Faith Venture

What is the one thing that is most important to you this year that you must work on?

I haven’t done New Year’s Resolutions for many years. That sort of thing simply doesn’t work. It’s like every January my Yoga class swells to triple its normal size from all the people who set fitness as a resolution. By February, they’re gone. Same in the fitness center.

Nehemiah (a man and a book in the Old Testament) had a task set before him by God. It was to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. More than a hundred years earlier, the Babylonians had torn down the walls, looted and destroyed the Temple and carried away many of the people. He wanted to restore that.

When enemies tried to divert him, he replied, “”I am doing a great work, why should I come down?”

Andy Stanley has turned me on to the study of Nehemiah. Lots of interesting leadership teachings. In a recent talk, (here is a link to it in iTunes), he talked about our “one thing.”

What is your “one thing?” Is it a relationship that must be fixed? Or severed? Or a new habit you need to bring into your life? Or a new mission you’ve felt God calling you to? Or a destructive habit (drinking, smoking, anger) that needs to be replaced?

One Example

Sometimes the people of a nation get worked into a frenzy of war and hate. The Balkans had a period of that. But sometimes governments posture and provoke because of the personalities of the leaders, not necessarily because the people want it.

In the face of a pending war between Israel and Iran, a graphic artist did his “one thing” although he never thought it would be so big. In this TED Talk, Ronny Edry explains “Israel and Iran, A Love Story” and the results of posting a picture of a poster he created of himself and his daughter with a bold message: “Iranians … we [heart] you” on Facebook from people in Iran and eventually around the world.

What if the voice of all the people who want to live in peace were heard? Maybe that’s a big thing for this year.

Israel and Iran, A Love Story

As you develop your spiritual practice, one attribute you want to strive to bring into your awareness is that of discernment. But to discern means you must bring in much information and then seek God’s guidance about how to interpret the information.

What I have discovered through a lifetime of observing people leads me to believe that many, if not most, people bring in just enough information to reinforce their existing beliefs or prejudices and then just stop.

There is often more to the story than what we pick up through general news reports. For example, most of us have read about the “exploited workers” in China’s factories. But has anyone actually talked to those workers to uncover just what they are really thinking? Reporter Leslie T. Chang did. She spent a couple of years living among those Chinese young workers and presented her story in a TED Talk. Turns out that reality is far different from what you read in The New York Times or Wall Street Journal.

We now have another conflict in the Palestinian area. Once again Israel thinks it can achieve peace and security through bombing and shooting. Once again the Palestinians think the same thing. It hasn’t worked for 4,000 years. Why think it will now? What are people on each side really thinking? Who can tell the real story and perhaps bring some discernment? I have yet to read anything but typical reactive reporting.

What situations in your life exist where it would be good to stop and consider what the other side is really thinking? To stop and consider each side as people rather than theoretical objects? We should ask for discernment from God to be a peacemaker rather than conflict perpetrator.

I last talked about playing chess and how it teaches you to look ahead. Another thing about chess players who are at a high level is that they really don’t see individual moves with an “if-then-else” logic. They see patterns. They look at a chess board and see a pattern that they recognize and know how to make decisions on the next move in order to move the pattern toward a winning outcome.

Life is like that. Individual decisions seem harmless. These decisions add up to a pattern. You can easily find yourself in a pattern of doing the wrong things–or the right things.

What sort of pattern is your life weaving? Are you tending toward being someone who is welcomed? Or whose presence is dreaded? Do you find yourself in a pattern of losing relationships and life wasted? Or a pattern of service and love?

The first of the Spiritual fruit Paul lists is love. Many people still mistake love as an emotion. You know, that gushy, hormone-filled, lose-your-head emotional high. They are wrong. Infatuation is not love.

Love is action. Love is something you do. Following Jesus, you act out love in the way you treat people. The way you serve people. You actually develop emotions from actions. As you act, so you will begin to feel. But the feeling is more mature. It’s more akin to empathy than infatuation. It’s more real.

It’s something you do.

My wife and I were discussing maturity the other day (no, not my lack of it–at least this time) after a rash of incidents of inappropriate behaviour by adults toward kids or just young adults in general. I asked if we teach maturity.

Maturity, responsibility, discipline–three words that would have made my hair curl when I was in college. I can remember the rebellious years. But by my mid-20s I was pretty much mature, responsible and disciplined. And I just expected my children to grow up that way. You can do that without being a tyrant. But you cannot do that by being your children’s friend.

Do they have a course in college about expected behaviour of teachers? I remember some classmates who were in the College of Education. They expressly did not want to be role models of behaviour. They just wanted to instruct in theory–not be one more model in the kid’s lives that showed the path to maturity. Parents I’ve seen and read about often were looking for playmates, not little lives to mold into mature and responsible adults.

I can remember telling my daughter that it was my job to set the limits and her job to test them. Being a teenager at the time, she thought she was discovering that normal growth curve for herself for the first time in history. Then she learned.

My goal for almost my entire life has been to continue to grow and mature in Jesus. What’s yours?

Last week I was at a conference–actually two conferences in one city–where I was kept busy from 4:30 am to about 10:30 pm. Exciting, but tiring. Only took a day to recover, but it’s hard to write these posts in those conditions. So, I was down to a couple. This week is another, but much shorter, conference. On the plus side, the high school soccer season is over for me. As an assignor, I worked a couple of hours a day finding referees for matches, dealing with injuries, game changes and upset coaches. Coupled with 9-10 hour work days, I was busy. Now, I have more time to read for a while until the next round of soccer comes around.