out with a lion. The tiger is all like “Check out these stripes,” then the lion says, “Cool, for a little jungle kitten. Maybe you should trying growing a beard like a king of the jungle.”Lions can pretty much take down anything they want, but there is one thing that really sets them a notch above the rest in my book and that is the fact they are ridiculously lazy. They just sit around and tell the lionesses to go out and get them some food. Sure it’s not just boring because if a wild boar or hyena tries to pick on a junior lion/lioness you still get some action but there is not a whole lot of obligations on the day to day.

                The problem with my dream of being a lion is that it just doesn’t line up with how I deal with things. If I am honest with what animal I act like, I am pretty sure I would be a turtle. When I face problems or life throws some adversity in my face I just want to go into my little shell and make it all go away. I have gotten much better with actually dealing with conflict as I have gotten older because the problem is that when you hide in a shell the conflict is still lurking outside.

                I know there are some drama queens that might get offended by this, but I think most people do not like conflict. We tend to avoid it and want it to disappear when it does show up. This is why I find it interesting when Jesus promises us peace He say, “My peace I give you, I do not give as the world gives” (John 14:27). The peace that is always at the forefront of my mind is the one accompanied by lush green meadows filled only with bunnies and butterflies. The peace we want and usually think of is one that removes our conflicts. We want God to take those problems lurking outside our turtle shells and make them disappear.

                The problem is that the peace that removes our conflicts is not the one we see play out in the life of Jesus or the lives of the apostles. Jesus himself was tempted to succumb to the peace of the world on the night of His death. Jesus knew that He was going to be betrayed, all His friends would desert Him and He would be murdered by people He loved since before their existence. In that moment of turmoil Jesus Christ pleads with God to “take this cup”; remove this conflict and give me the world’s peace. Jesus then goes on to pray “Not as I will, but as You will” (Matt 26:39) and in this moment He begins to model the peace of God. This peace is not one that removes our conflicts, but rather works in the midst of them; it transcends them.

                We live in a broken world that is filled with conflict. Jesus promises that we will face hardships because of Him. We cannot avoid it and God will not remove it, but Jesus has promised us His peace. This is the peace that Paul speaks of when he says “the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil 4:7). The life of a Christian is one that is full of conflict and God never promises to remove it, but the grace of God is that He has given us a peace that works in the midst of the conflict. He gives us the strength to come out of our shells and walk through the turmoil with a supernatural peace that world cannot understand.

                The important question in time of quiet becomes, where is my conflict? And in times of conflict, where is my peace?

"Before Me"

Before Me

By Alan Johnson

Before I could comprehend my needs

Or know the extent of sinful deeds

Before I’d seen your loving face

Or the condition of the human race

Before I knew what love meant

Or saw it in the Son You sent

Before the fall of the first man

You had already formed a plan

Before I was born into sin

You saw my life and entered in

Before I’d even breathed a breath

Your Son, for me, had tasted death

So now I stand in Your light

Not by merit or by right

But simply by an unfair trade

Without my knowledge You had made

Finding myself an unworthy recipient

Being blessed while completely ignorant

For while still drowning unknowingly

You saw and simply came to me

And before I could even ask You to

You pulled me up to be with You

So this is a poem I wrote a while ago and thought I would share it. I wrote this in response to a testimony I had heard that was full of painful circumstances and incredible brokenness. However, in the midst of the heartache emerged one of the best pictures of grace I have ever seen. At the center of the brokenness was a savior who moved in spite of the individuals. The person explained how despite everything that was happening God was present, He moved in her life before she could even comprehend who He was. It is easy to cast ourselves with leading parts in our stories, but the reality is that the story of grace is one of Christ alone. Salvation comes to us through the grace of God and the Love of a Father who knows the needs of His children before they can comprehend the sinful brokenness they are trapped within. 

Holiness

Growing up in a Christian School environment there are a few themes you pick up very quickly and little answers to question that you learn. Knowing the answers to certain questions would make you a notch better than the first year Christian-schoolers. One of those questions is “What does it mean to be holy?” This was always a trick question. Whoever asked the question is trying to get someone to say something about how being Holy means doing the right things and being perfect, but we all knew better. We knew that being holy didn’t mean being perfect, it meant being set apart.

I have always liked thinking of holy as being “set apart,” but I had never really thought about what being set apart looks like or really means. I think we all agree that as Christians we act differently than other people, but what actually makes us different. Does it mean that I just don’t swear? Honestly I think that is what most people think being holy boils down to. I was talking to a coworker at an old job who wanted to start going to church because he was miserable and just feels that he needs to put God back in his life. It was interesting talking to him about it because he says he didn’t used to live the way he does now. He also told me that he didn’t use to talk like he does now; he didn’t use to swear so much. It is funny how swearing seems to be the line that gets drawn in the sand that separates the holy from the unholy, but I really think the true meaning of holiness is something much deeper than simply the words that come out of our mouths.

When I think of trying to be holy, it always seems to boil down to what I am doing. If I want to be more holy, I need to do more good things. On the other hand, if I am doing a lot bad things I will feel less holy. I guess I realized that my view of holiness has always been about how I view myself and how I think other people view me. However, when I look at the reality of trying to do more good things so that I can look better in my own eyes and the eyes of the people around me, I don’t think that is holiness at all. What I find myself describing is not holiness, but pride.

Let’s get back to that Sunday school answer of what it means to be holy. To be holy means to be set apart. So if we start looking at the life of Jesus who was perfectly holy in every way I start to notice something. Jesus never seemed to care what people thought about Him. He was content to be that weirdo walking around saying things that a lot of people didn’t like. He would heal someone and then tell them not to let anyone know about it. I can’t understand why Jesus would do that. If I healed someone I think I might tell that person to go around saying what I did. One of the most frustrating things in the gospels for me to read is people criticizing Jesus. People were constantly calling him a drunkard and glutton and saying that He was just like all the tax collectors, prostitutes and other “sinners” that He hung around. Whenever those “righteous” people said those things I would wait with great anticipation for Jesus to put them in their place. I desperately wanted Jesus to stand up and tell them all they were wrong and that He was perfect. I wanted Jesus to get into a big fight about who was actually a better person and turn the tables on those stupid Pharisees who were the real sinners, but He never does. So Jesus was holy but He never seemed to focus on his image, or about what He or anyone else thought about Him. So what made Jesus holy? What set Him apart from everyone else?

I started thinking about those questions and realized that holiness has nothing to do with how I view myself, but it has everything to do with how I view the people around me. What set Jesus apart from everyone else was that He cared for and loved everyone around Him. Jesus lived in a society full of people trying to make themselves look better than the person next to them. There were people wearing blindfolds out in public so that they wouldn’t look lustfully at women, people would shout prayers from the street corners so people could hear them pray and do all other kinds of righteous acts to elevate their status in their own minds and in the minds of others, but Jesus never played that game. Jesus could have started listing off all the things that made Him so much better than all those other people, but that wasn’t what being Holy was about, that was pride. What set Jesus apart from those people was not His perfect pride, but His perfect love. It wasn’t how He viewed himself in comparison to the people around Him, it was how He viewed the people around Him with love. 

So when I start thinking about what set Jesus apart and God’s call for us to “be holy,” I start thinking about what that means; what that looks like. I think it looks a lot like how Jesus lived. It means we stop looking at ourselves and start looking at the people around us. It involves letting go of those things we do to make ourselves look better and starting to love the people God puts around us. We stop caring about our image and start caring about the people Christ died to save.

“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
 John 13:35

I Love M&Ms?

All my friends are getting married. I am not getting married. I have been in denial about being a grown up for a long time now, and these recent engagements are shaking the fabric of my boyish existence. I have even been asked to perform one of the ceremonies, which is putting a unique spin on the situation. What do I, a single dude in his twenties, know about marriage? To put it simply: I know nothing. Ok, well I guess I know next to nothing. I have seen enough Disney movies to know how love and marriage works, but I did miss the royal wedding so I am certainly not an expert.

 I know that there is supposed to be love involved, but love is such a broad term. Sometimes I’ll be eating peanuts covered in chocolate and a thin candy shell and be compelled to remark, “I love peanut M&Ms” and my brother wittily suggests, “Why don’t you marry them.” I am well aware that joke died years ago, and I know that marring a bag of Peanut M&Ms is absurd, but it does say something about how we view love. It is confusing when we describe the person we want to spend the rest of our life with using the same word I use to proclaim my favorite snack.

Is my feeling about M&M’s really the same feeling that my friend has about his future wife? I hope not. My love lasts until I run out or eat too many and I hope my friend doesn’t get sick of or eat his fiancé.

A while ago I was thinking about how society views love and I decided we often treat it as a commodity. We view it as something we spend on people. There seems to be two general reasons we show people love: to pay someone back or to get something in return. We love people as a response to how they treat us. If someone is nice to me, I will show them some love in return, or if I want something from someone I might try giving them a little love, but rarely do we love someone just for being a person.

When we view love as a commodity, it affects the way we use it. We treat is as if we have a limited supply and are trying not to spend it all.  Rarely do people go into an interaction just giving love freely. People have to earn love. When we view love as a commodity, it selfishly demands that we get something in return. If I love someone else they need to like me or treat me in a certain way, as if I just paid for some service. I think this is where we really see how messed up this version of love is.  I was in a relationship where I thought I really loved the person, but the whole time I was showing her love I was expecting her to love me in a certain way. When she didn’t return that love the way I was expecting it was extremely frustrating. I felt like I was paying for something I wasn’t getting.

I believe this is why the divorce rate is so high in America. We have taken the capitalistic society we live in and translated love into it. We have reduced love to a commodity and the church is all but immune. So I started thinking: how does God view love? How does He look at it and want us to use it?

While I was meditating on how God views love I came to the simple revelation that: “God is love.”

For God, love is not a commodity, but His identity.

This makes much more sense when we look at the life of Jesus. When Jesus travelled around people were drawn to him because He loved them regardless of who they were. It seemed the less deserving the people were of love; the more He gave it to them. He took our system of commodity love and turned it upside down. He loved people just because they were people, even the smelly ones. I say even the smelly ones because I have a hard time loving smelly people. I worked in downtown Seattle at the courthouse and right next to the building was park where hundreds of homeless people lived during the summer. In that park there was a single Honey Bucket. I don’t think there has ever been a smellier port-a-potty in the history of the world. Whenever it was emptied the smell would travel blocks and sometimes there was no escaping it. The smell of the park and the potty kept me away from the homeless people there. I can’t help but think what Jesus would have done in my shoes. I don’t think he would have kept walking away from the stink day after day. He would have walked into the stink and loved the stinky people who lived in the stinky park.   

The reason Jesus was able to love everyone was because love was not something He used as a commodity but rather it was who He was. God taking on flesh in Jesus Christ was love incarnate.  He was, and is, love. That set Him apart from everyone else. He went places and changed lives through love because it was His identity.

The exciting part is that this is not something God had planned just for Jesus. This is God’s plan for us. The church is not called to love certain people, we are called to be love to everyone. We are called to take on love as an identity. If God is light, and God is love, we see that light is love. This is what it means to be the light of the world. The way we illuminate the darkness and bring light to the world is through loving people like Jesus.

Jesus changed the lives of so many people he met. He never did that by winning an argument or telling people how wrong they were. It is freeing to know that I don’t have to try and work at being the perfect person. I don’t have to have all the answers or right things to say. All we need to do is allow God show us His love and allow that to change our identity. To allow God to fill us with His light and watch it shine through our brokenness.

I know I have sort of rambled down a rabbit hole from where I started and I have come nowhere close to exhausting the subject or my thoughts on it. There is so much more that goes into a relationship and particularly a marriage, but for all my friends getting married and anyone else who knows a real person, make love an identity. Don’t love expecting something in return or to pay someone back. Love like God loves us. In spite of our brokenness He sacrificially pours Himself into our lives and changes us. That kind of love is the kind that changes lives; that is the love you can build a life upon.

Transformation

People often get me confused with a smart person because I wear glasses. Glasses can make even the dumbest person look remotely intelligent so I am partially grateful that my eyes hate contacts, but I have not always had glasses. When I as in 9^Th grade, I started getting headaches and my eyes would hurt when I would read things. At first nobody believed me, thinking that it must have been an elaborate story to get out of doing homework but eventually I made it to an eye doctor.

I discovered a couple things at the optometrist. The first was that I had astigmatism which was causing my headaches, but also I found out I had extremely poor vision in my left eye. I was practically blind in the one eye and it caused my total vision to suffer greatly. I became very amused at closing my good eye and then my bad eye and seeing how blurry things got as I went between the two. I remember wondering how I could have been so ignorant to the poor vision in my left eye.

After a few days I got my glasses and it changed everything. The world came to life in a vivid way that I could not have imagined the day before. I remember looking out the window into my backyard, nothing in the backyard had changed overnight but I perceived it in a whole new way. The redwood tree I had climbed as a younger child was no longer a reddish pole with greenish blobs attached; it had a trunk, complete with bark that was peeling off as squirrels playing tag scrambled up and down. The green blobs were made of individual branches each with smaller twigs full of needles bursting out of the long brown arms.

In the days that followed it became alarming at how I had gotten so used to the blurry world that I had lived in for so long. I was completely unaware of the vivid realities that were around me. I had not made a decision to view the world in a lesser way. I did not even know I was missing out. However, the reality was that I was not viewing the world as it was meant to be viewed. I had been settling for a blurry version rather than the vivid reality of what was around me.

I was reading through Romans a while ago and read the part that says "Do not conform any longer" (Rom 12:2). I am sure I had read that passage many times but for some reason this simple phrase really stuck out to me. Paul says “any longer" which implies that it was something the Church was actively doing. I often see myself in the characters of scripture and began to wonder if this was still true today? Does the church still conform to the world around them? Do I as an individual Christian still conform to society?

 As I began to think about all the ways that I look no different than the world around me it became alarming how often I go to society for my identity rather than the cross. I have a hunch too, that this is not a problem that is limited to me. As I look at the church I see that collectively we are conforming to the society we are called to change. The scariest thing about conformity is how subtle it can be. It is not as if Christians are trying to live just like the people next to them, most of the time we are unaware we are even doing it. It happens when we view issues and define terms through the lens of society rather than that of Christ. Our definitions and understanding of things like of success, love, holiness, salvation and so many others get blurred by their cultural understandings.

However, there is hope in the second half of the verse. It goes on to say "be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Rom 12:2). When I think of this notion of being transformed it brings me back to when I got glasses. Just like I was ignorant of what was around me, we are unknowingly settling for the blurry versions of what it means to be a Christian. We are not necessarily actively choosing to conform, but rather are passively defaulting to what is around us. In calling us to be transformed, it is as if God is asking us to stop living in a dim and shadowy world and to put on new lenses that will allow us to view the world in the vivid reality that God intended.

When we look at the life of Christ it is clear that He viewed the world differently. He looked into situations and people and saw things that other people missed. Where others viewed failures and lost causes, He saw opportunities to love.  He looked at the world with a fresh perspective that was anything but what those around Him saw. Paul is essentially challenging Christians to try and see the world that Jesus saw; to try and see people the way Christ did.

I believe that if we do this, if we allow God to change the way we view the world and think about simple ideas, we will be transformed. We will be the salt of the Earth. We will be the light of the world. We will shine Christ’s love into the darkness and illuminate a world around us with a vivid reality that we have been unknowingly blind to for so long. We will change the world through simple acts of love like Christ and we will open other people's eyes to that very world which we had failed to see for so long.

We will be transformed and transform the world around us.

Conformity

I was pretty awkward in Junior High. I am still pretty awkward today, but in Junior High I was excessively awkward. I desperately wanted to be accepted by everyone so I had to create multiple versions of myself to appeal to various different people. I've always liked wearing hats so a lot of my rebellion meant wearing it backwards. My dad hated it. He would make little comments about how stupid and backwards my hat was. I thought about giving in to my dad's critical remarks but I knew better. I had to be cool and that meant wearing my hat backwards. These versions of myself looked a lot more like the person I was trying to win over than who I used to be. I tried to like the music they liked. I talked like they did. I did what they did.  I thought to be accepted I should just act like everyone else. Fortunately I was not nearly cool enough to hang out with people who were actually doing bad things, but I still lost a lot of who I was for a couple years.


When you read through the Old Testament you end up following around a group of people called the Israelites. The Israelites were God's chosen people and He did a lot of amazing things for them. When the Israelites found themselves enslaved by the Egyptians God sent Moses to lead them out of Egypt and into the promise land. However, Moses was not just supposed to lead them out of Egypt, God wanted everyone to know how great and powerful He is. I can probably skip the story recap because everyone saw Prince of Egypt, but for those who are rusty on their Disney movies: to show God's power Moses was told to bring down a series of plagues on Egypt. These plagues ended with the Egyptians giving the Israelites all their cool stuff and telling them to get out of town. The story doesn't stop there though, the Israelites run into the Red Sea and by then Pharaoh realized that he had let his slave labor quit so was chasing after them with an army to bring them back. So things are looking grim for the Israelites until God shows up again. He holds the army at bay with a pillar of fire while He parts the Red Sea. After the Israelites had cross the sea on dry land the fire disappears and Pharaoh's army gets punked. While in the middle of the sea the water comes back and drowns the army. That is amazing.


I tell this story because of the one that comes after it. It is hard to believe some of the things that God did for the Israelites, but it is even harder to believe some of the things that the Israelites did knowing what God had done in their midst. After being lead out of Egypt they are camped at the base of a mountain and Moses goes up to get the commandments from God, but the Israelites decide Moses and God are taking too long. They decide they don't want to be God's special people anymore; they don't want to be different. So they get together and tell Moses' brother Aaron to make them a golden cow to worship. They are basically saying that they want to be like everyone else around them.


When I used to read these stories I would get so mad because time and time again the Israelites would try and be like the nations around them and God would always say, "No, I want something else for you. I want you to be different. I want you to be set apart." God would plead with them to be His and His alone, but the chosen people had made a choice to by like everyone else. They chose to conform.


I was not kidding when I said this used to upset me. I would get actually angry and these dead people for being so stupid. One times I must have been excessively mad and God overheard my thoughts because He hit me with a ton of bricks. I realized that I am the same way. Not just the Junior High awkward Alan, but every version of me ever. God has done amazing things in my life, but still time and time again I get my identity from everyone and everything around me. I conform.

I stopped getting mad at the Israelites and started identifying with them.


The thing about myself and the Israelites is that I don't think we are alone. When I look at Christians today I see countless places where we have conformed to the society around us. Where we have gotten our identity from someplace other than a God calling us to be set apart, to be different. We have blown it, we have conformed.

You can get depressed when you start thinking of all the places we have messed up, but one of the comforts I get also comes from the Israelites. No matter how many times they blew it, no matter how many times they failed and conformed to the people around them. No matter how many times they turned away from God, He still pursued them. God refused to leave them alone and continued to love and seek them, and this is another thing I can identify with.

God loves us. God pursues us and He is still calling us to be different; to be set apart.

Set Apart

Why do people tend

To chase the latest trend?

No matter what it is we see

We follow, mindlessly.

We dare not fight against the tide

For fear of being swept aside.

It’s far easier to indulge

And simply do what we’re told.

But courage I suppose is this:

To feel the currant and resist;

To see the norm, but depart

And in doing so, be set apart.

Reflections

I love to write but never want to do it. I love sharing my ideas but turning them into something more concrete than thoughts floating aimlessly around in my head is sometimes hard. This blog is my attempt to be proactive with the situation. As these thoughts escape my brain and take on the form of words my hope is that they will be a blessing and encouragement to those who read them.

The framework that I come from is that of a Christian who has been saved by the grace of God. Everything else is touched by that reality and it shapes the way I think. It is impossible for people to adequately understand the greatness and magnitude of the love and mercy shown to people by God without first understanding the human condition. It is easy to be positive and focus on the beauty and good that is in people and ignore anything else. However, when we closely examine who we are we find that there is an ugliness that lurks beneath the surface. While often ignored or hidden away, we are all broken people. Ignoring the brokenness can get in the way of allowing God to fix us and restore us to what we were created to be.

When we understand that brokenness we can then fully appreciate the work of Christ on the cross. Jesus enters into our brokenness and fixes us. He does not save us because of who we are, but rather in spite of who we are, because of who HE is.

I am titling this blog "Reflections" because I intend to reflect of the human condition and the work of God. His work in both my life and on a larger scale. The other reason is because of what Christ does in our lives. As we follow after Him we begin to realize that we are the Light of the World. We are doing the very work Christ did by loving people and spreading that love which He so lavishly bestowed on everyone He met. However, we do not create this light. The light we shine into the darkness is just a reflection of the light that God, through His grace and mercy, is pouring out on us daily. The means, and the power, and the purpose of Life is Christ alone. To take anything away from that is a great disservice to the gospel.

The gospel is the most beautiful gift ever given, but it shines brighter still when contrasted to the ugliness of who we are apart from Jesus. I hope by delving into the depths of our fractured and broken souls we can catch a glimpse of Christ's light and in time become a reflection of that to the lost world around us. Some of us are already experiencing what it means to be a reflection of Christ to the world, but we can all polish off the dirt and shine brighter still.

Transforming into You

I tried my best to be accepted

But despite my best still felt dejected

No matter how fast, toward You, I 'd run

The distance could not be overcome

I looked to the commands but got nowhere

Except hopelessly caught in despair

But, with grace, You looked down from above

 Restored and saved me by Your Love

Now this Love dwells in me

Sanctifying; making me holy

Because in my heart Your word resides

Changing who I am inside

Like the sun drives out the night

So my darkness leaves in Your light

Which slowly begins shining through

As I am transforming into You

My priorities get rearranged

As my perspective is being changed

I long to spread Your Love around

So that others lost, may be found