(Source: erikwahlstrom, via rosesness)
(Source: erikwahlstrom, via rosesness)
This is a Matt Redman song as well. One time I was playing this song in my car, and Jo nudged me…I wouldn’t have noticed, except for the fact that the week earlier or so when Sam spoke on it, Jo had nudged me back then as well. I gave her a -___- face.
Everyone aspires to be the guy on the stage—The Steve Jobs, The Mark Zuckerberg; in christian circles too: The John Calvin, The Jonathan Edwards—and for myself—The Mark Driscoll and The Jaeson Ma.
I’m going through the book of Joshua right now. Even here, it’s the protagonist Joshua that everyone always remembers, for good reasons too. But when the sword slinging action dies down a bit the bible has moments like Rahab. Not a lot is said about her life, except that she was a prostitute, who had compassion on the Israelite tribe, and found God’s favor. But what little was said was enough to have her name carved into the Bible forever, and to have her as one of the definitions of true faith in the book of Hebrews.
I guess what I’m learning in my…small comfortable world..is a little more of what God is about. After the Holy Spirit comes, after the shake ‘n bake, after the demons are cast out, after the lame start walking, and the blind start seeing there is..well..everyday life.
I think for a really long time, I thought this God thing was just an eternal LSD trip, a high after never ending high. But I guess 1 Corinthians 13 summarizes some of the greater lessons amidst the demonology that Holy Spirit has been leading me through these past few days. Love.
While God is all the shake ‘n bake awesomeness, God says if you’re gonna have one thing pick love. Because if you have it you have everything, and if you don’t have it, you have nothing.
I wonder if the Bible says anything directly about pain. Because I think I only began to learn to love, when I embraced my own pain. I couldn’t have compassion on the pain of others, if I never accepted my own. I could do only one thing, which was resent the weakness of others, the same way I resented it in myself. There was no salvation, and no savior, because I’d denied the reality and existence of my need for one…ultimately denying the need and existence of others need for one.
But this pain thing…what little I know of it, it makes people less scary. It makes people less offensive. I’m not naive enough to believe that love can fix everyone and solve everything. But at the least, love can change things and love can change people.
So David, aspire to love and not fame, and go in the way of love and not power. If you want to help and change the world so badly you’ll do it when you learn to love more, not when you learn more.
Salsa.
Spontaneity always adds an ounce of fun to life. I went to a Latino club last night to celebrate one of my friend’s birthdays. I met up with R and J, friends from my acrobatic days.
The scene was interesting, different than my usual crowd..surprising amount of 50+ year olds. But it brought me face to face with the stark reminder that I don’t hang with non-christians, or even non-asians enough.
J and E both learned the same thing from their travels—people are people no matter how different the context. It’s a thought I’d been ruminating on for a while, and a thought that came back to me last night.I think everyone looks for love that longing presents in different fashions. That’s what I felt last night at least. The alcohol, hook-up culture and a bit of salsa music are convenient analgesics for life.
But I saw it in all the strangers, I heard it from J,R,C and W. My heart went out to them, in the most non-savior complex fashion I could try to put that.
Despite all the things that we lack, Sycomore gatherings for the most part have had a familial quality to them that I don’t really experience anywhere else. It’s a stark contrast to a night club, obviously. But a part of me wishes to share what that’s like.
Slightly intoxicated my last thought as I was exiting the club was: “I found all the lost people btw, apparently they’re everywhere except inside the churches”.
Jesus, continue to move me to show them the greater depths of you.
My parents and their parents grew up poor. They had many moments where they wondered where their next meal was coming from. My dad and his older sister spent time living on the streets as children because they’d been separated from my grandmother.
Growing up, my parents would often tell us, you don’t know what it’s like to starve. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor. It’s especially true for me, being the youngest of the family (because over the years we’ve been blessed with much more wealth than we had when my sisters were growing up).
Strangely, I nevertheless always had compassion on the poor. Perhaps it’s just human empathy, but I suppose if you combine that with my affinity and love for innovation and seeing potential, you get the compulsion to complete the great challenge of ending poverty in this generation.
Poverty, while a complex issue, like most problems is never as hard as people make it out to be. I’ve poured over dozens of stories of social entrepreneurs and then I closed the book about half-way in when I realized something: the difference between those who change the world, and those who don’t is simply that those who do, decided to do it.
But after reading Joanne’s Journal, I realized a few things that can be summarized by the age-old song “What the world needs now, is love sweet love. No, not just for some, but for everyone”
Thus, the journey for me right now isn’t as much of an ascension towards entrepreneurial ingenuity, as much as it is journey downwards to explore the pains of the human condition, and to see how much brighter light is in that darkness.
It’s been a while since I’ve felt like I really had free time. To be fair, with boards still coming up, I’m celebrating a little early. I often look back at my St. John’s experience with regret. While I’m not quite sure what I’ve learned with my $300,000 education, I leave with two invaluable lessons from life and God.
1. I can teach myself almost anything. (thank you second-rate education)
2. There are no lines to color inside of, there is no box we have to live within.
I don’t have all the words to jot down how I’m feeling right now, but hopeful is a good one to start with.
I’ve always wanted to be the guy who could make things possible. The one who could coach and provide resources for people to live their lives with passion. My mission statement was “To turn Jesus Christ from an ideology to a practical reality”. My dream organization, would be called “Praxis”. Life and God in their bigness created it already: www.praxislabs.com. Hopefully I’ll be able to join something like this soon.
I’m reading about the life of the pastor born with no arms or legs and he says it well: “I’m just one small tiny example, pick any true-life hero, whether it’s Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, or the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and you’ll find someone who had to weather adversity-prison, violence, even the threat of death, but held on to the belief that their dreams could prevail.”
Home
This room it’s us and the lives we’ve shared
It’s a pair of shoes only we could wear
So moving on, means moving out
To leave you is to leave my house
And home; cuz when I’m with you I’m home.
I started life-coaching sessions. It’s been fun to finally get around to some of the bad behavioral patterns that set me back. The epiphany of today was during our conversation: in the middle of talking about how I’ve been trying my best and talking about the limitations I couldn’t over come, Ingrid interjected and said “You couldn’t or you wouldn’t?” I stopped in my tracks….”that’s….a really hard question!” I answered. Wouldn’t would be the honest answer and that opens a whole can of worms.
It might be a guy thing, but there’s something exhilarating about having an incredibly sturdy tool in your hand and a problem that you have to fix. Then there’s the Jesus twist, being face to face with a dear brother whom I am powerless to help, but challenged to love.
Somewhere along the road something changed. I realized everything that I am and wasn’t; all the good and the bad.
I realized that I wasn’t alone in my fear, that everyone around me is just as scared and weak as I am, whether they want to admit it or not. I no longer found in me the desire worship people and my fear of them fell away as their wounds became more evident. I found instead an ability to feel compassion and love.
But I guess that’s the beautiful story of the Cross: The creator God himself leveling out the entire human race; whether you’re a king or a peasant you’re broken and in need of redemption. I’ve come to believe everyone inherently knows this, everyone inherently knows their own inadequacies, and even if they don’t it’s not very hard to point them out. In that fashion everyone has a need for love and redemption, and there’s no need to fear if we’re all on equal playing fields.
It’s been an interesting few days, weeks even. I can’t tell if it’s divine revelation or morbid introspection, but in these past two weeks I’ve never felt so naked or embarrassed about myself, but it was a good epiphany. These past two weeks brought me face to face with everything that I hoped to be, and the stark reality of everything that I am not, and for awhile I felt crushed by the despair of that disparity. But thanks be to God, that it simultaneously brought me to the foot of the cross. I micro-blogged the experience with the words
“This life of Faith, what it teaches us is that the things we thought would kill us won’t; in our surrender to Christ, we find an ever supreme satisfaction that makes us invincible because we realize more and more that we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”
It’s an agonizing process where God is destroying my idols, peeling off the hardened layers of my essence like the famous Lewis novel, and taking me deeper into himself.
I’m changing. I don’t have the words to describe what that looks like yet, but I can feel it.
Perhaps my most profound revelation is this: passion was a misnomer. Passion was the euphemism I used for idol whether that was a degree, career, legacy, or person.
So often it has been the case that I would idolize women in my life. I was too weak in my understanding of the gospel, and I was too passive in regards to leading my own life.
The stark reality is that there is no girl, hero, career, or circumstance that will bring me joy or redemption. The pedestals I’ve reserved for so many people and things in my life have come crumbling down, and I’m face to face with a sea of people I’ve realized are not all too different from myself. People whom I no longer need to be my redemption, but rather people to whom I can hope help point to Jesus.
As men of God, there is an invitation, calling, and opportunity to lead. As children of God there is an invitation to freedom and joy.
Salvation belongs to the Lord alone, and I’ve never felt so free.
La Lousianne
3/4 oz rye whiskey
3/4 oz sweet vermouth
3/4 oz Benedictine
dash Peychaud’s Bittersdash Absinthe or Herbsainte
stir with icestrain into glass
Enjoyed this at a new speakeasy called Bathtub Gin with E.
A conversation we had:
“It’s funny how much I’ve realized I’ve attached my identity in those closest to me, and for the first time I suppose I’m learning to live apart from that…that I don’t feel as if I need to be deeply involved in the lives of my friends, and that I don’t feel particularly lonely when I’m not a part of their lives either.”
“Like you don’t need to mettle in their lives”
“Yeah, exactly.”
Take a step back.
Because sometimes reality is questionable, and no one ever told me how to deal with this. Somewhere in the middle of of 4 people getting saved in a day, healing, and God hearing and answering the desperate lost prayers of a girl who needed love, through a bunch of young people who have no idea what they’re doing..somewhere in the middle of that I came face to face with a God I didn’t fully comprehend, and a God who left me speechless.
Somewhere in the middle of ongoings that my mind would tell me are completely ridiculous, juxtaposed with an invisible force that was overwhelming the very essence of my being with power, love and freedom; I experienced a dimension and world that transcended all that I understood. But the noise has faded and the atmosphere is no longer exploding with power.
But the noise has faded and the atmosphere is no longer exploding with power. Here I am now in my wonderful home: fluorescent desk light shining in my face, the quiet hum of Apple’s overpriced machinery quietly reverberating in my room, and beautiful worship music coming through my perfectly balanced speakers. My house is empty and in need of a cleaning, and I have about 12 hours of studying material to absorb in the next 48 hours.
Reality, life/God is telling me tonight will always be bigger than I initially perceived. Truth is a person and his essence is freedom. While Voltaire’s Candide ended his life of naivety and optimism with the words “..that may be true, but we must tend to our garden”. Jesus says to us “that is all true, and therefore tend to your garden knowing that you are more loved and free in Christ than you have ever imagined.”
(via rosesness)
What lies between knowing what you want and knowing what you need….is a lot of hard work! At least I get to be a bumbling idiot that is expected of youth in one area of my life.
I had a hard time finding a photo for this one. My mind drifted around today, it started with trying to get errands done and reorganizing my life..and somehow ended up thinking about Kony 2012..which led to looking up other wars and global conflicts..which led to revisiting Back To Jerusalem..which led to really reflecting and meditating on global missions and the persecuted church. It reminded me of how small my problems are..even how small our church problems are. It made me reconsider again what I or the American church was really living for, and if we were somewhat falling short of the call. I’m going to end the rest of this entry in narrative.
Like a gust of wind it suddenly hit me, and my mind flooded with memories of all I’ve heard and read about frontier missions and how long ago I desired to be there too. I found myself on my knees, and a deep remorse came over me; I heaved and almost cried.
“My heart is idolatrous, and there are too many things to which I’d rather cling. There are too many things that I desire more than the advancement of the gospel. Woe is me, that I love and desire a comfortable life more than the salvation of souls. Forgive me Lord, for the things that I have dreamt and sought after have been far too small. The things that I have mourned over have been far too insignificant. The things that I have longed for have been far too selfish. Like David in Psalm 51, I pray to you: Create in me a clean heart, O God and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence O Lord and Take not thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation and renew a right spirit within me.”
