Storyteller

In my last blog, I wrote about captivity and about my desire to be a part of setting people free - more specifically about how my calling fits into the greater framework of Christ's calling as found in Isaiah 58.  While still a work in progress, some things are beginning to take shape ever so slowly.  I still feel like I am walking into the fog, but occasionally a glimmer will be provided, a sight on the horizon, a quick picture of what lies ahead.  I think this is God's grace; His providence in my life, urging me forward and reminding me that great things lie ahead.

I like telling stories.  In college, my roommate Paul and I would go back and forth telling stories and entertaining ourselves and others along the way.  Stories are powerful.  Inside of a story lies truth, but that truth is packaged in a narrative which allows us to project ourselves into the story, relate with the truth found there and more readily digest truth into our lives.  Jesus used stories when describing life with God and in relating everyday life to the larger story (metanarrative) that overarches the story of humanity.  I have an inkling that storytelling may be a part of what lies ahead for me.  Not so much in the traditional sense of the word, I don't think there are any jobs out there as a storyteller, but framing truth is something I am very interested in. 

When someone shares their story something powerful happens.  The teller and the listener are somehow intrinsically connect in a new way - to tell your story is to expose yourself - to expose your innermost longings and desires.  To tell your story is to risk and where risk dwells, beauty follows closely behind.  I say this because in each of us lies a story of paramount importance - an unfolding of events Divinely authored and played out on a stage that is encompasses our lives.  Many of us don't embrace this story; instead we fight it, struggling against our reality because the miss the beauty than runs so deeply within it.

This morning I am spending some time reflecting on my story because as I look ahead and strive towards something greater, something better, something life giving I am reminded by the voice deep within that the best way to determine my path ahead is to know understand my trajectory.  That trajectory takes into effect where I have been, where I am at, and to where I am pointed.  I all too readily forget where I have come from, forget the provision of God, suffering from a sort of selective amnesia where somehow the events of my life get reinterpreted in such a way that I am left to suspect I am alone in this venture as I have been all along.  This gross misrepresentation takes place when I forget my story, when I fail to remember the times I have been rescued, the times I have been redeemed and made new and the times when I was hurting and broken and in need of simple kindness and gentle love.  I need to remember - my life and my future depends on my ability to remember what has happened - more pointedly to remember how He has happened over and over in my life, and undeniably so.  This is the overarching story we tie into, the profound and endless love of God demonstrated through Christ, revealed daily, and determined solely by His grace.

 Stories are how Jesus taught us to understand God.  Stories connect us.  Stories are powerful and everyone has one.  How will yours read?  

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Setting Free the Captive Heart

Captivity is defined as the state or period of being imprisoned, confined, or enslaved.  Our hearts are said to been held captive until Christ came to set the captives free, to bind up the brokenhearted, and to proclaim the favor of God (favor can also be defined as grace) Isaiah 58.  I am trying to gain a better understanding of what a calling is, and what my calling might be; this is a topic of great importance to me right now as I delve into a new chapter of life with the hope of aligning myself with God's best intent for my story.  I think a calling is like an invitation, it can be rejected, ignored, missed, or accepted and I believe our calling is both general and specific.

It's general in the sense that we are called to love well, act with compassion, mercy and grace, and to exude the character of God in all that we do.  It is a tall order and one that will not always be upheld perfectly, but that only points us to our unending need of Love Himself.  Without being connected to Love, how well can I love?  On a more specific note, our calling should be defined in light of Christ's calling, as we are always and completely defined in light of Him.  His sacrifice has forever defined us as forgiven, loved and welcomed into the family of God.  We are now able to exist in union with God and eventually in perfect union with Him.  As mentioned earlier, Christ's calling was to set the captives free, to bind up the brokenhearted, and to proclaim the favor of God.  I have been asking myself where my life, my calling fits under this umbrella and I am really drawn to setting the captives free.  I want my life to be about that.  I would die a very happy man if I could look back on my life and be convinced that as a result of knowing the Lord in a way that allowed me to express His heart to others, people who's hearts were being held captive now live free.

Our hearts are held captive by so many things.  We strive for the appearance of success, happiness, and meaning.  We are insecure about the way we look, unsure about what our lives should be about, and we spend much of our time distracting ourselves by being "so busy."  Our captivity stems from the brokenness that lies deep within all of us - from what went wrong in the garden.  We lost our innocence, our trust in our Maker, and we were left broken - merely a shell of what we were intended to be.  Regaining that glory, what we were intended to be, is possible through a relationship with God, but it does not come easily.  Nothing will be attacked with more vengeance, no schemes or devices will be left unturned and no opportunity for destruction will be spared.  To regain our glory is to break the power of deception - a power that cripples our ability to trust God and to live a life of faith. 

Our faith is undermined when we find ourselves unable to trust.  I want to be about helping people regain this glory.  Captivity is broken when we regain our glory and our glory is regained when we are redefined in light of the glory of Christ.  His glory is infused into us through His actions at the cross.  Read Romans 6:4-7

Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin.

  I want to help people understand that God loves them.  Don't gloss over that.  God loves us.  This is great news and even better when we consider His love has no strings, no contingencies, no gimmicks, no self-centered motives, and absolutely no half-heartedness.  I hope my life can be about spreading the truth about God's heart for His people in order that our lives might be altered, undone, transformed.  If you really believed you were loved, not because of anything you did or didn't do, not because of how much good you have done and not because you lived a good life, how would your life look?  What would you change?  What striving would cease?  What hopes would emerge from the depths of your soul?  Could it be true - is there a love so exacting and so personal?

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Thwarted

I love being a Dad - I  love the giggles and wiggles and when I see my little girl, I see the beauty of creation and remember how fortunate I am.  I am a blessed man - I have a beautiful family and a wife who loves me more than I could ever deserve.  Life, as beautiful and full of joy as it is sometimes is also a constant struggle.  I feel resistance around every corner and nothing seems to be coming easily.  I feel like I am being thwarted...by God.

You have to understand something about me - I can't not plan - it is like this innate thirst inside of me that won't be quenched without a gameplan.  Part of that is growing up in a family of planners - we are already discussing plans for Christmas and knew what we were doing on Halloween by the time September rolled around.  My job is a great outlet for that because all day long I plan and execute - it is probably 80% of what I do.  I am in the process of re-learning that planning my life is not always a fruitful endeavor.  I knew this once, but somewhere along the way believed again that planning my life could somehow hedge me against the riskiness of risk itself (interesting how I have to learn things more than once - the simpler the concept the more readily I seem to forget its applications).  This is where the thwarting comes in to play.

I am wrestling with God - well its really more of me running around in my life and God waiting for me to stop so He can give me the direction I say I so desperately want.  I am like a little kid hopped up on pixie stix, zooming around, trying to figure out what to do next.  Eventually, I may even exhaust myself enough that I will stop and listen.  It's not that I don't try - if anything I try too hard, but somehow, deep inside my own broken humanity lies a will that still thinks I can make it on my own.  Nonetheless, Ang and I are talking to each other and to God about what He has next for us and right now it feels like we are putting our hearts out on our sleeves and hearing nothing...just crickets...  We seem to catch a glimmer of an idea that ignites something but then as quickly as the fire starts, its extinguished.  We just can't seem to find our way right now.  Life feels a bit like walking out of my house for the first time in the morning into a thick bank of fog - I just feel disoriented.

Concocting a plan that seems like something God might have for us and branding our plans with His name is always going to be easier than truly waiting.  I am impatient and times, but today, I thanked God for His thwartiing ways.  He is truly my guide on this journey and at times I am so far off the trail that I need some thwarting, some resistance, and some "gentle" corrections to my course.

I am asking God for direction, but more importantly for the courage to follow Him.  I don't know what lies around the next bend in the road of this journey for our family, but I am excited, I sense it is something truly grand.  I sense it is something worthy of the calling God has on our lives.  I sense it will require much, but I sense it will exceed our highest hopes. 

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Looking For a New Book

So recently I finished the books I was reading and though I am still entrenched in "The Brothers Karamazov" I am on page 53 of 833 and am seriously wondering if I have the stamina for it right now.  Wondering if anyone out there has a recommendation?? 

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Mystery is History

As I wrote about in my last post, a longing for adventure is hard wired into each of our souls.  I believe that this longing is intimately connected with our view of the world around us.  Our sense of adventure is directly proportional to the mystery we allow to exist in the world around us.  This is not a fool's mystery that could be explained but instead is not, this is genuine mystery, the unknown, ideas and concepts that are beyond us and therefore draw us out into a story much larger and more grand than are own.  A story that encompasses ours but is not limited to its confines.

As we began to lose our sense of wonder and awe, the world became automated, robotic, predictable even - except that its not.  Somewhere along the way mysteries were studied, dissected, analyzed and put back together so that we could build formulas in an attempt to remove elements of the unknown - except we now know less than we knew then.  We fear mystery.  We avoid the unknown.

I know I do - my actions declare rather boldly that I would prefer to control life rather than experience it.  I try to fit God into my pocket to be carried around like a talisman instead of seeing Him as a shepherd, One who longs to guide and direct me along the path of my life.  The concept that our life on this Earth is one of mystery is unsettling to us because to grasp the mysterious life requires us to fully trust. Adventure cannot be had in a controlled environment - doesn't work that way.  Control negates adventure.  Mystery is the petri dish whereby adventure can be cultivated - without mystery there is no adventure to embark on.

Oftentimes we choose to control our lives because when we have control, we cannot be caught off guard or surprised, but rather remain in the driver's seat always knowing.  Why is it such a big deal for us to always know?  Knowledge is powerful but not singularly.  Knowing what you will do in ten years can be helpful, but it can also be limiting.  This is one of my greatest struggles.  I want to know where my foot is going to land before I pick it up to take a step.  I think that by knowing, somehow I will gain power over the successfullness of the outcome and therefore miss most of the entire point.  My Father is less interested in where my foot is going to land and is more interested in whether or not I will try to take a step - where that step takes me is secondary.  The point is the step, the point is the journey, the point is the process of learning to trust enough to take a step and not know where the next one will take you.  Peter would never have gotten out of the boat had he worried himself with where he was going to put his foot (on top of the water ended up working out just fine).  If he had worried about where he was going to step, he would have deduced that his foot had nowhere to go and therefore he could not possibly take a step.  Instead, he saw Christ, chose to follow and allowed Him to take care of the rest. 

This sounds warm and fuzzy but I do not intend it to sound that way.  Trust is ugly, faith is awfully messy at times because it requires that we voluntarily release control and choose vulnerability, something our society has not trained us to do.  In our me-first culture, nothing is more counterintuitive than choosing to be vulnerable, than choosing to embrace the unknown in hopes that you will be met there.  Our inability to be self sufficient demostrates our great need - our striving to run solo anyways demonstrates our great pride and desire for control, but taking an opportunity to relinquish control, to choose surrender, to choose to embrace the unknown demostrates our profoundly unique ability to trust.  To trust is to embrace mystery, to embrace mystery is to open oneself to an opportunity for adventure.

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Sense of Adventure

I  was working on my next blog this morning while Olivia happily crawled around the carpet squealing and looking at everything she could feast her eyes on.  She would touch the wall ever so deliberately as if she was trying to determine exactly how it felt and as she went from one item to the next, her eyes slowly fixed upon the door that was cracked partially open.  The opening was maybe an inch wide but it was like a screaming invitation to an adventure, to something grand, to the unknown.  Olivia quickly began making her way over to the door that was ajar and as she drew near she slowed and peaked inside ever so cautiously to see what lay behind the door.  She gently urged the door open and made her way inside where a wonderland of amusement, mystery, and excitement awaited her.  She found her way to...her room.

My daughter's sense of adventure is alive and well and her ripe imagination allows everything in her world to experienced to the fullest.  I can remember times in my life when I viewed my life as an adventure.  A time when the happenings of my day were significant on a more reaching scale than my own mere amusement, a time when it seemed there were invitations to grandeur around every corner and a time when I felt alive.  I think I see my life a bit less like an adventure now.  If I had to describe that time with an image, I felt like I was standing on a mountain overlooking an open plain, and now I still feel like I am on the mountain only I have lost the horizon and am looking only at the ground in front of me.  I need to look up, I need to see where I am going, but I fear that breaking from my current state may leave me realizing I have lost my way. 

My heart longs for a new adventure - life has been so full this past year with us buying a house, having a baby, working, and gettting used to being parents.  For awhile, it seemed that the adventure would be becoming parents - but that's missing the mark.  Where it is wild and crazy being a parent, the adventure for Ang and I must lie in doing something, in being a part of something truly grand and worthwhile.

Let me think about adventures for a second...what makes a great adventure? A great adventure has an interesting plot, something captivating and compelling; it has a series of obstacles that must be overcome (nothing great enough to be deemed an adventure comes without resistance right!), there must be a company of people (a brotherhood, companion, company, someone to share the journey with), it must be something worth laying everything on the line for - there must be a risk/reward in there somewhere and an adventure must change the adventurer in some way.  No great adventure leaves a person unchanged.  I want this.  I want an adventure.  I love my family and I like our life well enough at times but it leaves me yearning for something that really gets my blood pumping, something that compels me and something that I feel like is worthy of the short amount of time we have here on Earth.

I want to feel like Olivia must have felt when she saw that door cracked open.  Curiosity, wonder, mystery - these things gripped her little heart and she went searching for what lay behind the door.    

I want that anticipation.  I want that sense of intrigue.  I want that adventure.   That's my prayer.

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Thoughts on TIme

Our idea of time has gotten me thinking lately.  I have been paying closer attention to the metaphors we use to discuss time and its place in our day to day lives.  By nature, metaphors reveal and conceal things - basically they describe things but not perfectly or completely.  By drawing comparisons between time and other things, we learn more about some aspects of time but also realize that by shedding light on some aspects of time we cast a shadow on others.  The dynamic is at work the most when we try to describe elements of our lives that are somewhat abstract, intangible, or difficult to grasp.

So back to time.  We frequently use the metaphor, "time is money."   Think about how many money metaphors we use when talking about time.  To name a few, "how should I spend my time,"I want to invest my time in important matters,"I can save time by doing it a different way, "I need to better manage my time."  There are hundreds of different ways we utilize the metaphor "time is money."  I catch myself using this metaphor multiple times everyday, but I finally stopped to wonder one day - Is that really true?  Do I really think of time and money as being that similar?  In our society we are really focused on getting ahead, on making money, and therefore tend to be materialistic by nature.  I wonder if this idea of time is driven by our materialism.  I want to think of my time as something to enjoy, to experience, to exist in - not something to spend because then I am concerned with the return on my investment.  Namely, that whatever of whoever I spend my time on must make it worthwhile by giving me a return.

I am not sure how to think about time, but I know it requires more thoughtfulness on my part.  I wonder too, if we feel unproductive in part because of how we think about time as something we spend, invest, or use.  Therefore if we are not spending, investing or using it in a way that yields a return, it seems like a waste.  That sounds like a far cry from love and an even further cry from my heart.

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