going for it

I’m sitting here drinking some French press and listening to Gary Go sing ‘Wonderful’.

I’m wondering if change made his way to your door? It seems he’s been making rounds. Did you at least open the door and hear him out? Did he stir something in you…something you forgot about? Did he spin you around and remind you of the dreams you used to dream and tell you it’s still possible?

Yeah, me, too.

I decided to do it. Risk. That’s what it is and I believe that things don’t change, move or become without risk. It was scary at first. I was secure, but in a place I didn’t want to be. I’m not a ’signs’ person, but they were there. When I would ask for confirmation, I learned that the confirmation comes after the risk.

And they have. I acted in faith first and then little flowers in my new field started to pop up. I’m not completely off the old bus, yet, but my stop is coming up. I didn’t plan the stop and have nowhere to sleep once I’m off. I also don’t have the extra money for an unexpected layover, but I know my next bus will be along shortly. Until then, I’ll be a bit of a transient in need of a bath. I know I’ll doubt and feel foolish in the hard times, but then I’ll remember the words I’m typing you and I’ll keep at it.

Do you know what I’m talking about? Where are you in this journey?

You know, change will come whether you submit to it or not. You can kick and scream or you can jump and watch it happen from the sky. I’m the crazy person who is talking to you while I’m decked out in my skydiving get-up. If you could see my eyes through my goggles, you would see a crazy fear excitement. Listen, I’m doing this. I have a place waiting on me and I’ve been waiting on it for a long time. I just have to jump.

It’s all about you, now. Did change leave his number? Call him one more time and make sure you heard him right. Then stop being a wimp and put your goggles on. Don’t forget to tighten your laces.

Here’s one last thing. When Jesus told his disciples to go, they didn’t worry about the way it would affect their families. What Jesus wanted them to do was more important. They’ve seen people get turned away from a life with him because they were afraid to leave their security and they never got to experience the life with Jesus. It wasn’t always wonderful, they were abused as much as they were loved. But it was exhilarating to follow a man who went against the grain and they always seemed to be taken care of.

When Jesus sent the disciples to preach in other places, he stayed back and went into their villages. Only when you leave your security, and you may be leaving holes, will Jesus come in and fill the holes and do it better than you could have.

When Jesus finished placing this charge before his twelve disciples, he went on to teach and preach in their villages. -Matthew 11:1

Well, I’m off. I hope I’ll see you there. Maybe after it settles down, we can catch up and share our journey’s over coffee.

be the upheaval

it’s time to be the change you want to see. heal the divisions. it’s easy to sit in your little world and complain, but can you get outside and start a revolution? be the difference. 

You can’t get love if you don’t give it.  You can’t be free unless you loose what is bound.  Hatred breathes and grows and consumes what is owned and the object of what you despise may never know what you wish to demise.  Forgiveness is your weapon.  Love is your power and your reward.  

We are one breed, one in kind and classification.  We shred ourselves by divisions in race, religion, failure and aspiration.  Misery loves company and the only thing to show for your union is a dark and damp offering to the gods of the diseased selfishness.  Love is the hardest thing to choose because it causes you to deny yourself and open up to the failures of others. 

Superstitions and dusty traditions hold back the innovators and originators.  How can you be something new if you don’t do something you’ve never done?  How can you learn if you don’t open up to the idea that you have something yet to learn?

Take everything that you can physically lose and mentally lose it.  Find who you are in the loss of everything that has always defined you. 

Befriend an unlikely.  Forgive the blameworthy.  Love the insufferable. 

Be the upheaval.  

letters

I got a letter from a reader the other day. it was titled ‘First thoughts after getting kicked in the gut...’ It went well with the other explanations people give when they’re reading. Men, if they’ve been there, want to know if they’re going to cry all the way through, or just during the first half. If they haven’t been there, they feel like they’re getting kicked somewhere else. I have some who cry in the dedication.

People are telling me about healing and hope. Some are telling me about intense conviction and a leveling of religious ego and building up the ‘love’ that we’re meant to be defined by.

‘Grace Is For Sinners‘ covers so much territory. It seems to be whatever that person needs, whether they like it or not. It’s a challenge. For some, it’s the challenge of their life. It’s a journey that will leave you forever changed.

With her permission, here is an excerpt from my latest letter. Can you identify?

     Finished “Grace is for Sinners” …I intentionally didn’t read it at home, and waited until I was safely packed away on a business trip that would leave me in Isolation over the weekend. I read it then.

     So…here’s the initial reaction, …sobbing and all. At least you get to read it without the tear-stains. 

     I finished ‘Grace is for Sinners’ this afternoon. I started it a few days ago…read late the first night. Yesterday I didn’t pick it up. Partly because I didn’t want to face the rest of ‘Grace…’ quite yet. But I picked it up and finished the book my daughter calls ‘raw’. She is right. It’s raw and real and causes me to smell the smell of rotten stuff buried deep within myself. The smell of sin is hard to ignore when it surfaces.

     I walked a few blocks to help erase the smell. The breeze was fresh and clean and helped me to ignore the noxious odor. I had all but forgotten the stench. All but.

    Things were sifting around below the surface of my mind…I knew stuff was there, I didn’t want to think about them, yet. Then I looked up to the sky and tears came fast to my eyes.

     “I want to know You. I want to trust You completely. I can’t live this half-life anymore. Help me.”

     I was praying and walking back to the hotel. I don’t know what this all means. I do know that I don’t want life to go back to normal. Ever. I don’t want this to be a ‘high’ that gives me goosebumps and then is gone when ‘real life’ hits. It’s not a high. I’m as scared as I’ve ever been, and feel vulnerable.

     When my daughter asked my reaction, my word was ’shocked’. Not at the story…it’s all too known in the church today, in various ways, some subtle, some flaunted. Shocked was what I chose for how far from God’s Truth we have strayed, and how little we seem to realize or care that we have done so.

     You have voiced in this book much of what I’ve been trying to put to words for many long years. Why isn’t the church relevant to others as it should be? Why is the New Testament church not what we see today. How can we change what needs to be changed?

     I have clung to the hope that some day, some way, things would be better. Our lives would live up to what our mouths speak. Or our lives would follow what our hearts knew to be the Truth. I still have that hope. I don’t know if I will get to see it happen, but I know that God’s Bride will become the beauty he deserves.

jesus camp

A friend of mine sent her daughter to church camp this past week. They’re both fairly new to church and were excited. When her daughter got home, my friend wanted to know about her week and if she learned anything.

She had a blast. And she learned about something called ‘Camo Christians’. What are ‘Camo Christians’? Her daughter explained that they were people who call themselves Christians but don’t look like them. The kids at this camp were taught examples of how to call them out.

‘If you see someone drinking or smoking or something, you invite them to church. If they say they already go to their own church you give them a look and say, “Oh, you do?’ The look she demonstrated was one of disbelief and doubt.

“I’ve had it with you! You’re hopeless, you religion scholars, you Pharisees! Frauds! Your lives are roadblocks to God’s kingdom. You refuse to enter, and won’t let anyone else in either. You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You go halfway around the world to make a convert, but once you get him you make him into a replica of yourselves, double-damned.”  Jesus- Matthew 23:13-15

I know that this sort of thing is being taught because it’s evident in the lives of people who claim to be Christians. So much that it’s what the Christian population is known for. Self-righteous judgement. However, to know that church camps are putting children through role-playing scenarios on how to be Pharisees is appalling. 

When are people going to see that churches (in general) and the bulk of people who claim to be Christians are misled into Cul-De-Sacs of Crazy? The false teaching is heavily evident because they know we’re Christians by our judgemental attitudes.

“In too many ways the church has become an exclusive sub-culture that is appearance based. You will know they are Christians by what they do and don’t do, where they go and don’t go, who they associate with and who they disassociate. Whatever happened to letting them know you’re a Christian ‘by [your] love, by [your] love’? To the rest of the world, they have the disturbing appearance of being a group of one-dimensional robots where actions don’t line up with words. Usually it’s too much for any average outsider to stomach and that’s why you hear them talk about the church being full of hypocrites.” – ‘Grace Is For Sinners’ 

‘The way we know we’ve been transferred from death to life is that we love our brothers and sisters. Anyone who doesn’t love is as good as dead.’ - 1 John 3:14

ear candy

I like to listen to other preachers via podcast because it gives me an idea of what is being preached to the church. I listen to those who have large audiences because they’re obviously saying things that the public wants to hear. I listen to learn and I listen to observe.

When I’m caught up in the place where the speaker is caught up, it’s inspiring and I usually wish I could have a conversation with him/her.

Sometimes I am so appalled by the words that are coming out of thier mouths that I have to back it up and relisten, just so I’m sure I heard them right.

I listened to a man this morning talking about the perspective you should have when people move out of your life. His message was encouraging as far as looking at a friend moving away as a tool for God to teach you to not be too dependant on someone. He went on to say that if someone you love moves away or takes a new job, then they were never actually ‘with you.’ It’s a statement that makes no sense, but only served as the platter for a mutilated scripture (the only scripture he used) to puncuate his message.

He quoted 1 John 2:19. “They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.”

I guess, to the thousands of listeners this man reaches, it makes sense. You have to not know the Bible to make it work and even if that’s what the Bible meant, it says nothing. These people got all dressed up to go to church. Thier pastor recorded what he preached for a podcast that millions will listen to. They’re looking to learn something about God to grow spiritually and this is what they get. 

A motivational speaker dressed up like a preacher speaking a message that tantilizes their ears based on his own opinions and he throws in a scripture verse that doens’t even make sense in the context of his message. It’s grotesque. 

The conext of the verse he used is this:

Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us. – 1 John 2:18-19

So, according to this preacher, if a friend moves away or gets another job he’s the anti-christ. 

We need to study the Bible ourselves and check everything people are telling us. Most of this stuff makes no sense, but it takes people on an emotional roller coaster and makes them feel good for going to church. And we wonder why the majority of Christians can’t have an intelligent conversation about their faith. Not to mention the throngs of people who are walking away from the whole thing. 

We’re in a generation that want answers and want something real. This motivational speaker type pastor era that uses random sentences from the Bible to make a message sound religious is nauseating. You’re supposed to use your voice and position to teach the Bible. You’re not supposed to use the Bible to teach your position. 

Here’s what the passage that was used says a few verses later:

 “I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray.” – 1 John 2:26

the word is in

Here is the latest review of ‘Grace Is For Sinners’ as written by Mariah Secrest for Wrecked For The Ordinary: Social Action For Spiritual Misfits. (I love that name)

“When we talk about grace on Sunday morning, we often couch it in sacrosanct sentiment. We gloss over our (or others’) bevy of shortcomings with a wand of detachment, daring only to acquaint ourselves with some vague and perhaps grandiose notion of grace. When we depart into Sunday afternoon traffic, however, the thin vapor of grace as something lofty and intangible tends to evaporate.

 

Does grace really show up in the crevices of our lives? Grace looks pretty on paper, but is it just like the inflated legal tender of our collapsing economy-a currency that promises much but is backed with little value? Grace seems like something we should talk about only once we don’t need it. Do our inadequacies punch holes in the righteousness that Christ champions?   

Grace seems like something we talk about in the sanctuary, not the bars. We speak of it as though it is lightweight, floating around in the clouds as some ephemeral nicety. But grace is meant to go hand-in-hand with experience. It’s meant to be the flower pushing up through mud and grit. Grace is the cupful of water running over the dusty lips of those who are facedown in the desert. Grace is for sinners.

 

 

Serena Woods’ autobiographical account of her experience with grace minces no words. The opening chapter of Grace is for Sinners picks up her story with her on the bathroom floor, shutting her kids out from her so they won’t see her crying about the affair she was having with her friend’s husband.

 

She writes, “I was a Christian for nine years and never did anything like this before. I didn’t think I ever would. I had strong feelings and biting words for people who do what I did and there I sat, being who I hate and still being me, whom I loved. Two separate identities in one small body…I wondered that night, if hell was just separation from God.”

 

We have a difficult time extending grace to fellow believers. All manner of tangled questions arise as to how much God really forgives and what that means to those who sin and their community around them. Of course, we know in our heads that we are all sinners saved by grace-we can quote the verse-but sadly that often does little to prevent us from stratifying our degrees of righteousness for a handy reference point. This was very much Serena’s encounter with the church, and catching a glimpse of her heartbreaking experience of rejection shines a glaring Mag light on the high price of judgmental predispositions. Certainly, our failures bring enough devastation on themselves. But self-righteous judgment and moral stratification within the church can extenuate the damage beyond recovery.

 

Grace is for Sinners is the story of a woman who found grace where it was most needed and from the purest source-God Himself. But it came through the most painful of voyages across the wilderness of guilt, misguidance, and isolation. Christians who didn’t know how to handle grace on an industrial level burned the bridge that Christ meant to bring Serena back into restoration. Serena freely admits her guilt, but so convictingly reminds us, “Jesus didn’t hang on the cross in case you need him, he hung on the cross because you desperately need him.”   

This is, and has always been, the essence of the Gospel. Death to life. Brokenness to restoration.  The very experience of the Resurrection represents the transformation that each of us who claim Christ has undergone. We don’t get to hang on to just a little bit of our own moral status. He asks us to completely swap our attempts at holiness with his own. If we are still sitting in judgment of one remorseful believer’s failures over and against our own with no posture of restoration, it can only be because we ourselves have not found the profusion of healing that God aches for us to take from His scarred-over hands. Perhaps we are still cowering from our own guilt, covering it up by pointing at the decoy of others’ guilt. Grace levels the playing field. Redemption is meant for all. 

Grace, in short, is for sinners.”

 

wind hovering over the water

Remembering who we are is one of the hardest things to do. 

The experiences we have in flesh and blood distract us from the experiences that take place in the spirit, the ‘wind hovering over the water’ life.

It’s hard to rip the flesh out of the equation. Needs make us aware of the ability in our hands. Passion makes us aware of the energy in our shapes. Dreams make us aware of the potential in our time. Pain makes us aware of the energy in our tears. Anger makes us sense the power of our fists. We use God like a shovel. We wear God like cheap perfume. We use oils and chants as though God were a genie. Our sense of entitlement thinks God wouldn’t want us to cry. Our so called righteous indignation uses God like brass knuckles.

When will we see that the flesh is separate from the spirit? We have the freedom to move about the world and all of its experiences without being bound to them. Things in this life do not sustain us because their loss cannot break us. We navigate our lives choosing liberation or capture.

It’s not about choosing right for the sake of choosing right. You’re choosing freedom. Not freedom from pain, failure, consequences or punishment. These are all things that have to do with the flesh. Flesh is relative and based on perspective.

Freedom has to do with the spirit. Nothing in the here and now should be used to navigate you. Only distract you. You have a force working against your freedom. An enemy who wants you to feel not only pain, guilt and uncertainty, but also relief, success and security.  We are distracted by all of those things. We are tied to all of those things. We are held captive by our flesh in more ways than we know.

The power of the wind. An invisible force gentle enough to make chimes sing. Sturdy enough for birds to rest their wings. Strong enough to put a farmer’s tractor in the trees. The power of the wind hints at a terrifying and awesome invisible made visible by the effects it has on what we can actually see.

Flesh is only a whisper, not an infallible entity. Don’t submit to things that die with passing time. It’ll never be fascinating enough to hold you and it will never be simple enough to make you understand.  

“You’re not listening. Let me say it again. Unless a person submits to this original creation—the ‘wind-hovering-over-the-water’ creation, the invisible moving the visible, a baptism into a new life—it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom. When you look at a baby, it’s just that: a body you can look at and touch. But the person who takes shape within is formed by something you can’t see and touch—the Spirit—and becomes a living spirit.”

~ Jesus, John 3 5-6 MSG

 

vacancy

Last night was the final session for ‘The Pilot’ group of the ‘Grace Is For Sinners: Bible Study.’ Six weeks isn’t that long, compared to the connections that we made with each other.

They were trying to figure out ways to stay connected, joking around about trying to sneak into the next group, when someone mentioned coming to the final session of every group. All of the groups adding up and getting together at the last session.

I love this idea.

In the first meeting, I propose a challenge to those who come. The challenge to not only recognize the flaw in the religious system and need for change, but to be the change. We spend the next four weeks digging into the system, comparing and contrasting common practice against scripture, results and overall message. At the final session, I ask a series of questions to see what they have learned.

‘The Pilot’ group wants to be there to hear the answers. I think they’re taking the challenge to be a part of a group of people who ‘get it’ seriously. They are determined to be the change.

It will be so inspiring to watch the final sessions grow over time and for everyone to connect with others who have the same challenge and goal.

“The whole point of what we’re urging is simply love — love uncontaminated by self-interest and counterfeit faith, a life open to God. Those who fail to keep to this point soon wander off into cul-de-sacs of gossip. They set themselves up as experts on religious issues, but haven’t the remotest idea of what they’re holding forth with such imposing eloquence.” (1 Timothy 1:5)

Pre-orders

Four days ago I started taking pre-orders for ‘Grace Is For Sinners’ and over twenty have sold. A few months back I remember thinking that it would feel cool to sell ten.

I know a group of ladies who want to read ‘Grace Is For Sinners’ in their book club. Some have considered going through the book in their small groups. It’s definitely a conversation starter simply because the book offers a different perspective on sin, failure, God and grace than you’ll easily find elsewhere.

If you’re interested in being one of the first to have the book, order the book for yourself, your friends or book club before December 10. The orders will be placed on December 11 and should arrive before Christmas. This date is only for pre-orders, so pay no attention to it if you’re not concerned about getting it before Christmas.

After the book is released, possibly toward the end of January, there will be a book release party with food and drinks. It will be set up a little like a book club so that those who are reading or have read ‘Grace Is For Sinners’ can talk about how it impacted their lives: whether they hate or love it. 

Send an email through the contact page if you’re interested in being a part of the party. 

Spread the word about the book if you know anyone who might like it.

I’ll keep you posted!

that’s what HE said