Posts Tagged ‘God’
OK, so this picture has nothing really to do with my post, but I just really love it and yeah . . . it inspires me :)
But what I really want to talk about is the fact that I’ve taught 4 of the last 5 Sundays, and I have the next two as well. This is the most I’ve ever taught consecutively on Sunday morning in my life. I was excited for this challenge, and knew that I’d learn a lot about myself during the process.
One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m starting to fall into a groove (just noticed that when I spell that with one “o” like I did the first time, that it spells GROVE – wouldn’t that be nice to ‘fall into’?). I have kind of a series of things I do, almost like a ritual, to get inspired for a new teaching.
First, early in the week, I like to spend anywhere between 1-3 hours praying in the main room at the church. Something about being in the room that I will preach in inspires me. And praying, before thinking about what I want to say, or studying and researching, is a really good foundation for me. I like to just pray. And then listen. And then write.
Usually the first thing I’m going for is the “main idea.” Often I have a pre-assigned topic, so what I’m praying about is what God wants me to say about that topic. Then, (hopefully as fast as possible) I am passionately pursuing the coveted three points. I am addicted to those three points. I lust after them. I need them. If it starts to get close to Sunday, and I don’t have the three headings for those points, I start to panic. What if I can’t find three points???
So yeah, I’m a little obsessed with the three points. But it’s for a good reason. They are the main building blocks to support and communicate the main message. I need them (did I mention that yet?!).
Then I like to spend some time studying. I’ll do this by listening to a couple teachings throughout the week that are of similar themes and taking notes on them. I carry these notes in the car, around in my pocket, wherever I need them.
I also will do some study online. Usually two nights before I’ll spend some considerable time reading related verses, and especially commentaries.
Then, either two nights before, or the night before, I take a shower. Yup. A shower. I have no idea why, but it really seems to work for me. In the shower I pretty much start to preach in my head and try different approaches over and over again until it “works.”
Eventually I get tired of the shower, so I have to get out. So then I spend another long period of time walking around the house (not naked!!) praying and writing things down, and reciting the teaching in my head.
Once I feel really good about flow, about stories, about verses, about themes, about the three points, and about illustrations…then I will let myself go write. Usually this isn’t until 11pm the night before.
Crazy huh?
So, what inspires you?
“A preacher should aim to stimulate the mind, stir the heart, and motivate the will.”
When I get the chance to teach at church I think about this quote a lot. I’m not even sure who said it, but somewhere along the line in my life, this quote made an impact in my life. I will often run my teaching through this gauntlet—is it intellectually challenging?; will it touch people emotionally?; is it practical enough to demand a behavioral, volitional response?
To say that I “think about my teachings a lot” is probably a pretty good understatement. I come close to obsessing. Seriously. I typically spend hours mulling over every single detail in my teaching. Generally I won’t even start writing notes down, until I have rehearsed my teaching over and over again in my head. God has gifted (or is it a curse!) me with a very logical brain, so when I think about a teaching, I actually visualize the teaching broken into several-minute chunks. Welcome>Intro (is it a story? funny? serious? bible verse? does this really fit? will it work? will it grab people’s attention? does it seguey perfectly?)>first point…..and on and on.
I obsess over every minute detail. Does this story illustrate exactly what this point will say? Or, I’m making this point, what story from my life can I think of to illustrate this? Does point 1 support and flow into point 2, and then point 3, and overall? Is there a logical flow?
When I’m all done creating, I will often go over it and write times in the margins to help me stay on track—like, point 1 must start at 10:05. (Have I said too much yet?)
I spend so much time inside my head (and spirit) that I have to create activities to help me not fall asleep. It actually is kind of a meditation that I do where I envision myself preaching and just try different approaches, different Scriptures, different stories, one after the other, until it works. So I will often take 30 minute showers during preparation time, in order to stay awake while thinking through this. And I’ve taken to walking. I will pace in my house; sometimes outside my house—back and forth on my sidewalk—and very often in the main room of the church.
I say all this to say that I take creating a teaching very seriously. I try to listen to God for every detail. And this past Sunday, was one of those Sundays for me.
I think my preparation was decent, maybe not my best. The material God put on my heart was solid. Challenging even. The logical flow was good. But you see, you can prepare until the cows come home (which by the way, they never did that night, so maybe that’s the deal) but if you can’t deliver, then it’s virtually pointless. And delivery is where everything fell apart for me. Delivery is usually the EASY part for me. I absolutely love being in front of people and teaching. It is one of my very favorite, most fulfilling, most exciting things to do in life. But I do have an achilles heel—insecurity.
And this Sunday it got the best of me.
Somewhere in between the 9am service and the 11am service, the thought grabbed me that I have been way too serious lately. No funny stories. Not much laughing. Was I doing something wrong? Allowing myself to dwell on this thought eventually led to my demise! During the 11am service, about 10 minutes into the teaching, I looked around and to my eyes, it appeared people were totally bored.
“Oh no! See! You are WAY TOO SERIOUS! Quick! Think of something funny to say! You are losing them! Why did you pick this topic anyway? This topic is too elementary! No one is challenged! They are just feeling sorry for you now!”
And down I went. Further and further. And then, I made my trademark mistake. I started apologizing for myself.
“I’m sorry I’m so serious all the time guys! Man, you are probably thinking where’s the funny Christian we are used to?”
And over the years I’ve learned that me apologizing for myself, is really me saying, “Well I think this really stinks, so you probably do too! Right?!?”
Yeah. So I bombed.
Now, what’s crazy about teaching in church is that even if on the inside I bombed; even if according to my standards I did not attain that level I am shooting for; God still uses the material to touch people’s lives. And inevitably people will come up to me after my worst showings (in my eyes) and say, “That was your best teaching ever!”
WHAT?!?!?!?
I guess that’s God’s way of reminding me that even though I prepare, prepare, prepare . . . in the end the real “oomph” to any good teaching is God. And that, of course, is always my prayer. That God will fill my words with meaning and authority beyond my abilities. And so often he does, for which I am always very grateful.
But anyway, I’m slated to teach again this week. And I am going to conquer this insecurity, and give a teaching knowing that I’m doing what I love, and saying what God wants me to say. And I’m not going to get focused on what other people look like, or think . . .or what I think they think which, might not even be true! I’m just going to enjoy myself, and do my best. And let the words fall where they may…
You know, when things go wrong in life, we are often tempted to blame God. I know I have been at many times in my life, and I know that for many it is almost a knee-jerk reaction. I’ve thought some about why this is true, and I think it (in part) comes down to a sense of control. If we can blame God for bad things that happen, then, even though we are mad at God, there is still a sense of order in the universe. There is still a sense that God is in control—even if we don’t agree with what He’s doing.
I think we are uncomfortable with the fact that bad things do happen outside of God authoring them, because that feels almost random and chaotic. But that is closer to truth than the first idea. To be honest, I think that there is a sense of chaos and disorder in the universe. I think that sin, the decision to walk away from the God of order, is really the cause of this chaos.
And furthermore, I think that rather than hiding from that difficult fact, we can embrace it. I might even call that faith. You know? Trusting in spite of our inability to understand?
I feel like that’s a place that I’ve come to in my personal faith. After Hope died, I went through a long process of realizing that somewhere inside me I really believed that I deserved everything to work out well in my life. I was like a spiritual spoiled brat. I felt God asked me at some point—and please don’t hear this as harsh, it was during a long season—why I should demand everything to work out in my life the way I wanted, when so many others did not have that luxury. And I began to realize that my faith was not only centered in wanting to feel safe (falsely so), but it was also selfish. In fact, it wasn’t really faith at all in some ways because it was evidentially based. In other words, I felt good about God and my life if things were going well. But I doubted and got upset when things weren’t. Is that really faith? Faith is trust stripped of evidence and benefits. I mean SURE there will be evidence and benefits, but they cannot be the basis of faith. That’s why Jesus kept saying,”You people are just interested in signs!” They wanted the evidence, rather than trusting the person.
I guess I’m hoping to grow in understanding of this concept of faith. Of learning to trust in the character and intentions and will of God, even when things that I’m pretty sure are not in his character keep happening to me or around me.
I’m super tired right now, so I’m not sure this is even coherent. But I wanted to blog to stay consistent, so Jason and Jessica don’t get mad at me :) Hopefully this makes some sense!
So, how does it make you feel when your spouse (or a close friend) says to you, “You seem like you’ve been a little cranky lately. Is everything ok?” You know how it makes me feel? Cranky!!
Now I know this is totally unfair. And Mandy is so caring and loving when she says it, she is not trying to “stick it to me” or anything—she genuinely cares about my well being. And her, above anyone else, can tell when something’s going on on the inside. She can often tell before I can!
But, when I’m confronted with my own crankiness, that I already know to be present, it just serves to increase the level of crank. And the more I thought about it, I realized the main reason it irritates me, is that I know SHE IS RIGHT! (That’s another major flaw of mine – being wrong. Or even being second to being right.)
So anyway, I need work. I need to open up the hood of my life and do some work. I don’t know why there’s a direct line that runs from stress to crankiness and irritation in my life, but there is, and I need to cut it. I don’t want stress to run my life. Or ruin my life! I don’t want my kids to grow up remembering a fun dad in the distant past, but only experiencing a dad who snaps at them, and sighs all the time. And I don’t want my wife to feel on the outside of some inner turmoil that I keep to myself.
You know—it’s hard being a guy! This stuff does not come naturally to me. Honestly, tonight, I just wanted to sulk. To just feel bad, and enjoy feeling bad. But what I needed was to talk (and maybe to play a few video games). And to pray. And to write a blog about what a jerk I can be. I think that will help. I hope it will help.
I feel lately that I’ve been really falling short of those great verses in the Bible about love – “patient” . . . “kind” . . . “not easily angered.” Man those are high standards. But they are so good for the human heart. They are so good for me to choose in the midst of financial struggle or work stress, to welcome patience into my heart. And they are so good for my kids to see and feel that no matter what, I am kind. Kind. Even if they are disobeying the same rule for the fourteenth time in ten minutes. I am kind.
So I’ve got some work to do. This is my public confession of my need of work. God help me . . . please!
Eden and Daddy Video
Tonight while I was watching TV and cuddling with Eden in my rocking chair, the reality of it all just struck me again. It really is hard to believe we are holding a precious living baby girl. We agonized over this decision like no other decision in our lives. It was truly and by far the most difficult call of my life. It felt that to try to have a child again after losing two would be such a huge risk. A risk of our hearts, and most profoundly for us, a risk of our three living children’s hearts.
Those feelings, however, were counter balanced by the thought—the dream—that our children could see, hold, kiss, and love a living child. The hope that Mandy’s childbearing years would not end in suffering, loss, and grief. Honestly, the valley of that decision was almost unbearable. I wanted to run away from it. But a day came, with the help of many important friends, lots of prayer, and some very real revelation from God, that we decided to take the leap.
Now, all along, because of how we have grown from the impact Malachi and Hope (our two children whom we lost) we never could say, “God has said this it will certainly happen.” Although we felt that God had led us to this decision, we also knew (and know) that we live in a world where God’s plans don’t always come to pass. We knew the very real possibility of losing yet another child. And we also didn’t (and don’t) want to say that God would be faithful if we had a baby. God is faithful. That is true whether our baby lived or not. It’s a hard truth to really think about, but true nonetheless. It was important to us that our faith not be contigent every again in our lives upon things happening the way we think they should. That is so much easier to say than to do.
And that is why Eden’s birth is such a miracle. Honestly, we sought science and medicine fervently —but they added little to us other than vigilant watching. No. God somehow allowed, created, or made this happen. It is unexplainable. Why her and not the other two? Why us and not someone else who has never had a child? There are no answers. But as Malachi and Hope have each changed our lives, so is Eden. What an amazing miracle. When we brought her home all Samuel could say was, “I can’t believe she’s alive!” For days he said this. What a different reality our children have now.
So, this post is kind of rambling. I guess my point is—I stand in awe of this beautiful blessing. I don’t deserve her. And God didn’t owe us. But she (as with Samuel, Elliot, Mathea, Malachi, and Hope) is a gift from God. A total gift.
So as I hold her and look into her face, I see the road we have traveled over the past several years leading up to this point, and I am caught off guard again at the beauty of this blessing. Thank you God. You are faithful in the bad and in the good. But I thank you from the deepest part of me for giving us this gift—the gift of life. The gift of Eden.
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