Just a question
Are you in control of your life or is your life controlling you?Over the last ten years of my life I’ve attended what seems to be a hundred churches in a hundred different places; all of which had a hundred different views of what “truth” really was. My wife left this morning to attended her family church, the church she grew up in. I have no quorums with the people of this church they are a lovely people.
However I’ve come up short in my search for a truly bible believing church. I believe how I feel is a personal problem of my own. And that is that each church I’ve attended has swayed from the truth or have replaced a sermon with worship, not that worship is bad or is not needed, it is.
But where has the ideals of the first century church gone? That FAITH come by hearing the word. Here’s my annoyance. While I like Christian music and worship i hate waking up on a Sunday morning to go to a rock concert, or to be entertained. In my search it seems like the church’s I’ve attended have focused so highly on retaining their congregations that they had replaced truth with entertainment and the Gospel has become something they are afraid might offend some.
Never mind that Jesus said the Gospel is a two edged sword rightfully dividing the good from the wicked. And I wonder are these just the day we are living in? My own short comings and trials have made it more difficult to reach out to fellow Christians but to be honest I also have grown weary of the pumped up musical theatrics of what church ought to be. The truth. Us building faith by hearing the Word. Why is it that many Churches have much shorter sermons these days and much too long musical sessions?
We are given 70 years at best to live, the rest is grace or so says the bible. So I question what is it that we are living for that will make these seventy years worth the battle? Do you understand that statement? This question or statement being one of the five questions that each human asks themselves in the greater mystery of life. Why am I here!
To be sure: I am not sure that we will ever find the answer to that question here in this time, for we know in part, see in part, understand in part. And I wonder that we perhaps are not so much supposed to find the answers, as we are to allow the questions. Because with this come other realities. And in the end will we be seventy years on looking back into the questions and find that what we were searching for had been there all along?
here’s something that I am loving in this moment
It’s late. The lights are low and i am trapped within the walls of my mind, having just read a buddies blog. Reading how he has struck out on a mission with the Peace Corp, a dream I too shared not so long ago. And it brings me into this place where i question the realities of life, consumerism, purpose. As i read his posts one after the next it reminded me of selling everything I owned as i struck out on a spiritual journey throughout Australia a few years ago. In the very same way it brings me back to the 1st century church and has me thinking about the apostles and how things we so different from the world we now know.
He (the other guy) is volunteering throughout Africa’s costal towns and it just makes me feel that, although scared, he is living something right; that he is living a better story as Donald Miller would put it. Not that i am comparing lives, I’m not. But it does make me take pause and think what if there is something we’re to be accomplishing in the here and now, something large that we are not to miss, yet we’re not sure what that thing is. And the business of the lines on the roads and city lights make us lose track of searching for that thing we don’t yet know we are missing.
“You can hardly hurt a Saint”
However, i am not one…
I never much liked Mike Tyson. Don’t get me wrong he was a killer in the ring but i never much cared for him as a person. That was until I caught a clip of him on CNN being interviewed by Opera. In the interview he reveals much about him self, his struggles as a pro boxer, but more so as a human in a real world.
As a child Tyson suffered from being bullied, and from this he developed low self esteem which led him to drug abuse and a determination to never let himself be hurt again. His persona developed and he was determined to protect himself in all avenue of life. What I like so much about watching this interview was that here was a man who had lost everything, his money, career, house and two marriages and was jailed for 3 years.
And being all of this, of being stripped of all he was, he was forced to face himself. “Tyson” is a movie that Sony released about his life and experiences. But What really catches my attention is how I identified with him, with his struggles and putting up a defense. In some ways my life was not all that different a story from his. Having experienced similiar abuses as a child I too had put up a defense, a coping mechanism to help yourself feel protected, so that no one will hurt you again. The problem with this is that often times it makes a person more sensitive to life. All in all, the interview was great, if you get a chance to check it out, do.
And for me not liking Tyson as a person, well I have to say that this has changed because i can see the defense he’d put around himself and see the humanity behind that very defense. And this make me like him all the more.
Have you ever walked a path so long that you forget where it is you were walking too? I think of Hansel and Gretel leaving behind breadcrumbs to find their way back home, forgetting just how temporal they were. I think this is how life can be at times, we forget just what it is that makes the journey worth remembering. We lose our way home.
However in story it is just at that moment, when it looks like the children are doomed in the gingerbread house that we remember why it is that finding our way back home, our way out of the mess we find our selves in, is so important. Light breaks at the windows, a foreshadow that the story has changed and that hope of finding home is once again possible.
The thing about life is, is that there are many paths we find our selves on, many places we walk, things we see. But what makes a difference in story as in life is there is often a climactic happening, a struggle which leads to a resolution of story. The protagonists find hope when all seems lost. read more…
Sometimes it feels like i am a tightrope walker, in a circus,
with hundreds of people looking on from the crowd. Watching to see if i will fall... 
