my kids and crisis

I am so proud of my kids! Okay...so maybe I am biased. However this week I watched both Heidi and Karisa face crisis and handle it well.

Heidi graduated this spring with a special ed/elementary ed degree. She will work for the Philadelphia School district. On Wednesday she had a meeting in center Philadelphia at the district office to get her placement. When she got there, she was informed that they were placing her in a high school special ed position. In her words - "I had a moment". She has no experience or education dealing with high school students.

Here is where I am so proud of her. After a bit of panic and several phone calls, she arrived at the point where she assumed that God must want her in this specific high school. In spite of her fear, she began to look for the opportunities...maybe she could help coach a girls soccer team...maybe God had something that she did not see yet.

The next day she got called in for a second meeting. At that meeting they reassigned her to a K-4 school where she will teach in an elementary class!

Karisa spent three weeks in India. Her arrival date back in the states was this past Friday, the 17th. The beginning of the week she called us to tell us that she may not be able to get out of the mountains. There was a good deal of political unrest and there was an indefinite strike. In that part of the world, a strike shuts down all transportation, businesses, and markets. In other words, life comes to a standstill. Her response to the strike was that if God wanted her to stay indefinitely, then she would do so.

Incidentally, an influential leader in the town pulled some strings and she got to Delhi on Thursday and we picked her up in Newark on Friday!

Both girls faced crisis. Both responded the same way. After the initial fear and panic, they immediately began to look for the hand God. Both were fully aware the God orders their steps, that He is good, and that He could be trusted with their future.

If we are going to partner with God in his redemptive and transformative work, we must have this kind of attitude. Obstacles become opportunities. We look for the hand of God in the midst of crisis. (Crisis is our perspective not God's.) We must be fully aware of God's goodness. In spite of our emotions we act from the perspective that God is good, that He knows better than I do.

cool and cutting edge?

I recently heard of a young couple who left their church to attend another church that had better children's ministry. That got me started thinking about following Jesus and about the church. For the past twenty years I have been involved with church planting in one capacity or another. For years the "experts" stressed a high quality children's ministry, a really cool youth ministry, and a high energy adult service with cutting edge "worship" as the best way to grow a church rapidly. And you know what? It really did work!

Yet I am wondering if perhaps we didn't miss something. We have created a generation of church attenders that are little more than consumers. Church is the commodity and we attempt to entice them with the promise of a superior product. We have dynamic ministry programs! We are the coolest! (Well...we wouldn't say so but deep inside that it is what we think.) Our kids ministry rocks! And so we present church as a commodity that adds value to your life or to your kid's lives.

I am not sure that Jesus was cool...or cutting edge. We do read of His children's ministry - He took time in the midst of an all important discourse about divorce to hold and bless the children. He didn't mind the interuption. In fact, He became angry with those who attempted to shoo the children away. I can't really find any cool ministry programs He instituted. Jesus did heal the sick, give the sinners hope, and proclaimed the good news that the realm of God was here on earth now.

Might it be that we have substituted dynamic programs for the power of God? Might it be that the kingdom of God is not about cool or cutting edge? Are we simply entertaining and being entertained, seeing who can draw the largest crowd? Where is the power to heal the sick? Where is the power to transfrom lives and bring wholeness?

false realities

In light of my post about Barney Frank, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae, I thought it may be helpful to post something that I wrote some time ago. I am not sure if I ever posted this before. If I did I apologize!

For the past several years, God has been inviting Bev and me to participate with Him in His restorative work in the lives of individuals. It is hard to imagine a greater joy than seeing wholeness come to individuals, to see a life characterized by wreckage be transformed into wholeness. In our interaction with people who need restored, we noticed one constant theme that led to their personal destruction. In every circumstance, a false reality paved the way for destructive behavior to emerge.

I would define a false reality as the creation of a perception or a belief system not based on truth. It is the embracing of any thought process that does not align with reality as defined by God and therefore does not align itself with truth. It is the denial of what really is (true reality), choosing instead to believe and live according to a mindset or thought pattern created to justify or validate certain behaviors. For instance, an alcoholic will insist he can control his drinking or that he can stop drinking whenever he so chooses. The actuality of the situation is that there is no way he can stop without intervention outside of himself. However, he stubbornly clings to the lie that he can control his drinking. That false reality allows the power of alcohol to strengthen its grip in his life. No amount of insistence about the veracity of a false reality will cause the deception to be true.

Most of the restorative situations with which Bev and I work are people who would consider themselves as followers of Jesus. We have made a particularly disturbing discovery about their false realities – initially they have willingly engaged in their specific deception. Rather than seeking and choosing truth, God’s reality, they chose to either create or engage in a false reality because it was more convenient. They embraced a thought pattern that appealed to their base nature, to their “self-god”.

In almost every instance, people needing restoration have asked “How did we get here?” The creation of these false realities have simultaneously created and strengthened the deception. Not only does the creation of a false reality facilitate deception, it concurrently strengthens the deception and gives birth to new false realities. The vicious cycle opens the door for destruction and wreckage to occur.

Prior to people choosing to engage in the initial deception, there is another underlying condition that gives rise to the vulnerability toward accepting and creating false realities. The most essential nature of humanity is that we are created as a spirit being. God “breathed” and His image was imparted to Adam. We frequently call this spirit component of our being our heart. It is the heart that is born from above through Christ. It is the heart that is joined in union with God. The spirit is overtaken by Him becoming one with Him. As such, this union becomes our center, the source of true life. Everything that pertains to life, to godliness, and to wisdom flows from our union with God in our heart.

The self-god, which is centered in the realm of the intellect and the emotions, violently opposes our spiritual union with God. The self-god attempts to entice each of us to abandon living from our union with God and draws us to engaging in our intellect and emotions as our sole source of life and wisdom.

In our experience, every person purposefully engaging in a false reality was prepared to receive that reality when they turned from living from their union with God to living from intellect and emotions. Universally, people caught in destructive behaviors have no idea what God is saying about them, about who they are or about their situation. That ignorance is not a result of the destructive behavior; rather the ignorance creates the conditions for the destructive behavior to take root.

Ultimately, the way to keep from being entangled by false realities is by guarding our heart. We must continually keep the place of our oneness with God as the center that determines our actions. God frequently invites us to live in ways that feel dangerous to our intellect and emotions. At the point of that invitation, we choose whether we will live according to God’s reality or whether we will open the door to the possibility of engaging in false realities because we are choosing to live according to the self-god.

We must ruthlessly oppose the self-god and its desires, choosing the way of the cross. We must take an honest look at our thought processes, realizing our predisposition to deception apart from Christ. For the past number of years, I have asked God to judge me, to judge my motives, to reveal reality and truth. The result of that prayer is that I am confronted regularly with the choice of either embracing my definition of reality or choosing to embrace the Father’s definition. God has taken aim at my motives and perceptions so frequently that it seems to me that He is my enemy much of the time.

Yet I am fully aware that the judgment of God springs from His incredible love toward me. I am also deeply aware of my own vulnerability to perceptions that lead to destruction. Therefore the only safe path is the reality as defined by God, regardless of how painful or difficult it seems to me. Not only is reality as defined by God a place of safety, living according to His reality leads to abundant life.