This post is specifically for those trying to walk in the footsteps of Christ. Who find themselves having a hard time trusting God’s god and perfect will for them because of the roadblocks of what you see. Faith is perhaps the hardest part of following God. Mostly, for me, because faith requires pushing past feelings. Right now, I’m feeling beaten down, disappointed, and having a hard time mustering up hope for the future in certain areas of my life. My usual route when faced with these feelings is to give in to them, to buckle under the pain and the imagined future I’ve created that is an extension of my current feelings into a absurdly depressing future.

There a couple of things that are helping me this time to stop short of getting on the ride towards hopelessness.

• Perspective – I’ve been here before. I’ve seen the consequences of hopelessness and the destination it leads me to. The final destination is nowhere near where I really want to be.
• Recognizing the fact that my feelings fluctuate and will not be the same in 4 days, 4 hours , and potentially 4 minutes. Letting such ethereal, fleeting feelings (no matter how all-encompassing and deep) serve as the basis for my behavior only ends up hurting me
• Understanding finally that I have a power in these moments. A power that may not make me feel better immediately, but one that will help me to know how to move forward in spite of my feelings.

This power is the power to choose differently. The power to decide to trust God even when everything that I see and the voice in my head is telling me that I should trust my own understanding and seek my own happiness vs. trusting the position that God has anointed me for.

While thinking today, I was brought to the passage in Ezekiel about a certain valley. It reminds me that no matter how lost a cause may seem, there is still hope with our God.

The Lord took hold of me, and I was carried away by the Spirit of the Lord to a valley filled with bones. He led me all around among the bones that covered the valley floor. They were scattered everywhere across the ground and were completely dried out. Then he asked me, ‘Son of man, can these bones become living people again?’ ‘O Sovereign Lord,’ I replied, ‘You alone know the answer to that.’ Then he said to me, ‘Speak a prophetic message to these bones and say, ‘Dry bones, listen to the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Look! I am going to put breath into you and make you live again! I will put flesh and muscles on you and cover you with skin. I will put breath into you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.” So I spoke this message, just as he told me. Suddenly as I spoke, there was a rattling noise all across the valley. The bones of each body came together and attached themselves as complete skeletons. Then as I watched, muscles and flesh formed over the bones..but they still had no breath in them. Then he said to me, ‘Speak a prophetic message to the winds, son of man..”Come, O Breath, from the four winds! Breathe into these dead bodies so they may live again. So I spoke the message as he commanded me, and breath came into their bodies. They all came to life and stood up on their feet – a great army”

Ezekiel 37:1-10

Understanding the power and love of our God is what I’m leaning on as I look at the dry bones in the valley of certain areas of my life.

I’m going to have to rest on God’s grace and ability to fix even the most dessicated situation.

FOF, OFO.

I have a voice in my head.

I’m sure you probably have a similar one.

Sometimes, I don’t mind this voice in my head. It allows me to think through potential situations and do cool things like self-reflect.

Most times, however, my voice is complaining and annoying. I mean, it sounds like me, but it often says things that put me in a bad mood or make me angry.

It’s taking me a long time to start to wonder, why exactly I listen to this voice.

I think the original reason is that, like my ’99 honda accord, it was mine. No one else in the world had this particular voice, just me. So who could it be talking to but me. However, over the last couple of months, years, decades. I can see certain patterns in the voice. Patterns that don’t lead to forward progress in certain areas.

I think the voice is deathly afraid of risk, intimacy, and failure.

I’m no fan of these things either.

But I notice that the voice kicks up a steady stream of reasons why I shouldn’t risk a new venture, or let someone close to me, and how I can control failure by working to the exclusion of all other things, whenever I consider something that may fall into those categories.

What’s interesting is that in the short term – the voice is right.

I can avoid risk by not pursuing the things that excite me. I can keep my heart safe by only letting people in so far, and I can prevent failure by working hard on things that don’t matter. If I stay on the hamster wheel long enough, the voice might distract me from the dreams that lay on the horizon.

For me, the first step in growing will be doing battle with the voice in my head and listening to the still, small voice in my soul that is pointing out into the horizon.

Even if that means I have to risk the safe place that the voice considers home.

Fly or Fall.

OFO

[8/4/22]

Me and work have a unhealthy relationship. I’m not sure exactly why. There’s probably a million reasons that I could point to:

• My parents were immigrants and hard work was just a matter of survival
• I live in a society where money is tied to productivity and I decided early I didn’t want to be poor
• In the family I grew up in, work, especially paid labor was the great excuser – almost anything could be forgiven if work was the reason

This reality, unfortunately, has some unfortunate fruit. I can find myself using work as an excuse to avoid other, more important work. Whether that work in internal emotional work, spiritual work or just investing in family seems not to matter.

Being in relationship with someone who didn’t grow up with these same values can be a bit disorienting. The reaction to work used as a all-excuse is bewildering to me. Work isn’t viewed as a relevant excuse for missing important functions, which allows me to evaluate exactly why I’m working so hard and make sure that i’m being honest with myself.

One of the questions I have to ask myself is why am I working so hard? Of course, you should work heartily unto the lord but working all day – that may point to something else.

Psalm 127 speaks a bit about this:

“Unless the Lord builds a house, the work of the builders is wasted. Unless the Lord protects a city, guarding it with sentries will do no good. It is useless for you to work so hard from early morning until late at night, anxiously working for food to eat; for God gives rest to his loved ones.”

Psalm 127:1-2

Too often I find myself working anxiously which at its base means, I really don’t trust God to provide for me. I think that I must create a pathway via work to provide for myself.

Lord forgive my inability to remember the many ways you’ve provided for me and and my family and help me to rest in You.

FOF.

OFO

Something that is on my mind this morning is the way that God always manages to be right “on-time”, and how this is really the best most effective way to make sure that people learn something at a heart level.

Do you remember the feeling of being in classes that didn’t apply to any area of your current experience and how mundane those hours of trigonometry seemed? Alot of our general education seemed to hold no relevance to our lived experience and so often those lessons are doomed to fade into the shade of oblivion.

Was this because the information wasn’t true? or helpful? I’d venture to say that no- the information was both true, and potentially helpful but that more importantly, it just didn’t apply and had no “good soil” for the skills, information, or learning to sink into.

Contrast those experiences with the experience of riding a bike, or learning to drive a car, or when you learned to budget or invest. These skills were potentially much easier to grasp for one specific reason, in my opinion: Immediate applicability with a clear benefit.

If you learned how to ride your bike on Monday, you could immediately take the bike for a spin for the rest of the week. The same with learning to budget – as soon as your next check rolled in you could immediately use the skills and see their impact on your quality of life.

I think that God in his infinite wisdom is not unaware of this fact. Often, it seems upon looking back I can see how he brought me to a place where I could on a very intimate level start to understand the lessons that he was working on with me. He would bring me to a place where my frustration was at an all time high in order for him to really show the impact of how trusting him to give me peace would change my life. He will often bring me to a place where money alone is unsatisfactory or not enough to provide and he will show me how his provision is much broader than just money.

In my opinion, there is no better place to be in order to start to really want to see a solution and when given one, use it. It’s something like ‘Rock Bottom’ for alcoholics anonymous. We’ve reached a place where we can finally hear and accept the wisdom that we need in order to make it to a better place in the long term.

I would love to use this model of learning while I’m in the process of teaching my children. It makes me wonder what this might require from me to work effectively?

Patience?

Being involved enough to see where my children are at?

Not allowing my fear of inadequacy force my hand into solving all their problems for them immediately but being patient enough to allow the problem to develop fully and the emotional fortitude to see the potential benefit of pain.

I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to (with my wife) build those skills enough to impact my family’s life for the better.

FOF. OFO.

Today feels a bit like the day after a thunderstorm. The last 48 hours have been chaotic and emotionally draining. And although the sun has risen upon a new day with new possibilities, the smell of ozone lingers and the leaves are awash in the streets.

I feel the exact opposite of excited to tackle the day.

I definitely feel like I’m falling.

The emotional lows that come with spiritual growth can be soul-crushing. Our inability to see past our current situation can make it feel like God has forgotten us. We may be tempted to opt out of doing the very things that God has perhaps called us to do. We may also want to indict God, because honestly, if He is the King of the Universe, and controls all things why is he making me suffer like this?

In moments of emotional pain, that seems to exist with no reason, it can feel much easier to reject God wholesale in order to turn to the things that will comfort us in the short run. Those things can be food, unhealthy relationships, pornography, drugs, or other band-aids that will distract you from the waves of pain that seem to wash upon your heart with no end in sight.

If you can..

I’d highly recommend you hold tight before you make any decisions that won’t serve you. Instead, I’d ask you to stay engaged with God.

Be angry with God, but talk to Him.

Curse him if you must, break down and ask Him about his absence.

The Psalms are full of this exact situation where the pain of life can seem to separate us from our faith in Christ. Where believing in the God of angel armies feels like the flimsy hope of an immature child. Psalm 77 is one of these psalms. It perfectly reflects the thoughts that accompany the pain of times when God seems to have put up an “out of office” sign.

“I cry out to God; yes I shout. Oh, that God would listen to me! When I was in deep trouble, I searched for the Lord. All night long I prayed, with hands lifted toward heaven but my soul was not comforted. I think of God and I moan, overwhelmed with longing for his help.

-Psalm 77:1-3

I was recently in one of these spells and, while I failed at a lot, I can share a couple things that I did right:

• Stayed connected with the body of Believers
• Kept talking to God, even if it was mostly about my pain and his [perceived] absence

In the spirit of transparency I did a lot more wrong than right. I let my emotions and need for control run wild and didn’t discipline myself to spend more time with him during my morning devotional time. In fact, I was so fed, I was only able write a couple of words. In fact the first sentence I wrote in my journal was: “Lord, where are you. How could this happen?”

Psalm 77 gives some insight into a tactic that I didn’t use but that we should when were in these tunnels of darkness.

“And I said, ‘This is my fate; the Most High has turned his hand against me.” but then I recall all you have done, O Lord; I remember your wonderful deeds of long ago. They are constantly in my thoughts. I cannot stop thinking about your mighty works.”

Psalm 77: 10-12

The writer of this psalm, although they were in the midst of deep pain, chose to double down on remembering how good God had been to them in the past. This gave him the strength to continue on, even if things seems particularly dark. This is something that I’m going to try to remember during my next trial in the hopes that my faith muscle will remember how I feel now, after I’ve come out of the darkness and feel 1000% better about God’s faithfulness.

Also, honestly, after I’ve come out of a storm and can see clearly again that God did not forsake me but that I was just throwing a tantrum or couldn’t see the benefits of the situation at the moment, I feel so embarrassed.

I feel almost ashamed at my lack of faith, but then I have to remind myself that I’m not alone, and that believers through the generations have endured the same feelings as God works out the immaturity that can be found in us all. Praying for your strength and remembrance of God’s goodness.

F.O.F

OFO

[7/26/22 – 7/27/22]