Faith Venture

Who has helped you on your life’s journey? Professionally? Spiritually? Gaining maturity?

Sometimes you don’t realize it until later.

I had a teacher who was unassuming, but he taught us how to think. One of the more valuable classes I took.

Another teacher and a professor encouraged me to try things and expand.

Soccer referee mentors helped me grow and put me in big games.

Pause and reflect on those who have helped you. Say thanks.

In return, whom have you helped along the way?

Be someone who opens doors to others behind you, not one who slams the door shut.

“Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans,” said John Lennon.

Life is what happens while you’re busy taking a selfie.

I’ve watched people for many years who visit a wonder of nature or a child’s activity and devote their attention to making a video. How often will they watch a video versus how many memories of experiencing the moment?

The beginning of a Yoga class consists of bringing students into awareness of the moment. Bringing distracted minds and tensed up bodies together for a time so that we can experience the practice and calm and strengthen and stretch.

How do we do this?

First step–breathe. Deeply. Paying attention to the exhale. It’s all in the exhale.

Come back home to the present moment.

We all know people who exalt in pointing out the sins of others. We just love those people–not!

Jesus told us not to go around judging. After all they may only have a speck in their eye while we have a log in ours.

Matthew tells us shortly after reporting that saying with another–watch out for false prophets. Don’t fall for their words, rather look at their fruit.

Someone in our small group immediately responded, “Sounds like judging to me.”

Well, yes…and no.

We do need to know whom to trust when we meet them. Jesus never told us to be naive or stupid.

There is a lifestyle involved here.

We can be the sort of person who always puts others down, calls out their sins, tells people how bad that other person is.

Don’t be that person.

We can be the sort of person who does not fall for every “pick up line” in the book. We have our eyes wide open We look past flowery or powerful language observing instead how people act and what they have done.

Jesus radically included women in his group of disciples. (See yesterday’s post with four examples.)

Paul intentionally went out to include all manner of different peoples into the movement.

Phillip witnessed to a black man.

Yet, after 2,000 years of Christianity, we still have trouble treating every human as a child created by God.

Oh, yes, bad people exist.

But everywhere you look around the entire globe people of the “home” group hate, discriminate against, and even kill other people because they don’t look the same as us, use the same language as us, eat the same foods as us, have a different gender.

We keep wishing we could just make them disappear. Or pass a law that declares them as non-people.

Yet Jesus said that loving our neighbor means helping whoever we come across, even if they are from a sub-group we were taught to hate from our earliest years. Everyone is a child of God, whom he loves.

When you hear or read the word “God”, what comes to mind?

A picture? An emotion? A picture and an emotion?

Andy Stanley is currently teaching to those who have left church or a relationship with God because the “God” they were taught and are living with is the “God of the No Testament.”

Maybe I like the series because he brings together things I’ve pondered and written about for years.

My favorite is what I call the “vending machine” god. You drop in a couple of prayers and god dispenses whatever button you pushed. Want a healing? Done. Want a new relationship? Ka-ching. Win the lottery? (Only one from among millions who prayed to this god was answered in the ultra mega billions lottery last night according to news I saw this morning.)

He also talks about “boyfriend (or girlfriend) god.” God who is always around you. Those of us who have lived the life know that sometimes God seems distant and removed.

Or “guild god”. He (and his followers who taught you) make you feel guilty about everything you do.

Maybe you are still affected by one or more of these false gods.

Maybe practicing the disciplines of study, prayer, meditation, worship we all come to acknowledge the one true creator God.

That was always my question. Or phrased differently, how do you know that?

By the end of my second year of college, I finally learned the “game”. It is the other four of Rudyard Kipling’s six honest serving men–what, who, when, and where.

They said they were encouraging thinking. They really wanted memorization.

My grades significantly improved.

Pursuing why is a career.

Why did they say that? Why did they choose that story in their narrative? Why do we care?

Or as the famous philosophy exam had it–question: why; answer: why not?

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it makes us more fully human.

I stand at the beginning of the trail staring down the mile-long stretch that starts the run. I just don’t feel like running that opening mile. My heart just isn’t in it today. That’s the phrase we use.

I blow the whistle for the kickoff. The next hour is devoted to chasing soccer players around the pitch. Even for 12-year-olds I’m running the equivalent of a 5K. Didn’t even notice it. My heart was in it.

The middle of the Sermon on the Mount contains some of Jesus’s teachings on the heart. It is the attitude with which we give. The attitude with which we pray. The attitude with which we serve.

God looks at the condition of our hearts. He sees whether our heart is in it or not.

It is better for us, and better for the world around us, if our heart is in it.

Tony Robbins told a story about a friend who owns a gym.

He sees people join the gym. They get dressed and show up many times each week. They stand amongst the equipment. They take selfies of themselves and the equipment. They leave.

These people never use the equipment. They just have a need to show their followers on social media that they were there.

You mean that we can’t just look at the exercise machine and become fit????

A guy at my gym told me yesterday about a couple who invited their pastor for dinner. Following a nice dinner and conversation, the pastor left. As the couple finished cleaning, the woman noticed that a spoon was missing from the pastor’s place setting. “Did he take the spoon?” they wondered.

About a year later, they invited the pastor for another dinner. During dinner, the wife quietly noted that they were missing a spoon from last year’s dinner. “You didn’t happen to take it with you?” she asked.

He smiled. “While you and your husband were busy in the kitchen, I placed the spoon in your Bible,” he said.

We have many great books. We have meditation apps for our smart phones. We have prayer guides. We have myriad opportunities to serve.

But we must actually do the work.

Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher. He probed into the depths of his motivations. He was a Stoic. He was also Emperor of Rome.

He also had a flaw that almost cost him his life. He was too trusting.

His first response was to trust people. He assumed that they had the same goodness and kindness as he. Yet, he was constantly betrayed. He wife, his brother, his son, his general.

My first response is to trust when I meet people. Maybe within certain contexts I would be wary, but in general that is I. And…this tendency to believe people good has led me astray on occasion or cost me money or emotional grief.

I also know people whose first response to others is distrust. They are cynical and distrustful people. I have observed them.

I’d rather be me. Maybe with a better dose of realism. Because many people are like the second type.