Weird: Because Normal Isn't Working....

  Over the past month I have really struggled to keep up on my reading goal of 50 books in a year.  I've started and stopped a few books but nothing really seemed to keep my interest all the way through.  Then a few weeks ago I was at work and came across a bright blue book with the words "Weird:" written across the cover.  Upon a second glance I realised it was by same author who wrote "The ChristianAtheist" (Craig Groeschel) and I decided I needed to read it.  Much like his other book,Groeschel writes "Weird: Because Normal isn't working", in such an easy to read way that he  grabs your attention right from the start and then once again sucker punches you with the reality of things you already know, but often forget.

 The book focus on five specific areas.....Time, Money, Relationships, Sex and Values...that all people whether christian or not struggle with.  Except, as the title suggests, he makes the point that in each of these things there should be difference between how a Christian and the World react to them.  As the bible says in verses like John 15:19....Christian's are not of the world...they have a different mindset that sets them apart and makes them...well... WEIRD!
  The point Groeschel seems to be making is that if as Christian's we are fitting into the world, comfortable living in it's ways, then something is wrong!  As followers of Christ our aim is to please our heavenly father....everything else flows out of our love for him.  But this world teaches us to live for ourselves and allow everything to flow out of our need to be happy and content.  Is it any wonder then as to why Christian's would/should be considered Weird?!?!
  Although this book touches on subjects all people can relate too, I think certain sections will resonate more than others with different people.  For example, as I read the section about Time, I couldn't help but feel convicted for the amount of energy I put towards everything else but God....how in life I "do" so much, but often that leaves very little time to just "be" with God.  Yet as I read the section about sex, although I agreed with much of what he said, it didn't have the same impact as it might have with a different reader.
  Ultimately no matter what speaks to you more, or what resonates most with you, the main point is still the same....and for that reason I think this is a good and timely book for The Church as a whole.  It's time we stop fitting in.....fully surrender to God...and not be afraid to be WEIRD!

Insanity or growth....only time will tell....

  So I am trying to decide if I am being completely stupid or trying to grow up.  You see for the past several years one of my sisters and I have had a pretty strained relationship.  At one point in our lives we were pretty good friends, but then….well life happened…and now there’s a lack of trust and respect between the two of us.  Usually we keep our distance from each other and when moments come up when we have to come together…we do so with as much civility as we each can muster.

  Over the past several months I have been praying that God would change my heart towards her.  For years I prayed that God would just change her and then one day it dawned on me that it didn’t matter how my sister acted or what she did…I will always be held responsible for how I treat and react to her.  So that’s when I changed my prayer.  Most days I have to pray a million times over for God to forgive me for the anger and frustration I have towards her.  And at the same time I find myself asking God to help me to forgive her and to let the love I have for her, just for being my sister, come through.

  Today we had a family party…something that is pretty common in this house.  Yet what was not common about this party was how well my sister and I got along.  It wasn’t until hours into the celebration that I realized that I wasn’t feeling as tense and anxious as I usually am around her.  And it took my other sister pointing out the fact that I actually went out of my way to invite my sister to do a walk with me next month, for me to realize something was truly different.

  The reality is I love my sister….I always have and always will.  But…..there’s a part of me that worries I am setting myself up for a fall.  I know her track record…and I know mine….and the two of us together don’t really mix anymore….. And it seems that someone is bound to get hurt by this new found connection in our relationship.  One the other hand maybe this is all an answer to prayer….maybe this is proof of God working in my heart and really just an opportunity for me to grow.  Honestly I’m scared….but I am hoping for the best….I guess we’ll see what happens….

UnConditional: The call of Jesus to Radical Forgivenes...

  For the past week or so I have been reading the book “UnConditional: The call of Jesus to Radical Forgiveness” by Brian Zahnd (which you can get for free as an EBook on both bn.com and amazon.com).  Honestly I picked up the book as a challenge for myself….I am not the most forgiving person ever…and since I honestly do want honor God in every area of my life and become a more forgiving person… I figured a book like this might start me off in the right direction.  So I tried to be as open as possible as I read each chapter and tried to glean as much as possible from each page…and let me tell you, there was a lot of great stuff in there.

  In the first Chapter the author shares a story, taken from the book “The sunflower” by Simon Wiesenthal, about a Austrian Jew imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War two, who is brought to the bedside of a dying SS officer to hold his hand while he confesses all the horrible things he has done and then who asks forgiveness of him.  “The sunflower” goes on to share the responses of 53 prominent thinkers of what they would have done in that position (would they forgive or not)…but Zahnd’s point, which he shares in his book by giving his own response to the question, is that Forgiveness is the foundation of Christianity…but not just forgiveness….rather the reconciliation, restoration, redemption that comes through it!

  Using the back drop of the sermon on the mount and the crucifixion/resurrection of Jesus Zahnd shares how in the world we are taught a system of revenge…an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth….and how we all seek justice on our own terms.  Yet God calls us to a new standard….to take up our cross and as Christ did on THE cross, “Forgive”.  He talks about how the pardon of the cross is scandalous in a society where payment or punishment is required for wrong…and how because of this radical forgiveness of Christ we are to become people who, unlike society, offer that same extravagant forgiveness to others.   This book is full of stories of people who were truly wronged and had no reason to forgive, but did….people like Pope John Paul who forgave his shooter and the Amish community that forgive the man who shot up their school house killing five young girls….and in so doing makes the point that forgiveness brings an end to the cycle of revenge!

   The author also talks about the idea of justice and how we all seek justice from our own point of view and at times what might seem “just” to you will seem “unjust” to me and thus ultimately true justice can only come from God the father.  He shares how forgiveness is not “forgetting” the past but that “forgiveness, when done as an expression of faith in God, allows us to have a new perspective on the past”.   It’s quite powerful stuff actually (although I can’t articulate it nearly as well as he does)! 
    Although I wish I could say that after reading this book I no longer struggle with forgiveness….that upon reading the last chapter I’ve just let everything go for good….but that’s just not reality.  Instead I’ve been holding onto a quote Zahnd made early on in the book that “...Forgiveness is an act of will and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart"....and I find myself each day, sometimes each moment, coming before God and asking Him to help me to forgive and to understand more fully how much I have been forgiven so that the overflow of his forgiveness would run through me to the others in my life (Lord hear my prayer).

Matters of the heart...

  The other day I was sitting in my room trying to have some quiet time when I kept finding myself stressing over how utterly frustrated I am with certain relationships I have in my life.  I want to be the kind of person who loves unconditionally, but honestly, sometimes it seems that the best I can do with some people is straddle the line between love and hate. So I decided to do a little study and looked up all those verses in the bible that talk about how we are to treat “one another”.  Verses like…

*Love one another (John 13:34, 35; 1 John 3:11, 23; 1 John 4:7, 11)

*Be devoted to one another (Romans 12:10)

* Live in Harmony with one another (Romans 12:16, 1 Peter 3:8))

*Stop passing judgment on one another (Romans 14:13)

*Accept one another (Romans 15:7)

*Serve one another (Galatians 5:13)

*Bear with one another (Ephesians 4:2)

*Be kind and compassionate to one another (Ephesians 5:21, 1 Thes 5:13))

*Encourage and build one another up (1 Thes 4:9; 1 Thes 5:11)

*Spur one another on (Hebrews 10:24)

*Offer hospitality to one another (1 Peter 4:9)

*Carry Each other’s burdens (Galatians 6:2)

  ….what I realized is that not a single one of these verses (there’s more than just what I listed) talks about the other person’s actions or attitudes….instead each and every single verse focuses on the attitude of your own heart!  So often it’s easy for me to think about how somebody else acted or came across or what they said…as if that justifies me in however I respond.  But the reality is…on judgment day, when I stand before God, I will not responsible for others, but rather for myself….so it doesn’t matter if I feel like someone else is being a jerk, is too arrogant, rude, hurtful, etc.  What matters is that I chose each moment to live for God and honor him through my actions.

Success means Never,Never Giving Up...

  The first five minutes of any run are usually pretty hard for me.  I go through this major mental battle over whether or not I can actually run or go for as long as I want…..I doubt myself, think about all the times I’ve failed, and think about quitting a million times over.  But if I just keep going…just keep pushing through those first five minutes I can usually make it home again without stopping.  Well tonight my run started out in that same mental space....and even though I’ve run the same route I did tonight a million times over, I honestly doubted I could do it.  It’s funny though how frustration in one area can bring up so many other frustrations in different areas of your life….and that’s what happened tonight.  My struggle in trying to push through the mental game of running was starting to bring up all these other failures I seem to be struggling with right now in my real life…and before I knew it I was getting quite angry, upset and frustrated….and I was starting to feel like not just this run, but life in general, was this huge mountain in front of me that I had no chance of climbing….and then I remembered something….

  Two years ago I went to Los Angles and had an opportunity to train with some of the best trainers out there (along with some of the coolest people I know).  One day in particular we were brought up to runyon canyon (a portion of which is pictured to the right…and when I say portion…I mean portion…this is only the top half of the canyon) and we were told we were to run to the top of it WITHOUT stopping…in fact the exact instructions were you can run as slow as you want…but whatever you do…DO NOT stop running until you reach the top!  Honestly…I didn’t think I could do it.  The canyon’s trail had such a huge incline and although I was in much better shape than I am now and had been running a lot more then I currently am…I doubted my own ability.  Nonetheless I decided to try…and upon trying I made a decision NOT to give up!  I wanted to…believe me I did….Everything within me was telling me I couldn’t do it…but I did….and it was one of the biggest accomplishments of my life (sounds silly but yet so true)!

  Tonight I needed to remember that story.  In terms of my run it reminded me to just keep putting one foot in front of the other and I would make it home (which I did).  I don’t have to run fast….it doesn’t have to look pretty…I just have to not give up!  And in terms of life…it reminded me that no matter how big of a hole I feel I need to crawl out of….no matter how high the “mountains” of life are around me….if I just don’t give up I will get to where I want to be.  It seems so simple….”Success means never, never, never giving up”….but sometimes those words just seem like words…and it’s nice to be able to look back at my own life and see the proof of them! So here's to climbing new mountains...and not giving up...

Jess

Max O'Hartford 5k....Race #1 of 2011....

  So at the beginning of the year I set a goal for myself that I wanted to run 11 races in 2011.  At first I was doing really good preparing myself to reach that goal.  Throughout most of January I was at the gym almost every night training and was being much more careful about what I was eating.  But….by February much of that fervor faded and I found myself struggling to even want to work out…never mind being ready to run a race.  So about a month ago I did a little research and came up with a list of 14 different races I wanted to do this year (I came up with 14 just in case I missed a few…that way I wouldn’t be scrambling at the end of the year to find a way to accomplish my goal).  Well as you can see from the picture to the left, I have now officially completed one race (I have this list hanging up in my room so that every day I am reminded why I need to get out there and train)!

  Today I ran the Max O’hartford 5k and I have to be honest….for the past few days I have been so nervous about this race.  I knew I could do it….I just wanted to be sure to do it well...and well I wasn’t so confident that this would be the result!  Thankfully….this turned out to be a really good run for me!  I felt great the entire time (well minus the first two minutes when for a brief second I was wondering why in the world I was trying to torture myself like this)…and although we (my sister ran with me) did running intervals for most of the race…I felt like I could have run the whole time (kind of an amazing feat for my first race in five months)!  We finished with an official time of 39:20 (a pace of 12:40 per mile).

   One of my favorite things about this race though was getting to do it with my sister (and some of our friends)!  When I first started running two years ago I did all these races alone…and although I was proud of the accomplishment, there just felt like there was something missing.  Having my sister by my side and my friends around us (okay so maybe in front of us…hee hee) made this race so much more fun!  Watching my sister push through wanting to quit….getting to listen to her hilarious comments…and having someone there to keep me running (when on my own I might have quit)…is priceless!  Such a great way to spend a pre-birthday weekend! 

Back to the Basics....

  Over the past several days I have been flip flopping back and forth between reading “Reasons for God” by Timothy Keller and “Simply Christian” by N.T. Wright.  And one of the things I love about both these books is the continual reminder within each of them that the Christian faith is not based on anything we do but on what Jesus did on the cross!

  I don’t know about you but when I do something wrong, I immediately want to make amends.  If it’s something I’ve said, I immediately want to take it back or try to cover it with even more words.  If it’s something I’ve done, I want to hide it away (or myself away) or do something else in order to make it better.  If it’s something I didn’t say or didn’t do, well then I try to say or do something else in order to fill in the giant hole I just created.  The thing is…..no matter how much good I try to do to make up for my wrong….the wrongs still there.  And even when other people have forgiven me, often times I struggle to forgive myself.

    In terms of my faith, growing up I believed in God, but I saw Him as a dictator in heaven who had all these rules and regulations I had to follow in order to be allowed entrance into his kingdom.  Over the years that turned into a belief that if I actually did all the right things and said all the right things then I would earn my spot.  That seemed all well and good for me until I committed what was in my mind was my first “unforgiveable sin”….after that came shame, fear, cover up….and more sin.  All of a sudden it became painfully obvious to me that I couldn’t do anything to make amends to God…and well since my faith was based on what I did…it  became harder and harder  to come to God at all.

  Then I had an experience with God unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced.  It’s like I was standing in the presence of a holy, perfect God….broken, ashamed, afraid….and I felt loved!  It made no sense….and at times it still doesn’t!  How can a perfect, holy righteous God love someone like me…who parades around like I have it all together all the while knowing how much of a screw-up I am?!?!  None-the-less in that one experience, for that one moment, I actually understood what Grace truly was and that my faith isn’t about me and my ability to perform, but rather it’s set in the firm foundation of Jesus Christ, his perfection, and his ultimate sacrifice of giving His life to cover for my sin!

  Most days I still struggle with fully understanding this.  I worry that the next mistake or wrong thing I do will be the end all be all to my relationship with God.  But then I come basic to the basics….to the cross…to the understanding that I am saved by God and not by me.  And then this understanding of God’s perfect love casts out all fear (1 John 4:18).  So that’s my prayer for today….that I would continually go back to the basics and live at the foot of the cross.