Must You Break Me Before You Fix Me?

Is it possible to be broken beyond repair?
The pit of my stomach's become a lump in my throat.
I can't swallow as the chills fill my body.
Is this forever?  Am I forever?
I'd rather not be forever
Because it seems like the chasm in my heart
     is growing, not shrinking.

I thought I had the anecdote, but I jumped that boat
Only to jump back in with more questions than answers,
More holes than patches.
Will I sink for eternity, knowing less the more I learn,
Making more but with less to earn?

Is it me that's broken, or the world around me?
Is it me that's sinking, or the world around me?
Or both

God we need a savior!

A Prayer: Clothing Spirit in Words

Father,
Nothing in my heart can speak.
My mouth is dry and when I open it babble pours forth
But why open it if I don't make sense
And can't communicate the nonsense
That is my thoughts?

Sometimes I think emotions,
But emotions can't be thought
So there's no words to express what I'm
thinking, or feeling, or both, or neither.

If it can't be said is it really a thought?
If it can't be thought is it really an emotion?
If there's no emotion, am I really feeling the
nonsense coming from my mouth but not my heart?

I'm emptier now than when I started,
so maybe my hand created an avenue for the unthinkable emotions
But what I really want isn't to be emptied, but to be filled.

A Poem: Idolatry

What I need now is empty, quiet peace;
Distraction from everything.
Shaken from my preoccupation with frenzied commotion, confusing amusement.

I turn to idols to help rescue me from idolatry,
Trading idol for idol til I'm a mess of broken dreams,
With a broken heart that bleeds
Poison I drink to give myself strength
To keep living my death, living my death in agony.

I just wanna get away, wanna leave it all behind.
But when I run I find
It all follows,
Or perhaps I just couldn't leave the hollow
deceptions behind.

Maybe I deceive myself when I run,
Because its not about what you're leaving but where you're going
And as long as I'm obsessed with what I left or want to leave
Am I really leaving or even wanting to leave?

Book Review: "Leaders Who Last" by Dave Kraft

Leaders Who Last by Dave Kraft

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Dave Kraft obviously has a passion for leadership and the desire to see passionate leaders developed within the church. I cringe at his obvious assumption that the pastor is (and ought to be) the main leader within the local church body. I believe that pastors can be leaders, but I think that pastors can also be teachers, preachers, counselors, etc... What I take away from this book is the truth that what the church needs most is to make disciples, followers of Christ, who will then turn around and make more disciples. In this way we see that our primary goal is the development of leaders, not only followers. This responsibility does not lie only on the pastor, but on the congregation as a whole. And so I see this not only being a book for full-time pastoral staff, I believe that this is a book that any church leader, any Christian, can read and learn from.



View all my reviews

Growing in Wisdom, Living a Life of Love and Faithfulness

God is an adoptive God, often favoring those who are cast aside or considered of lesser value.  We see this with Jacob, David, and Moses, to name a few.  All throughout Scripture, highlighted in Jesus’ lineage, we see God choosing to work through and use those you would least expect.

I’ve been struck by 1 Samuel 2:12-26 where the sons of Eli, the priest, are compared with the young boy Samuel.  Samuel was not a priest, in fact he wasn’t even a Levite, the tribe of Israel who aided the priests at the temple.  Samuel was the son of a nobody Ephraimite, but as we read his story we see that God was preparing him to do great things.  Eli’s sons were slowly becoming worse and worse, following their own hearts rather than God’s, while Samuel was instead growing in stature and favor with the Lord and men (1 Samuel 2:25-26).

This is an interesting phrase, “he grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.”  We see this repeated of Jesus in Luke 2:52.  We also find this phrase in Proverbs 3 along with some instructions.  “My son, do not forget my teaching… Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God and man.”  This father goes on to say “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding….Do not be wise in your own eyes…Honor the Lord with your wealth…Do not despise the Lord’s discipline.”

And so we see that the ones who want to be like Jesus, the ones who want to be used by God to do great things for His kingdom, are the ones who are willing to surrender themselves to the will of God, to lay aside their own agenda and pick up God’s agenda, to trust that God knows what He is doing, to listen to instruction and learn from those around them, and who ultimately honor God whether he blesses them with wealth or grows them through discipline.  God does not use the most powerful and pleasing; He chooses to work through the humble and submitted, the loving and faithful.

What part of God’s will do you need to submit to today? Are you growing in wisdom, living a life of love and faithfulness?

How can we encourage each other, and specifically our youth, to be wise people of humble submission rather than brash people of power and compulsion?

The Questions that Shape our Thoughts and Actions

There are two foundational questions that I continually encounter in my spiritual journey: Who is God? and What does He want with me?  In fact, I would argue that most, if not all, disagreements between individual Christians and groups of believers ultimately lie in one of these two categories.  Also, as I look at Scripture it seems that most, if not all, passages deal with one of these two questions.

Interestingly, I find that at different times in my life I deal with one of these questions more than the other.  There are times that I am literally consumed with the question of "Who is God?" to the point that I am no longer being effective in my relationships and living for him, and other moments when I am so consumed with wondering "What does God want with me?" that I lose all focus on who He is and why I can even ask this second question in the first place.

And while these two questions, as extremes, can sometimes lead in two different directions, it occurred to me today that they can only be answered in relationship to each other.  My understanding of who God is is meaningless unless followed with the question of what God wants with me, and my understanding of what God wants with me is meaningless unless tethered to my understanding of who God is.

I began reflecting on this because I've realized recently that I've become so consumed by my day-to-day activities, so focused on living in right relationship with others, so caught up in living in a God honoring way that I have ceased to ask the question of "Who is God?".  The deepest desire of my heart is no longer to know God, to love Him and seek Him above all else.  My desire for righteous living started as a desire to grow God's kingdom, to honor and please him, but somewhere along the line I forgot about God and simply started living for the sake of living.  I believe that this is corrected by turning to the other question, the one I haven't been asking, but in doing that I must not be careful to so turn away from considering myself and who I ought to be that I forsake the second greatest commandment.

Where are you at?  Do you spend more time asking yourself who God is or what you ought to be doing?  Do you have a desire to know God and things about God but find that you don't really care to live for Him when it comes down to the details of life?  Or are you so caught up in living life that you no longer care who God is or how His desires relate to those details of life you are caught up in?

Return to Scripture, where we find God answering both questions with equal clarity, care, and passion.

Knee Deep

I fear I'll only go as deep as the water I stand in. Before you hit the deep end you first need to stand in the shallow, but what if that becomes so comfortable that I never move on? What if the deep end becomes so unnerving, the possibility of slipping below the waterline and never returning, that I start to see deep waters as not only dangerous but off limits?
How deep is the water you are standing in? Are you a toe into Christ? Did you dive in head first?
Sometimes I find my body so wet that I start to retreat to shallower water, to puddles and tubs, rather than plunging into pools, rivers, and oceans.  Sometimes shallow water splashed all over the body feels much better than diving into the deep, mysterious waters and actually remaining there, swimming around, and taking it all in.
I don't want to remain as shallow as the water I'm standing in, I want to go deep.  Thankfully God's Word goes deep, unfortunately I often make it shallow.