Fear Itself

I have one huge fear. It's kind of strange really I suppose when I think about it. As a youth minister however it is a fear that seems to make sense really. There are times when I jerk awake with this fear trying to push it's way into my waking moments. It takes a moment or two usually in fact to remember that the fear I'm feeling is nothing more than a dream.

The fear that I experience in this line of work is that of being afraid that I am supposed to be filling in for the pastor and that I have forgotten and missed the early service at the church and then I don't have anything prepared when I come rushing in late. It is something that nags at me. It gnaws at the edges of my brain at times when I wake up on Sunday mornings. It is my nightmare that lingers even when I wake. Thankfully it has been only that, and has never become an actuality.

Last week however I took it one step further than just a nagging, lingering feeling. I knew that I had responsibilities on Sunday morning in the early service with the scripture that was supposed to be done via DVD. It was something that I had done before, but for some reason this particular weekend, I was extra nervous about the set up.

I woke suddenly and looked frantically for the clock which, upon seeing and focusing on, read 8:13 AM. At this point all my fears seemed to race forward into my consciousness as I literally leaped from my nice comfortable bed, throwing my covers aside and exclaiming to Roni "CRAP!! I am supposed to be doing stuff in the early service!!" I was about to make a beeline to the bathroom in order to hurriedly brush my teeth and throw on clothes when from the bed beside me I hear the voice of my loving wife say "What are you doing? It's Saturday." At this point I immediately collapsed back onto the bed, pulled the blanket back over me and went back to sleep. Crisis averted...for now. Peace and Love y'all.

Shapeless

We have been going over Revelation during our Wednesday night youth time. Last Wednesday (April 22), we covered chapter 4. If you're not sure what is in that chapter, it is where John has a vision of the throne room of God in Heaven. He describes God in terms of color and sound rather than with shapes and forms. I had never thought about God like that before.

We seem to get caught up rather often on God being not just a man, but a white man, or an old man or a man in the clouds, or the man upstairs. Really when you think about some of those things they are kind of limiting. We tend to make God in our own image rather than realize that we are made in His image. When we start putting all these terms on God it can begin to put limits on what we allow Him to do in our lives.

(Now, don’t misunderstand me on this. For our minds to be able to understand and grasp God we have to use terms that we can understand in order to comprehend Him [by the way the male pronoun is really more generic than anything]. We refer to God in terms of gender I believe more from a relational aspect than from an actual gender designation. If we referred to God as It, that would take all the relationship out of things. Think about it, when we refer to our possessions, we call them “It”, when we refer to a person, we use a descriptive gender pronoun. That has as much to do with our relationship to that person as it does anything else. Granted we will call an unborn baby an it when we don’t know the sex, but that is due more to the fact that we don’t yet have a relationship with that baby. Once we know the sex, we refer to the baby as he or she him or her.)

Ok, I say all of that to say that in order for us to understand God, we first have to personify God in our minds. However God is not limited by the ways that we personify Him. It should be our goal to realize that even though we have a need to think of God in such ways, God is actually beyond those limits, and if we try to confine him to just those limits that is where we begin to have problems in our relationships with both God and others.

So here is my challenge to you: Begin to think of God, as John says in 1 John 4, as Love rather than as just a personification and remember that Love, as it is laid out in 1 Corinthians 13, is limitless and really has no set form or boundary or gender. When we can do this we will begin to see our relationships differently and we can change begin to change the world. Peace and Love y’all.

Not A Man

Here is a music video that I saw/heard today. I think that it is pretty great. Pretty straight forward it would seem. It is by The Michael Gungor Band. I hope you enjoy and that the words will speak some Truth to you as you listen and watch.



Peace and Love Y'all.

Just a smidgen

Do you ever feel small? I mean, have you ever really stopped to think about how small we really are in the over all scheme of things? When you think about it, it can be a little bit daunting really, especially if you consider how big so many other things are.

I got a tweet earlier from one of my favorite authors, Don Miller. Granted I am just one person who happens to be following him on Twitter, and I for sure don't know him (but I do think it would be dang cool if I did), but it still is cool to get updates from him. Anyway he posted something about the entire cosmos that made me start thinking tonight. Check it out, cause it's really pretty cool.

Anyway, he added this verse to it: "What is man that you are mindful of him; the son of man that you care about him?" (Psalm 8:4) That is a question that I first heard nearly 13 years ago. I was listening to the song "God" by Rebecca St. James and that was in the lyrics. It made me stop and really think about it. What are we that God is mindful of us? Then of course when you look at the picture from that link there, you start to really wonder about our place in the cosmos. We think that we are big, and yet the images clearly show us just how small we are as a planet, much less as inhabitants of that planet.

So what is all of this? I am just going on about how little we are? No. See all those years ago as I listened to that song in my car (in cassette form to be sure) I asked God that same question. "God what am I that you are mindful of me, that you care about me?" I was curious, especially when you consider the size of everything. And as I drove a little further, I reached a point that I had to pull over on Interstate 20 between Big Spring and Stanton in order to write down the answer that I heard that day.

I felt like God spoke to me telling me that what made Him mindful of me was the simple fact that I was his creation. He had created me, and in the same way that an artist does not create something and then just turn away from it, that is what it is like with Him. He has invested himself in me and because of that he cares for and is mindful of me. I admit I can understand that so much better now that I have children. I am invested in those children...I could never not care for and be mindful of them. God, the same one that I believe is responsible for all the things in that picture, CARES FOR ME. Wow. I mean really, wow. As I sit here and think about it, it blows my mind.

So even though we are really very small in the over all scheme of things when it comes to created things, we have tremendous value to the one who created us. God is God of the huge things of the (seemingly) eternal cosmos, and yet he is also the God of the small things, like me. Peace and Love y'all.

So Sweet

Ok, I am laying on the floor of the living room this evening watching the end of LOST and Puck comes walking in. Not a big other than the fact that she is supposed to already be in bed and hopefully asleep at this point. She however is not, but she is so very sweet about it. She walks into the living room carrying a blanket with her and talking (she is always talking). Roni and I tell her it is time for her to go to bed.

Before she goes she drops the blanket near me so I pick it up. Within about 5 minnutes she is back and standing in the doorway from the hall to the living room. We are talking to her, telling her that it is time to go to bed, she has school in the morning and she didn't take a nap, things like that. I roll over and take the blanket that I have wadded up and playfully throw it at her. It hits her in the chest and she looks at me and in her sweet, innocent 3 1/2 year old way says "Hey F@*&%er".

I lay there not sure that I have heard her correctly. Roni jumps on it however. She is sitting in the rocking chair hear Puck and immediately says to her "How about calling him a silly head instead." So Puck says "Yeah...silly head" with all the 3 1/2 year old attitude she can muster it seems and we all laugh. She finally heads to bed. Roni wants to know what I think of her recovery and reaction to hearing such a word come from the mouth of our sweetly innocent little girl. I tell her that she did a good job to not make it a much bigger deal than it really was. She was afraid that if she made too much of it, Puck would continue to say it, much like she does with Shut-up.

Earlier this week. either Sunday or Monday, I was standing on the porch. I was minding my own business really talking to Roni a bit. Puck has a stick and is pretending that it is a snake. She proceeds to poke me in the butt with the stick, just on the right cheek, and tells us that the snake just "bited Daddy's butt." Roni again corrects her and she changes it to booty for the next time, but by now it doesn't really matter because Daddy is laughing so hard that I would not be able to correct her if I tried.

I have no idea where it is that she has picked up these words. Well, ok, she has heard her daddy use the word butt before. In fact I've probably called her a silly butt or some such. However it is strange to hear a 3 1/2 year old use such a word correctly. I am convinced that at times however, kids just figure out words. It's not that they are always taught them, or hear them and repeat what they have heard (if that were the case, my kids would have said some other things by now that they shouldn't). I really believe that sometimes, they just take a sound they have heard and they add a letter to it that they shouldn't and it comes out as something not nice.

Or perhaps she really doesn know what that word is and that is how she feels about me sometimes. Peace and Love y'all.