A Story of Holy Irony

I want to tell a story about something that happened to me this week. It’s not a very flattering story but it was an important lesson to… um, experience. The point of the lesson, and the story, is that often I still take pride in trying to run my own life and the little money that I have is a large part of that pride. Also, God has a way of making these things clear.

Here is the Story: in the near future I am probably going to start raising support for the ministry that I am a part of right now. To prepare for it I have been learning that when you ask people for money you are really asking them to join you in being a part of what God is doing, something that is bigger than themselves, and that is the more important part. Henri Nouwen says though that you cannot really ask people to share their money in this way unless you are completely free from feeling like you need the money more than you trust God.

I have never really wanted to make a lot of money or be rich, that's just never been a goal of mine. Two years ago I actually quit my sufficiently paying tech job to take a job, actually jobs, that didn't pay enough but were things I wanted to be doing. It's one thing to say that money isn't a big deal but I learned it's another to actually make moves to let go of even what little you have. God has been faithful though and I have always ended up with what I needed though I can't really explain how. So in light of my life situation I can usually say with confidence that money really isn't a big deal.

But so here's the point: this past week I was biking from work to home as I usually do and in a moment of carelessness I hit a taxi's side mirror and totally destroyed it. Half an hour of frustrating conversation with the driver later, I owed a substantial (for my circumstances) amount of money to him for breaking his mirror. The whole thing could have been worse but it was cold, I was tired and hungry, and I was very unhappy about the situation. All I could think about was that I had just wasted half of my paycheck. I don’t believe in coincidence anymore but I just could not understand why that had just happened.

About twenty minutes later while still riding home, an impatient driver cut me off with a somewhat risky move only to stop at a red light. It was not an wise thing to do by the driver but really it was no big deal. I, however, flipped out at him, yelling and cursing and personally insulting him as I passed by. He of course could only honk at me, so he did. Predictably the whole thing left me feeling not at all better. I immediately thought about what I had said to our College Group about cursing just days before. What I had said is this: using four letter words is not in itself a sin, but it is a demonstration of what is going on in our heart. Often when we curse, it shows that we don't trust God to take care of us in our situation. I very clearly was not trusting God to take care of me in light of the money that I now owed.

So to recap, I'm learning about how it will be important in the next step that I am taking to be totally confident in God and not be attached to the money I will be asking for.  Then I unexpectedly owe money that I can't really afford because of a moment of foolishness. THEN I demonstrate how tightly I still hold the money that I do have by taking it out on this poor guy. I think God has a masterful sense of timing.

The point of course, is that I often still take try to run my own life and the money I have to build myself some security. When Jesus says we cannot serve two masters He is right. If I am trying to give myself value by running my own life, I am a slave to myself. If I rely on the money that I have instead on the Promise of my Creator, I am a slave to the money. But Jesus died to break our bondage to anything that keeps us from running to him. That’s why I hit that guy’s mirror.

The Hustle Prayer

   During my last year of college, I had so much to do and so little time to do it that I would write down all my assignment dates on a calendar and tape it to my wall. I called it my Semester Evacuation Plan. I do not credit this with me making it through that last year; instead I give that credit to the Hustle Prayer.

   The Hustle Prayer was a prayer that I made up in college for when things got really difficult and I didn’t feel like I had enough time in the day to do everything that needed to be done. I would say, “LORD, Please help me get done today what needs to get done. What doesn’t get done I trust You that it didn’t need to get done today.” The thing that I noticed was that on the days that I did not pray like this on my train ride to school, I was far more stressed than on the days that I did pray this way. It wasn’t about the words that I was saying, instead it was the change was in the attitude of my heart and the invitation for God to come fill it that God responded to. The days that I prayed the Hustle Prayer I was more intentionally relying on God’s promises to take care of me instead of carrying that burden all by myself.

   Recently the Hustle Prayer has been coming back into my mind because sometimes I don’t feel like I have the energy or the focus to get all of the things done. Earlier this week as I was praying it occurred to me: what if I applied the Hustle Prayer not just to today, but to my whole life? To be honest this was a scary thought. I have a lot of things that I would love to do, or try, or learn, in this one lifetime that I have. At the same time a large part of my relationship with Jesus has been when and how much do I submit to his will for my life and how much do I rebel and try to do my own thing? (The answer, of course, is that I should always submit to my loving Creator, but I don’t always make wise choices.) So to trust God that the things that need to happen in my life will happen and to trust that the things that do not happen did not need to happen is a very uncomfortable Idea.

   We love to think that if we try hard enough we can make some value for ourselves. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who at some point wasn’t trying to feel a sense of self-worth because of what they accomplished.  But do we really want to live like that forever, in this world where we can’t even guarantee who will live past tomorrow? It seems like a very difficult and unnecessary burden to take on. I am all for trying things that are hard, but no matter what we accomplish that feeling of self-worth eventually goes away and where are we left? Jesus says “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”[1] We were designed to rely on the loving Designer and then everything else falls into place. The easiest time to remember this is when you have more on your plate than you think you can handle. The hardest time to live this out is when you actually have to let go and trust that God is actually a loving Designer and will not let you down.

   I heard someone say once that engineers think: “I could lift the world if you gave me somewhere to put the crane” meaning that the same laws of Physics that apply to very small things also apply to very big things. What if every day I committed to rely on my Creator for my full life plan the same way I do for the days that seem so hard? How would that change the way I anticipate the future?

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[1] Matthew 11:28 NIV

What are you worth?

   When I became an adult I thought that I would finally have everything figured out, and that the other adults around me would have it figured out too. Not only did I find out that’s not true, but I also found out that everyone is trying to figure out what the heck they are doing. Adults, Teens, kids, we all want to know what we are worth, and we all desperately cling to things that we hope give us value.

   This upcoming weekend is the Youth Group’s Coffeehouse event. Coffeehouse is our big event that is part family dinner, part live music, and part talent show. My favorite part of the event is that it is entirely planned and executed by high school students with one college leader as a point person. While Coffeehouse has evolved over the years as the Youth Group’s interests have changed, it has always been a significant memory within the family. Coffeehouse is a big deal in my world, and between it, Thanksgiving, and the impending Christmas season, November feels like a busy month. As a result I have been feeling more acutely my weaknesses in time management and staying on top of things.

   This week I feel like I have not been very productive and it leads to me feeling insecure like I am inadequate. I am not by nature a planner; I tend much more to be a figure-it-out-as-you-go-along person. This makes me very good at last minute situations, relative to the population, but not very good at preparing things well in advance. I have found that in working with youth, being adjustable is very valuable; and however, it is certainly not the most efficient method of getting work done. This is not new to me of course, I have been wired in a certain way all of my life, but moments come when I forget who I am and feel like I am supposed to be more effective, more productive, and more efficient. These feelings almost always result in a voice saying that I am not good enough and that in the end, I am inadequate.

   This, however, is not the truth. The truth is that my value is not connected to my productivity or my efficiency or my effectiveness or even my ability as a leader or even my adequacy as an adult in general. My worth is not determined by who hires or fires me, or what my boss or the people around me think of me, or even what you, the reader, think of me. I am valuable because the Creator God, who designed me and gave me purpose, loves me and says that I belong to him. This is what I was reminded of this week when I felt like I should have been more productive this week. John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, wrote, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God.”[1] And most amazing of all, there is nothing that I can do to diminish my worth because God will not disown me. Paul, who began his career BY PERSECUTING BELIEVERS later wrote, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”[2] My Creator delights in me, and no matter how bad things get there is nothing that will ever change that.

   One of our undercurrent themes this year at Youth Group is that living as a Believer is counter-cultural. The reminder I got this week is the perfect example of that. This world works in a way that screams that your value is in what you contribute, or your monetary “net worth”, or what people think of you (including what your legacy will be). It is totally 100% the opposite to live with the truth that, while some of those things have value, none of them have anything to do with what you are worth. Your worth is based only on the love that the Creator has for you, and that will never go away.

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[1] 1 John 3:1

[2] Romans 8:1

You Can Do Hard Things

You can do hard things. I can’t count how many times I heard that from my Father growing up. It’s funny to me now because I say it to my students all the time, and this week I have taken it up a notch. Not only can we do hard things, it is our job to do them. We must step into the difficult situations that come up, and do the hard things.

Doing hard things then means getting past your fear of what might happen. Most hard things are hard to do because we are afraid of something. Put more simply, it is fear that makes things hard. We hesitate to do hard things because we do not want the pain, the embarrassment, the potential failure; in short we are afraid of the cost. This is not a judgment, its just an assessment: fear makes it hard to do hard things. This is why having courage is so important: because it takes courage to do hard things. Courage doesn’t mean not being afraid, it means being willing to do something even though you are afraid. This is what it means when to do hard things. This is we can do hard things, because God has given us the gift of courage to push through the discomfort or the fear or the pain. It’s a good thing too, because it’s our job to do hard things.

Let me explain why it’s our job to do hard things in a story. In the Old Testament story of David and Goliath, David is a young boy from a small village that has been left at home while his older brothers went to fight and invading army led by the giant Goliath. In the story, David is sent by his Father to bring food to his brothers at the Front. When he finds that the giant Goliath has been challenging anyone on the Israelite side to a duel and that everyone on the Israelite side has been hiding from Goliath in fear. David goes to the king and declares that he will fight Goliath. Of course the king laughs at the idea of David, who is a boy, fighting the giant Goliath who has been fighting for longer than David has been alive. But when he sees that David is determined, the King decides it is worth a shot. He dresses David in his own armor and gives him his own sword to make him more battle-ready. But David, who is a boy, is too small for the armor and not accustomed to fighting with the sword. He claims he cannot fight with them and instead goes out to meet Goliath with just his sling.

This is one of the most amazing things to have been recorded in history (you can read the rest in 1 Samuel, chapter 17) but, of course, there’s more going on under the surface. Earlier in the book of Samuel, before Goliath brings his army to Israel, we meet David. Samuel, writer of the book, prophet of God, is sent to anoint a new king because God has rejected King Saul. Samuel ends up at the house of David’s father and sees all of David’s well-built older Brothers. Samuel expects to anoint one of them but God rejects them all. David is finally sent for from where he was taking care of his father’s animals and Samuel anoints him as God’s chosen king of Israel.

Think about David’s moment with the King now. King Saul, the one David has been chosen to replace (though Saul doesn’t know it yet), is supposed to be the one facing the threat of Goliath and leading his men into battle. Instead it is David, who is a boy, doing what the King should be doing and making the hard decision to not be held back by his fear. David the anointed King was leading the nation of Israel the way that Saul the real king was supposed to be doing. David recognized it was the King’s job to do the hard thing and he stepped into it.

We are called to be different. To have value and make decisions that fly in the face of what our world says makes sense. This is hard; and it’s hard because it is scary. What will people think of you? What will they say? What if you do it and you’re wrong? But Jesus says he will never leave us and that he loves us. And because he loves us we can trust him when he says that he has made his plan in our best interest, we simply need to follow where he is calling us. And that takes courage.

Look how far we've come my dear

                  This past week I returned to my regularly scheduled work program as Youth Director at my Church after taking on our intense summer program for the months of July and August. My first order of business has been to prepare my Leadership teams for the fall. This is exciting to me because Leadership development and Discipleship are things that I am passionate about and these are the things that our program is designed to encourage. It is a little surreal however because it reminds me of last year at this time when I was just beginning as the official youth director, and It shows me how far God has brought me in my internal life.

                Last year at this time I was in the middle of a year in which I quit my sufficiently paying job that I did not enjoy to teach soccer to children on a part time basis; a job that most definitely did not make enough live off of. The goal was not to be as financially unwise as I could be but rather to follow where I felt God was leading me. I was also challenged to believe that if He was who I believed He was when I had enough, then he would be that same trustworthy, all-providing God when I didn't have enough. That one job quickly turned into two, and by the end of the summer I was working three jobs Including the Youth Director position at the Church.

                So last September at this time I was working three jobs and was focused on reorganizing the Youth Group leadership teams I would rely on and work with at church. At the time my role was temporary and we didn't know how long I would be in it or what would happen next, so we prepared prepare the Leadership teams to be able to run themselves and run the youth program on their own. Since then, both the youth group and the Leadership teams have matured and developed significantly. It was very exciting to see five of the leaders that I have watched grow for years graduate out of High School this past spring. Now, as I prepare to work with a different set of Leaders I am reminded of how much I have grown as well.

                I have been involved with this youth group continuously since I was in High School. That experience has allowed me to know each program through and through. What I didn't know when I began working as the Youth Director was how to implement the programs, and how to cast the vision for where the youth group would go. In short, I didn't know what I was doing, and I didn't know how little I actually knew. Fortunately that first task of rebuilding the Leadership teams was a short term goal that had to be accomplished before the rest of the youth group could be built on it. I was not prepared to cast a long term vision for the youth group and God knew it so gave me something small first. In the last year I have learned how much I actually know, and how little that actually is in the grand scheme of things. I have also learned to look for the next step while my leaders continue to capably run the week to week youth programs.

                Learning these things has required me to frequently step out of my comfort zone. I quickly reached the end of what I knew how to do before hitting a significant learning curve. These days that learning curve looks to be getting steeper as every step forward is new. It's an exciting time but it is also constant work. I am repeatedly faced with the decision to humble myself or to try do it on my own when I know that I don't have a clue. Ironically, this is the decision I put on my youth in the leadership teams all the time so that they can grow. It's good to know the learning process is the same at 26 as it is at 16. This road is a good one and when I'm honest with myself I remember that I really do enjoy learning new levels of leadership and working with people; I just don't enjoy the hard work and letting go of my ego. This road is a good one thought, and mostly it's because I'm not making it up, instead I'm looking for where God is working, and following him there.

                2 Corinthians 12:9