Our Obsessions

There is an absolute disconnect between the way we instinctively want to live life and the Kingdom of Heaven. Oftentimes we pit the ways of the world against God’s ways (which is a true discrepancy), but in doing so we fail to recognize the utter inadequacy of the inclinations of our heart when compared to God’s Kingdom. Or maybe we don’t fail to recognize it. Maybe it is because we recognize it that we point fingers at the world.

In our heads, especially once we’ve been following Jesus for an extended amount of time, we don’t think we are that far off from God’s standard of perfection. We probably wouldn’t say this outright, but we believe that our reflexes, reactions, wandering thoughts and earnest desires are all pretty darn close to sinless. What a dangerous thought.

I don’t come anywhere close to having a kneejerk reaction of praying for those who persecute me. I’d rather forget about my enemies and consider myself holy than love them. I like to eat, and therefore feel no guilt when Jesus starts statements about fasting with the assumption that you’re already doing it and know that I am not. I war with my heart regularly about the fact that I indeed CANNOT earn my salvation, or God’s pleasure, or his love. I’m almost always battling with my heart to love the approval of God more than I love the approval of man. And inherent in most of my behavior is a basic lack of faith that what God says in the Bible is true, simply because if I truly believed all the things Jesus has to say I’d live in very different ways than I currently do.

Everything within me seems to have a gravitational pull equivalent to that of the sun, dragging me ever towards the firebright allure of selfishness and sin.

It’s just a fact.

But what is also fact is that the one who is in me is not only greater than those who are in the world, but he is also greater than I am. He’s stronger. Sweeter. Wiser. More loving and kind and just. And he has the power to change my will and my desires to love the things of God more than I love myself.

It honestly feels unbelievable, but it’s true.

“We all, with unveiled faces, looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.” 2Cor 3:18

We are being transformed into the same image of consummate excellence that shines in Christ. How can you know what you should be moving towards or how you should be growing if you are not transfixed on Christ? He is the image. He is the blueprint. He is the one that should be the model for everything we become, and we should be making every effort, like tracing paper laid over the top of an image, to bring every aspect of our lives into alignment with his.

The smartphone is a wonderful thing because it revealed to us that addiction isn’t confined to a few people who battle with a few things like drugs and alcohol and gambling. We all have addictive personalities, and are at all times obsessed with something. It could be something as overt as our work or romantic lives, or as subtle as something like our independence or opinion. But something is always the center of our focus, captivating our minds and hearts. Thanks be to God that we can be transformed. Praise him that he is stronger than we are, because he can take our weak hearts and minds and bend them into obsession over Jesus and the Kingdom of God.

That verse from 2 Corinthians mentioned above does not say that transformation comes by way of an epic to do list or a 5 point strategy. It comes by looking at Jesus. Did you notice that? Looking at Jesus leads to transformation, meaning God must have given us just enough strength and willpower to turn towards Jesus and stay focused on Him. It will take every ounce of our puny willpower, but we have enough, and it is our only hope to live in alignment with the kingdom of God, our only chance at seeing heaven invade earth through our lives, and our only shot at living the abundant life God has to offer before we get to heaven.

GINOSKO - Deep and Rich Intimacy

Ginosko - to know

    As John explains that Jesus came revealing the Father (whom no one had ever seen), he says in verse 1:10 that the “world did not recognize him.”

    This is far more than walking past your favorite celebrity in a grocery store but failing to recognize them because of the large hat and sunglasses they were wearing. “Recognize” only covers the tip of the iceberg, and while it certainly meant that the world did not recognize that Jesus was the Messiah, John meant so much more.

    The word used is ginosko, which means “to know,” and in this case “to come to know.” There is certainly a revelatory nature to the phrase, which “recognize” encapsulates in a broad sense. But the word is referring to coming to know Jesus as the Son of God, the Savior of the world. John uses this word in other contexts throughout his writings, attempting to capture exactly what Jesus reveals of God and what we are invited to come to know:

• In John 17:3 and 6:69 it refers to knowing his Messianic dignity or distinction

• In 1 John 2:13 cf. John 1:10 it refers to knowing his divinity

• In John 10:14 it refers to knowing Jesus’ consummate kindness towards us, and the benefits rebounding to us from fellowship with him

• In John 14:31 it refers to knowing his love of God

• In 1 John it refers to knowing his sinless holiness

    John was concerned with far more than facial or vocal recognition. He is stating that you and I have been given every chance to know God, THE God, by knowing Jesus in his fullness: his character, position, authority, transcendence, perfection, everything.

    Unfortunately we have treated “knowing God” just like facial recognition on our phones where the goal is to make sure we could pick Jesus out of a lineup, while knowing nothing about who he is, in order to unlock access to heaven after we die. But as Dallas Willard said, God is less concerned with getting us into heaven but with getting heaven into us.

    That, according to John, comes by knowing, truly knowing Jesus.

    Again, you can learn all of these things about Jesus without actually knowing him personally. And that is where this word takes on even more life throughout scripture. Ginosko is used to mean:

• To become known, as in you and I become known by God as we know him

• To know, perceive, have knowledge of, as in you and I are given the intellectual ability to know the mind of God and the purposes and intentions of the Kingdom of Heaven. That is staggering.

• A Jewish idiom for sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, as in rather than being acquaintances held and holding off at arms length, we are invited into intimacy. We are invited to experience and engage with the fullest expression of love and delight and desire the universe holds, of which sex is is a pale, pathetic shadow.

• And finally, to become acquainted with, to know, as in a relationship, built over time and time together and trust and mutual interests and common goals and proximity and vulnerability and all of the other things the best friendships are made out of.

    John would not have us settle for merely recognizing Jesus in a crowd. He wants us to know him so deeply and personally that we recognize his scent, the pitch and tenor of his voice, the warmth of his smile, the comfort of and safety in his presence, the utter peace and joy that is ours when we simply sit with him and move to that place beyond words. It only comes through deep and rich intimacy.

    Know God. It is the only thing you were created for. You were made to know him so deeply that all of the other things he invites us into flow naturally and abundantly from us, like prayer and holiness, co-creation and obedience.

    And this knowledge, the personal and intimate relational knowing, must take priority over everything else you and I can ever “know.” From our relationships with others to our expertise in our vocation, from parenting and family matters to the vices we know will fix us if we can just get a little more, it all must come second. And I don’t mean a close second. And I don’t mean a distant second. I mean a “all else is absolute garbage and I couldn’t get it out of my life fast enough if it meant knowing Jesus more” type second. 

All things at all times are competing for our attention and affections. And in this competition the rankings cannot exist like Jesus first, then relationships second, possessions third, ambition fourth and so on. There is only first place and last place.

In the competition for our hearts, where the victor determines all other aspects of our lives, knowing Jesus must come first, and absolutely everything else must come dead last, so far behind your loving Savior that the track is closed, the lights are off, and everyone is home and asleep before anything else even sees the finish line.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” - John 1:14

The Wonder of Faith

If we are not living with wonder, we are not living with faith.

Our relationship with and trust in Jesus Christ is a dynamic which the Bible repeatedly claims is founded upon faith. Confident in what we hope for, trusting what we cannot see. Sometimes we like to think this applies to us only because Jesus no longer walks the earth. If only he were still around I would have perfect belief! A brief look at the interactions he had with the masses to whom he came unexpectedly, the religious zealots to whom he came exactly as expected, and even his disciples to whom he came intimately reveals to us that his physical presence did not create airtight faith.

Jesus came proclaiming a kingdom which had come and was still coming. It was one people largely could not see, though, paradoxically, had the ability to manifest in their treatment of one another.

He came displaying miracles which had absolutely no logical or scientific explanation. And though he did them repeatedly, the people surrounding him still had a difficult time believing in God for a fresh miracle today, or tomorrow, or the day after.

So even his physical presence is not a panacea, promising perfect confidence and trust in the power and work of God.

This is where faith bridges the gap.

The concept of faith has become so westernized that we actually believe we can calculate it, tabulate it, monitor and track it, and objectively evaluate the levels of faith in ourselves and the church. This must be scrapped entirely if we have any hope of being gifted the eyes to see and ears to hear the activity of God’s kingdom among us.

Faith contains mystery. It is not something which can be subjected to our small-minded scientific method, nor can it be limited to our strategies in the hopes of securing some semblance of predictability and control. This is terrifying, especially to those in power in the church, because if we can not reliably increase your faith, or force God to act, or provide a three step plan for your healing, then how will we keep you at our church?

And again, the western influence upon the church is fueled. If quantitative metrics are the highest good in the church, then we will do whatever it takes to keep your butts in our pews and your dollars in our offering plates. And that then, ”obviously” we think, displays your level of faith, because it is a measurable that we attach meaning to, like attendance equates to obedience to God and tithing means your priorities are shaped by the kingdom.

I can think of many words to describe this popular way of running a church.

Shallow.

Warped.

Manipulative.

Sad.

Secular.

I believe this approach is born out of two sides of the same coin: the fear of man (failure, irrelevance, unimportance) and the poverty mindset of an adopted child (lacking love, safety, comfort, affection). Both are manifestations of the same lie: that God’s love fails me at some step in the transfer of Christ’s blood and resurrection to my everyday life.

I also believe that the way to reclaim faith within the church is to reclaim wonder.

This is the conscious choice of the follower of Christ to wake up in the morning NOT to business as usual and a world they think they know and have some semblance of control over, but to wake up every day to a world of possibilities.

We must take God at his Word, that he is the Lord over all creation, that everything was created and is sustained by his breath, and that he knows absolutely everything, from the death of a sparrow to the exact number of hairs on our heads. We must believe he is active and alive in the presence of the Holy Spirit, moving in power in and through his church, with the ability to shape and bend “reality” as we know it to accomplish his purposes. We must also understand that he created the order of things in such a way that, rather than having to “bend” reality every time he wants something done, created things acting according to their created purpose accomplish the will of God, because he designed it that way at the beginning and planned every good work for it to do before it existed.

As that goes for us humans, we must understand, believe, and act out of our identity as God originally intended it, which is made possible by the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Then God can use and work through our relationships, our words, our creative acts, our vocations, our families, truly every aspect of our lives that has been submitted to him.

It is when we daily submerge ourselves in the unending ocean of God’s love for us that every aspect of our lives becomes infused with the supernatural.

And when we understand that everything is supernatural, we wake up every morning in wonder.

Vulnerability Is The Only Way Forward

    Walls, in and of themselves, are cold, impersonal, unfeeling, devoid of life and love and connection. They are easily constructed once you figure out what you are doing, and can be placed anywhere you want. They keep people out and define “your space” from “my space” and “their space.” They create boundaries, which make definition easier and safety more certain. 

It is no wonder we like them so much.

I don’t know that anyone could or would tell you they exist in a state of perfect safety in this life. Even if everything was certain and safe around them, they will still never escape death, which comes to take everything they’ve ever known with their five senses from them.

And so we build walls. We erect houses that define our place, and walls within that house to delineate what happens in certain spaces in the house. We put up fences around our property in order to let others know what we own, and, the hope is, to keep them out unless we grant them permission to enter. We build walls and boundaries around everything; cities, states, nations, you name it. And when your space encroaches upon my space in a destructive way, or simply in a way that I do not approve of, I raise my voice and let it be known that I will not tolerate your encroachment.

And so we have insulated ourselves from all unwanted human contact by putting walls between nations and devices between faces and distance between touch and...

These walls are merely outward manifestations, however, of our internal reality. They follow our hearts lead, which has never dwelt in perfect safety and therefore has constructed walls around itself as well. Defense mechanisms of sarcasm or indifference. Offensive measures such as slander and abusive language. These point to the fact that our hearts are walled, and as we strip all of these outward manifestations away, we find that, at our core, we have believed that we are unsafe.

What a tender and frail confession: “I am unsafe.” What great fear revealed and poked, feeling like a nerve in a tooth uncovered, un-numbed, and debilitating in it’s pain. What violation, looking in the eye what we have spent so long avoiding, hiding, and, quite frankly, abusing as we shoved it into the dark corners in our hearts. What solace, knowing I am not the only one who walks around feeling unsafe sometimes. Rarely. Constantly.

Maybe we don’t need to blame each other for our unsafety anymore. For while it is by human lips and bodies we are wounded and affirmed in our unsafe existence, it comes from humans who are also operating out of their lack of safety. They are just as scared of you as you are of them.

And it is here the invitation comes to us. The invitation to vulnerability.

We can rip the walls down. We can expose the nerves. We can own the fear. And we can do so with others who are doing the same.

Tragically, when thinking of where they might dwell in vulnerability with these other people, most do not think automatically and confidently of the church. Shame on us.

What was Christ if not the tearing of the veil between man and God and man and each other, achieved by the vulnerability it took to hang upon the cross naked and broken? What was Jesus if not the raw exposed nerve of heaven’s heart, given freely and openly to a world which would abuse it unceasingly? Who is God if not the perfect, compassionate Father who has loved his creation tenderly and sweetly, open-heartedly even, only to be taken advantage of, squeezed for all he’s worth, and perpetually abandoned at the wedding altar of his covenant faithfulness to us?

There is no excuse. Followers of Christ, if truly identified with the life of heaven, regularly choose vulnerability. They choose to be unsafe in a dangerous world. To be selfless in a selfish generation. To be an open space in a world of walls.

What a joy to know that our Father’s attention never wavers and his power cannot be overcome, so that when he daily leads us in green and spacious pastures we may dwell in perfect safety.

The Freedom of Heavenly Priorities

All things are not created equal. Quite spending your life like they are. Prioritize your life accordingly.

Life will never have a chance of being fulfilling, worthwhile, or well spent if your heart is not fixed on God. This is said after years spent chasing and pursuing other things. And not just things I thought would bring me goodness.

Sometimes we neglect to recognize that, out of our misguided desires, we do not seek that which heals or fulfills, but intentionally choose to devour with our whole being that which drains life from our souls. We do so on purpose, believing we deserve punishment, that it is the way of the world, or simply that it is better to feel pain than to feel nothing at all. Do not swim in the sewers of the world.

Start and finish and fill your days by delighting in God. He is the solid rock. Always.

Follow this priority swiftly with being delighted in. The God of all creation delights in you, brimming with joy as he sings songs of celebration over you. When he seems silent, distant, harsh, this remains true: God loves and likes you.

As you settle into your love for him and his love for you, your character will inevitably be shaped into greater purity and glory. I used to think these were snobbish words, but have come to taste and see that a pure heart, one that is always subjected to the light of the Lord, is true freedom, peace, and contentment.

Answer the Lord’s calls to growth and pruning with a consistent yes and life will open up before you, though it may feel the opposite in the moment. Your life will consist of dignity and beauty and substance if you grow in godly character, and hollow worthlessness if not.

A helpful prayer in this area that has proven itself over time is, “God, for all you have done, thank you. For all you will do, yes.”

After these, people take their place in your priorities, for they are the only eternal things apart from God and his word. As C.S. Lewis beautifully states, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” Treat all of God’s created humans with dignity, as they all bear God’s image.

However, that does not mean that all should receive the same priority and position in your heart and mind and soul. Spouse and children should always receive your best, the first fruits of your love and time and energy and devotion, for you are one with your spouse, and from that one comes more lives.

After that, determine who God has specifically called you to love. More than your general goodwill towards others, these people receive more conscious effort and time.

Yes, we are called generally to love our neighbor, but just as the whole world cannot live on one block, so too we can not give the full measure of our love to every human on earth. With the prioritization of some comes the de-prioritization of many. Good. You can do no good to anyone if you are attempting to do some good to everyone. Love them, pray for them, but do not give more of yourself than you should.

A brief word on toxic people. Their influence on your life should be limited, if not entirely eliminated. These are the people who choose to do violence to your heart and the world around them, and we ought to pity and love them. Most are blind to the destruction they cause, much less the pain and trauma that caused destruction in them! This does not mean we are intended to fix them all, though sometimes we may be asked to engage them more than we would like and be a part of the healing process. For the rest, pray for them and in love cast them and all of their carnage into the River of Life to be taken immediately downstream and out of sight. God will love them perfectly, even in your absence.

Disregarding the nuances of people, which I will discuss in the future, all that is left is things.

Work and create things that bring light and beauty and hope in Jesus into direct contact with the darkness of the world. Do not waste time with the hopeless and the morbid, remember what I said about sewers.

While created to work and co-create with God, our work is still a thing, and must take a position behind God and others, and one only slightly above possessions and toys. They will rot, your soul will not.

This prioritization of life leads to incredible freedoms and joys. You will live life as God intended, and you will experience the blessings he’s always intended for you to enjoy. It will shape your mind and thinking, your heart and emotions, your efforts and time, and all the while you will know greater peace because you have aligned your life with the priorities of heaven.

All things are not created equal. Quit spending your life like they are. Prioritize your life accordingly.

The Purpose of Your Existence

We systematize everything. It is all strategy and optimization and return on investment paired with a constant uneasy feeling that something could have been done better, or someone else is out there doing it better, or you could have given more, sacrificed more, been more.

And that’s the problem. We’re too busy doing that we can’t just be. But please, spend your life existing and not doing.

Everything about you and your existence is miraculous. Go ahead, take some time right now to give intentional thought to all of the things that exist the way they do so that you can exist the way you do. Go down into the minutiae of the cell and all the way back out to the order of the universe. Go wherever God takes you, and marvel.

You are not an accident. You are a miracle. And that’s just looking at the fact that you exist.

Far above and beyond your existence, however, is the purpose you exist:

You exist to be loved by God.

He spoke into nothing and created light. The light was and is necessary to make God’s creative works visible and life possible. It was only after light was created that everything else came into resplendent being.

Light is so important to reality that it had to be reintroduced into a world darkened by evil. It was reintroduced by the Light himself incarnating into the dust and grit of life. And then it was given to us by God himself as he called us The Light of the World.

What does his light illuminate? Tracing every now-visible act of his hand and expression of his heart and exertion of his will back to their source, we see that his light ultimately and always illuminates his love.

Because of love God created. Because of love God sustains all things. Because of love God gives himself to us, illuminating for us himself, ourselves, and the world around us in the process.

Because of Love you exist.

Do not be fooled by darkness, which promises fulfillment, but neither be fooled by well-intentioned followers of Jesus who, in their attempts to live in the light, become infatuated with darkness instead. Unfounded and constant claims of power and victory, incessant handling of wounds to discover their origin and psychoanalyze their attributes, and futile attempts to ignore the implications and effects of darkness (with one eye always on the dark, lest it overtake them) only serve to bind us more and more completely to the darkness.

Instead, choose light. Over and over again, in the expanse of joy and the delicate salt of tears, choose light. This leads ultimately to your decision to be loved.

Be loved. It is resolved reality, you are loved. It is daily choice, you receive love. It is identification with our true identity, I am Beloved.

Apart from Love, nothing eternal exists. Choose love and trace its path back to its origin, you will always find the divine.

Be Beloved, and you become divinity wrapped in flesh, God’s original intention when he blew warm breath into dust.

The Divinity of Loving Others

Love people.

    It’s simple, but it’s not easy.

    There is not a greater calling in life or a better goal to aim for. It is the greatest commandment, included in the same breath as “Love God.” There is no more divine call, no moment in life more divine than when you give your love away.

    That’s a thought: you and I are most like God, most bearing his image when we love. He is slow to anger and quick to love, and we are prone towards the exact opposite. So as we choose love to rule our lives down to the most minute detail, we become mirrors of the divine.

    What better way to make earth look more like heaven than to love. Not simply because love rules the heavens and sustains the cosmos (which He does), but because of the effect love has upon people, relationships, and societies as a whole. Drawing the best out of people can be attempted by berating and scolding them, but I think we know that love and encouragement holds far more power to unleash the potential of a soul than cynicism and criticism.

    As people are loved, they operate out of safety. It’s funny, safety doesn’t equate to complacency, which I think some overbearing fathers and mothers fear and therefore push their children far further than they should. Safety actually does just the opposite. It creates a platform from which to spring into the full expression of our gifts and goodness. Fear cripples creativity, while love unleashes it. Love thus retains the potential to improve the world around us and allows our God-given glory to shine. I say “retains” because it is dormant until we pick it up, make it our own, and give it away.

    Love is exhausting, because parts of our heart must be involved in the process of loving, and parts of our heart are given away as we give our love to others. They now possess something of you and are free to do what they want with it. This incredibly vulnerable and generous piece of yourself is at the mercy of another, many others if we are living life well, and you no longer have say in how it is treated and cared for. This would lead to a fatigue, burnout, and total depletion of life and love were it not for God’s perfect love for us, which never let’s our well run dry, and the love that others are giving us.

    This giving of love must include receiving in order to reach its full expression. We cannot experience the full scope of love and its transformative power by only giving love away. We must receive love as well. And just as we give a piece of ourselves away as we love, so too we receive pieces of others when they love us. We are slowly but surely becoming the sum of all of the loves in our hearts, if we choose to be that is.

    We can choose to be filled with things besides love: lust and physicality, anger and gossip, aggression and malice. That is what we can give away and, if that is the chosen path, what we will receive. We will have no capacity for love if we only extend hate. All of these things will accumulate in our hearts and we will be different people, shaped by everything we choose to let into our hearts and give away from there. Hate will breed hate, while love will fuel abundant life.

    Love people. It’s not rocket science, but it feels equally as hard to execute. Settling for anything less as the standard for your life will be an absolute waste.

The Power of Words

Don’t waste your words.

    There isn’t enough time. Life is full of too many regrets already. There are already so many malevolent and selfish influences in the lives of the ones you love.

    If you have a hard time imagining the importance of your words, imagine your fully grown children. Imagine having given an abundance of harmful, shaming, and discouraging words over the course of their lives. Imagine what that has done to their interior life. Their spirit. Their relationships. All from your mouth as their parent.

    Now imagine having done just the opposite for 30 years. Words of affirmation, love, affection, support flowing steadily from your heart out of your mouth. Imagine their demeanor, their confidence, their countenance, their relationships.

    You treat, or will treat, your children the way you treat everyone else. If you think that they will be different, that you will speak to them so differently and supportively just because they are your kids, you are mistaken. The way you treat the rest of the world will determine how you treat your children, especially with the words that come from your lips. 

Our language is habitual, springing from the posture of our hearts, which is formed by where we settle our attention. The difference between a defensive, tense, unsafe, scared, angry heart and a safe, loving, gentle, restful, at peace heart is vast. Don’t waste your time rummaging in the garbage heaps of life that are so often called “pop culture” or “normal.” Reject it. Resist it. Run the opposite direction.

It is for this reason God wants us to consider all that is good and true and lovely and excellent and praiseworthy and admirable. Our hearts are constantly being shaped, and we settle into the taught modes of being we acquired from our family of origin as well as the paths of least resistance. No matter what others tell you or what you tell yourselves, our default is not goodness.

We are selfish creatures who flaunt the idea of tolerance like it is a good thing, but the fact of the matter is that tolerance falls far, far short of the biblical ideal of love. Though stated as the societal ideal, tolerance only lasts in us as long as I can do what I want without you impinging on me. Once you have hindered me from attaining what I want in your pursuit of what you want, I am no longer tolerant, and I’m sure as hell not loving. That is the ceiling of our tolerance, and if we were to be honest with ourselves, our ceiling is very, very low.

The biblical command is love. The type of love that sacrifices itself for the good of others. The type of love that builds others up and rages against moments when they are torn down. The type of love that fosters safety and support, encouraging others so completely and regularly that they believe in the God of possibilities’ ability to empower and uplift them. Yes, even them! And this is only possible from hearts that are rooted in the perfect love of God, whose attention never wavers and whose power never fails.

To settle our hearts in the love of God means to settle ourselves into the affection and delight of God over us. We sink deeply into his desire for connection with us, we embrace his open heart, and we marvel at the wounds on the body of Jesus that accomplished this for us. We affirm that nothing can separate us from this love. Nothing. And we live like it for the rest of our lives, knowing that if this were the one thing we knew of God during our time on earth, it would be enough.

Our words of love must spring up from hearts that have received and welcomed the divine words of love God speaks over us. And when faced with every other alternative, every other place we could spend our words, every other fountain they could spring from, every other purpose they could have, it becomes clear that there is only one place that truly deserves to be spoken from.

Don’t waste your words. Speak them from your heart of love, which has found its home in the heart of Perfect Love.

Don't "What If?" Your Way Through Life

Don’t “What If?” Your way to the end of your life. For so many reasons.

    First, what an absolutely miserable existence. To have something that you know you could do or wish you would do and to just never take the uncountable opportunities you had to just do it. If we’re honest with ourselves we choose not to do these things because of any number of reasons, and these things would all be a huge benefit to your life and the life of those around you, because our hearts would truly long for something if it did not have the possibility of great benefit to your world.

    Second, imagine all of those things that people wished they would do. Now imagine if they would just do them. How much happier would everyone be? How much better would the world be because of our progress and discovery and benevolence toward each other? How much more safe and free and joyful would we all be if we knew and pursued those great dreams that lie within our hearts? And again, we speak only of those which lie at our deepest core as designed by God, the core that is beloved, safe, secure, confident, courageous, and benevolent. Those are the things we will recall on our deathbed and imagine how life could have been different, better.

    Third, how much more would your personal life manifest the kingdom of God. In acting and creating we are bringing forth the realities of heaven that God has placed in our hearts. This takes great honesty with ourselves, because, even though we go to church on Sundays, if we live like hell we won’t reliably produce heaven. But if our true desire is to delight in God and remain in regular intimacy with Him, then much of the learning will happen as we create and labor. We didn’t have to be perfect before we came to the cross and received the fullness of God’s forgiveness and love, so why do we think we need to be perfect before we start creating and acting?

    Fourth, I could not imagine a better way to kill the fear of man than to do the very thing that you think they will hate or judge or diminish or belittle you for. Imagine it is creating visual art. As long as you don’t create your art because of the opinions another has, you remain in the fear of man. But if we were to each push through that fear of man and create and act, regularly and authentically, we would break the power of opinion that we have agreed to because, not only are we going to get better at not believe the lie anymore, but we will be defiant of the critics, doing the very thing they say we shouldn’t.

    Fifth, I believe the people who would benefit the most from our lives were we to live them to their fullest expression would be those whom we love and care about the most. I sent something I had written to a cousin when I first started writing, and she responded with, “You are such a good writer, I can’t believe I’ve never read anything you’ve written!” With an included expression of personal benefit from the subject matter. The answer to her shock was easy: “You’ve never read anything I’ve written because I’ve never written anything!” The people we love and care for are the ones we long to see happy, to thrive, to exercise their gifts and talents and delights. It pains us to see them self-limiting, and regularly wish they could only see what we see in them. Then they would be free to fly! If only we could believe this for ourselves.

    There are plenty of other reasons that I wish I could communicate with full emotion and love on a page. But I don’t know that I need to. Maybe I just need to ask you to imagine the last day of your life, the last few minutes, and imagine what you had wished you’d cared about, who you’d listened to, how you spent your time, where you invested your heart, what you had wished you’d said and done. When you think of something that makes your heart swell and feel like bursting and sink at the very thought of having no time left to do it, act. Do everything it takes to do that thing.

    Instead of asking “What If?” on my deathbed, as I looked back on my days I’d like to spontaneously say, “Wow.”

Choose To Shine

I have been asking God to unleash heaven, and in my mind this has been something completely outside of myself. Like the glory cloud descends from on high, apart, other, and accessing it is a crapshoot, a lottery, a game of chance. So we try to tip the scale in our favor.

Like hoping we put ourselves in the right place at the right time. Like hoping to catch God in a good mood or generous moment. Like hoping we choose the right songs and anointed texts, say the right analogy and sing the right spontaneous words with the right melody. Like hoping we didn’t do too much this week to piss God off or make Him withdraw with arms crossed, head shaking in disappointment. Like hoping we grovel enough and believe the perfect things and repent with enough of our heart.

If we do these and a million other nuanced and mysterious things, then, we believe, God will unleash heaven in our midst. Then we might see the glory cloud, hear his voice, be healed, weep, experience something, anything transcendent.

But we’re mistaken. We’ve believed, you have believed a lie. Yes, it has been passed down and passed around and reinforced many times over by others, but YOU believed it. In fact, you have not simply believed this lie, you’ve owned it. Ingested it. Adopted it to be truth about you and the universe and God. But it’s a lie.

You see, while you and I have eternally attempted to ascend to the transcendent, the only Transcendence has eternally descended. To you. To me. To we.

As we have spent our days perfecting our high jump form, contracting and releasing muscles, directing eyes upwards, clearing mind and heart in the right sequence, right timing, right rightness in just one more vain attempt to reach God, God has invited us to just the opposite. To let Him reach us.

Uncontainable power could not be contained by flesh, but He made His choice.

Infinite knowledge and understanding could not fit inside one finite brain, but He made His choice.

Love without an end cap could not be found between 65 beats per minute, but He made His choice.

Death could not be swallowed up by life, digested and broken down into pieces by hope, joy and peace, and evacuated from a tomb after 3 days, but He made His choice.

And the unleashing of heaven could not be limited by the agency of fickle humans, so that its presence and power came and went only as freely as they chose, but He made His choice.

And because of His choices, the darkness that kept you from seeing and hearing and knowing the transcendent has been expelled by The Light, who is your life, and the power of illumination has been transferred to you. You now have the power to shine! 

We do so by choice.

Choosing to create rather than destroy.

Choosing to bless rather than curse.

Choosing to engage life rather than numb ourselves to it.

Choosing to shine rather than hide.

Choosing to do so brightly. Boldly. Bravely into any pocket or stronghold of darkness you find in this world, with the same confidence you have that a dark room will be bright when you flip a switch. 

A dark room is a reality, but it is not truth. The truth becomes known as the contours of and objects within a room are revealed by light, thus dispelling that former “reality” of darkness.

So it is for those of us who are not only children of light, but ARE light in the Lord. When you choose to  illuminate reality with the light of your true self as defined by God, the darkness of the world fades and God’s Truth is revealed everywhere around you. At home. In church. On the playground. In the hospital bed.

What’s more, anything that receives your touch of light becomes a light as well, which continues a centuries old chain of re-creation. Someone chooses to be light, the illuminated life shines on “reality”, Truth is revealed, and those who were once darkness are offered the choice to be light and illuminate the world around them, beginning the process anew.

Heaven is not unleashed by God from somewhere out there in unpredictable ways at arbitrary times in accidental places. It is unleashed in every moment you choose to shine.

He made His choice. It is time to make yours.

God Delights In You

It’s like I want to interact with everyone, have them sit down across from me, and ask them to shut up for a second. It feels like everyone who comes to me wants something from me. And I just want them to press pause. Stop thinking, for one second, about everything they are trying to get. All the posturing, all the reacting, all the influencing, all the manipulation, all the “right” words used, the looks, the glances, the clothes, the selfies, the filters, the gym time. Just drop it for a second. Take a deep breath. Shut up. Stop fidgeting. Just. Exist.

Start to acknowledge and receive God’s love. You are a miracle. Literally a skin-bag of organs, bones, muscles, and a million other things that function and give you life. And your life is on purpose. Nothing to do with your parents. Nothing to do with your circumstances. You are on purpose because God said so. He SAYS so. Every day, every moment, every breath is because he says so. He sees you. He knows you. He literally is in you as he expands and contracts your lungs, filling them with his air.

Wait. I saw that. Don’t get distracted. Disregard every other “reality” of life. This is THE Reality. Nothing is more important than your very existence. Because by it we know we are seen, and that we are loved. And not just a, “Yeah God keeps me alive so that means I’m loved.” Of course it does! AND on top of that, you are delighted in!

This overwhelming, affectionate heart of God has been veiled too long! It has been misinterpreted, mistreated, and misrepresented so horrifically that people ACTUALLY think God is about rules! How wonderfully absurd! Wonderful because the Truth is So. Much. Better. If we took a moment to tell off the other places we go for validity, we must take a moment to tell off every incorrect notion of God we have. No matter if it is deeply ingrained or shallowly tolerated, it must be jettisoned. Like, comically put on a rocket and sent it the hell away from here.

Your boring and dispassionate experience at grandma's church when you were little. The disgusting words said to you from the lips of a Christian. The judgmental stares, mean rumors, vile evils done to you that in your head were strongly or loosely connected to the name of Jesus. And, without diminishment or invalidating them, your pain. Your scars. Your wounds. Your tears. Those matter, and Jesus will redeem them. But at this very moment they must be let go.

All must be lost. Completely abandoned. So that in this moment your heart can hear one thing.

GOD DELIGHTS IN YOU.

The one who made you, formed you, put that silly freckle in your earlobe and chose the perfect pitch for your laughter and extended your nose to its exact stopping point in the world.

The one who has counted and caught every tear that has broken the threshold of your lower eyelid and all the others that didn’t, holding you as you ugly cried uncontrollably.

The one who walks with you in your favorite places, seeing and smiling at all the little things that make you giggle quietly to yourself and remember how glad you are to be alive.

The one who has seen every middle finger you have extended towards the heavens as you spewed the most colorful language you knew, pouring your rage and pain and doubt and fear out at him.

The one who knows every question of your heart and refuses to give you the “right Christian answer” while telling you to suck it up, but instead holds your hand every step of the journey.

The one who knows the most horrific things you’ve done and said and thought, those things that have ruined lives and derailed futures and broken hearts, including your own.

That God, HE is the one who delights in YOU.

It doesn’t make sense. It is overwhelming. It must and it will speak into every moment of your life. It will be a lifelong wrestling match. It will make you laugh and cry and mad and peaceful. But this perfect, unqualified, unloseable AND unearnable, unchanging, generous, intense, and joyful delight and love from God is the truest thing about you. Nothing else defines you. Personality is weak. Gifts and strengths are pathetic. Looks, relationships, accomplishments, possessions. Garbage. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying and is not representing God.

God delights in you.

Now, Oh Delightful One, let’s spend every moment living as royalty and inviting everyone into this family, created and stitched together by Love Himself.