When God Destroyed Me

There are plenty of times that I don’t feel qualified for doing student ministry (most times if I’m honest). The longer I stick around working with students the older I feel, the less I know, and the more things I realize that I’m not any good at. I’m not just talking about Instagram or Twitter but simple stuff, like retreat registrations and emails. Sometimes I marvel at all the ways that I don’t fit the job description that I would write for myself.

And then…

There are days like today. As I was running this evening (all my best thoughts come while running or hiking) I was overcome by the prayer requests of one of my students. There were so many similarities between this student’s story and mine. I ached in prayer for the Lord to move in and reveal truth and heal hurts. My body physically hurt (probably helped by the fact I hadn’t run in a few days) with emotion. It was as if my entire being was crying out in prayer (minus actual words).

And I was reminded of something from years ago…

I have always had a strong empathetic reflex. Even before I became a Christ-follower I would often be struck by severe pangs of pain, sorrow, and joy over the concerns of others. I remember one such encounter that left me ruined. I was at a Halloween party and a friend’s house (I didn’t have many friends). I didn’t know anyone at the party besides the host and so I awkwardly mingled my way around, upstairs, downstairs, outside. I watched as the other guests watched The Lost Boys in the basement and I felt an overwhelming, palpable darkness and despair. I had to leave the room. I made my way outside (it was somewhat warm for October) into the backyard. The host’s mother had a converted school bus out back. To this day I remember watching the adolescent lust as couple after couple circled off in the backyard to give away parts of themselves they would never get back. I briefly entered the bus to find the seats nearly full with other teens. I remember the darkness. My chest felt like it was caving in. I sat down beside the bus and sobbed silent tears. I felt destroyed at the brokenness and despair of the strangers who surrounded me.

Perhaps, God was preparing me. Perhaps He has designed this reaction in me to keep me from being judgmental or distant. Perhaps His desire is to break me to the point where all I can do is to cry out to Him in prayer.

Most often, that’s I can do.

Why We Do What We Do

This is a talk I gave on why our youth ministry exists and how we should evaluate why we do the things we do.

For three years these people had followed Jesus. Many of them gave up their jobs, their families, and their normal lives. They gave them up to follow a preacher around. Maybe it was curiosity. They saw Him perform miracles; they heard him say some pretty inflammatory things to the important religious and political figures of the day. They heard him say things about the Lord and the Kingdom of God that made it seem real, like it was really something that was happening, after four hundred years of silence, this guy made it seem like it was happening NOW. So at some point, these people got invested they bought into Jesus. They listened to Him and tried to imitate Him, to be like Him. He sent them out with His power to heal and preach about the Kingdom of God and they saw amazing things.

And then He’s murdered. He’s put on trial on trumped up charges and put on trial by a coward judge who orders Him murdered rather than upsetting the crowd. And they themselves scatter. Each of them to a greater or lesser degree abandons Jesus. They have three days of guilt and confusion. Was all this a waste of my life? What was the point if this guy was just going to be murdered? Was this really the Kingdom after all?

Then there’s a knock at the door, and its Peter and John and they’re saying that the body of Jesus is gone, that He’s risen from the dead just like He said He would. Later Jesus Himself shows up. He shows the holes in His hands where they drove the nails to crucify Him. He eats with them. He teaches them. They are excited. Jesus is back and now something is really going to happen because people don’t just rise from the dead every day.

And then Jesus says: I’m leaving. Now it’s your turn.

It’s your turn to tell others about me, about the way in which the Lord wants them to live.

And then He’s gone. Disappears.

And there’s this moment of confusion, of bewilderment. What do we do now? He says that now we’re in charge, that we have the power to do the things He did. But I don’t feel powerful. I don’t know what to say. And each of them had to make a choice: to believe what Jesus said or to give up and go home. There was no Jesus there inviting them to come in and stay. I mean He was God of course we’ll stay around God. But He’s gone now. 

What do we do go home? This was their opportunity to go back to a normal life, to stop looking like weirdos by fanatics.

And yet in one little verse in the story of the early church it says: These all with one mind were continually devoting themselves to prayer.

This is the start of a new year. How many of you made New Year’s resolutions? Most of the time people don’t keep their resolutions but I think that evaluating your life is very helpful. One of the things that I often find myself drawn to asking is: why am I doing what I’m doing? It’s so easy to fall into patterns and routines. Don’t get me wrong, patterns and routines can be good things but we need to look at them honestly and ask: why am I doing this?

It is easy to get into a routine. Routines can be great things. They help us establish patterns of behavior. They can help us become the people that we want to be.

However, we have a tendency to continue routines and patterns long after they have fulfilled their usefulness. My daughter is 2 years old. Early in life she used a pacifier to comfort her. Now however she doesn’t NEED that pacifier anymore, but she still wants it, she still demands it, she still cries for it, but it no longer serves its purpose.

It’s like Newton’s first law of motion (for you math geeks): an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside source.

We tend to keep doing the thing we’re doing even after its purpose has ended.

For many of us, Church can be a routine. Youth group can become a pattern. We play dodgeball. We eat snacks. And I think sometimes we need to step back and ask ourselves: why are we here? That’s what I want to do tonight: to talk about why we exist, because sometimes I think we get confused about why we’re doing what we’re doing.

Let me cut right to the chase: this is the goal of life: to know Jesus and make Him the center of our lives.

This should be at the heart of everything that we do in our lives.

The friends that we have – the core of those friendships should be Jesus.

The college we’re going to attend – the heart of that should be knowing and serving Jesus.

The boyfriend or girlfriend we want so badly – the heart of that should be knowing and serving Jesus.

But the reality is that we’re doing a pretty poor job at it. We get consumed by lust and envy and greed. We’re jealous and hateful. Even on our best days we’re horribly distracted by things that don’t make any difference and don’t bring us closer to Jesus.

Now the good news is that our standing before God doesn’t depend on us doing the “right” things or saying the “right” prayers. Our standing before God depends on Jesus’ death, his sacrifice to make us right before God. And that stays the same whether we’re having our best day or we’re having our worst day.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be striving to know Jesus more.

And that is what church is for, that is what youth group is for, they are tools to deepen the relationship between you and God.

And that’s what we’re here for. Strip away every single thing we do at youth group and that’s the core: to be a place to learn how to grow closer to God. Sometimes we get distracted and think it’s about games or food or about seeing our friends. Those are all fine things, good things, but they’re not the thing. If they were to suddenly disappear one week would things change? If one week we came here and there were no more games, would it matter? If you found out that your closest friends were never coming back to youth group, would you keep coming? If your parents suddenly said that they were never driving you to church again, how would it affect you?

I ask because I think about those first Christians that I told you about at the beginning. That’s the exact situation they were in.

(I know you were probably wondering why I told that story)

The early Christians (well they weren’t even that yet, they were just people who had followed Jesus) that had NO obligation to continue to meet together. In fact they had every reason to go home to their cities and their families and their jobs. Jesus was gone. The people who killed Him were still around (it’s only been 40 days, no one had forgotten yet). It would make perfect sense to lay low, at least for a while. Go home, become a fisherman again.

But they didn’t. They stayed.

They met together. They ate together. They prayed together.

They made an evaluation about what was rational, what was expedient, and what was faithful. They chose faith.

I’ll admit that sometimes in youth group it’s easy to get distracted and lose sight of the purpose. As someone who helps lead I have that problem. That’s why we need to periodically step back and strip away all of the “stuff” and really ask ourselves why we’re here, why we keep coming.

Are we here for the “stuff”?

Are we here because it’s a habit?

Are we here because we want to know Jesus?

I want to challenge you guys to ask that question of yourselves tonight.

Let me just say that the reason why we, as a ministry exist, is not to play games. It’s not to have food. It’s not to go to retreats. The reason we’re here is the same reason that the early Christians got together in those homes in Jerusalem --- they wanted to know Jesus and serve Him. All of the other “stuff” is fine so long as it does not distract us from Jesus.

When we chose the name A29 as the name of this ministry we did it deliberately because we wanted to follow in the footsteps of those early believers. There are 28 chapters in the book of Acts, but the history of Jesus working in this world goes on to this day. We want to be the 29^th chapter, the continuing chapter.

Think of this ministry as a tool in getting you closer to know Jesus.

Do any of you play sports?

I played baseball for 8 years when I was a kid (I stopped about 8^th grade (stupid decision, long story)) and I can remember all the practices that I would go to. If you play a sport, your ultimate aim is to get better at that sport. So to get better you practice, and you drill, and you watch. For me, the ways I got better at baseball were:

-         Practice (running laps)

-         Watching baseball on TV

-         Fielding grounders with my dad

-         Playing in games

Those were all different things that I did, but the purpose was the same: to become a better baseball player.

Wednesday nights, Sunday School, retreats they are all tools to help you know Jesus more and serve Him with your life. But they’re not the only tools, and they shouldn’t be. Reading your bible at home, listening to sermons, worshiping, following the examples of believers in your family. These are all other tools to get to where we want to be: close to Jesus.

I guess I’m saying two things:

-         The ultimate aim of the Christian is to know Christ and serve Him

-         Our purpose as a ministry is to help you do those two things.

So let me say this to you: you are like those early Christians. Nobody is forcing you to be here. I mean maybe your parents are to some extent but they can’t make you participate. They can’t make you engage. Only you are in control of your motives for being here. Those early Christians could have given up and gone home and I’m sure some of them did. But many didn’t. Many of them believe in the kingdom that Jesus told them about; they believed that Jesus was going to empower them to go out and do amazing things. Many of them chose to have faith in Jesus rather than what seemed to make sense for their lives. What are you going to do? What is going to be your motive for being here?

Let me promise you this: we, as leaders, are here for you. We don’t have to be. Nobody is making us, but we choose you. We choose to believe that Jesus wants to know you and that He has extraordinary plans for you. We believe that and we stake our time and our lives on that and we will continue to do everything in our limited power to help you grow closer to Christ. We are going to fail and we are going to get distracted with “stuff” but know that our goal is that you would know and serve Christ.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Here’s the funny thing, those early Christians who got together, they had every reason to doubt, they had every reason to want to pack it up and go home. But they stayed together united in purpose after Jesus left because they believed it when He said that He would do extraordinary things with their lives, that He would give them power.

So they met in homes. They ate together. They prayed. They helped one another in whatever needs they had.

And one day, the Lord showed up.

He gave them the Holy Spirit and sent those ordinary people on a trajectory that would change the face of human history. Those weak and doubting men and women who had abandoned Jesus during His crucifixion, those were the people that Jesus chose to shape history, because they chose to remain when they didn’t have to.

You don’t have to be here.

But the Lord has amazing plans for you.

Goals for 2015

Every year for the past six years I have made it my annual tradition to prepare a list of goals and principles to live by in the upcoming year. It’s a little more thoughtful and deliberate than a new year’s resolution (or at least I like to think so.) It started innocently enough, one year in which I was feeling particularly ambitious. My goals run the gamut in terms of scope. One year my goals might be to finish a novel or run a half-marathon and another year they might be to buy a new pair of glasses. As I said, pretty wide spectrum. Every December (or January if I procrastinate) I set aside time to think through what I want to accomplish in the upcoming year. If I’m completely honest I’m not much of a long-term planner. I often have a hard time seeing the “big picture”. I’m also decidedly risk-averse (read: cowardly).

I had already given some thought and jotted down a few notes on what I want 2015’s goals to be when I went for a run a week ago. [Sidenote: running is one of the “principles” that I have been able maintain consistently. Yay me!] I was trying to find a way to articulate why I do this exercise year after year if I were asked. I circled around the answer: it is a way to get me closer toward where I want to be. But then I began to ask myself: where do I want to be? What is my life aiming for? I mean its one thing to say that I want to write 500 a day on the way to finishing a novel, but is that what I really want? It is indeed a very noble goal but is that truly where I really want to be going?

I pondered and pondered and pondered some more and this is what I rested upon:

In 2015 I want to respond immediately when the Lord calls. At the end of the day; at the end of my life, that is what I want to identify me: did I respond to Jesus.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I am very good at dismissing the Lord’s calling. I will be leaving church and feel that I should pray for someone, but I get into my truck and drive home. At work, I will know that I should ask a deeper, probing question, but I shrug it off. It’s not that I don’t know what the Lord is asking me to do, it is rather that I have become adept at ignoring it or rationalizing it away. For instance, the other day I was going to see a movie with my parents (The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies if you must know) and as we drove though my parent’s neighborhood, I saw a woman sitting on her porch sobbing. Immediately I felt the desire to pull over and ask if she was okay. But… we were already cutting it close on the movie start time AND we were almost to my parent’s house already AND I wasn’t the one driving. So we drove on.

Who knows what the outcome would have been. She probably would have thought me crazy and shooed me off her property, but that wasn’t the point. The point wasn’t the validity or rationality or probability of the request, it was the one asking, namely the Lord. Will I respond when He asks me to?

I don’t know where you want to go in life. I don’t know what kind of person you want to be. I don’t know what goals you hope to accomplish in 2015, but I encourage you to thoughtfully articulate them. Give them attention. Think about the man or woman you want to be and set yourself down that path. The only way you can control who you’ll be in 10, 15, or 20 years is to become that person today, this day, this moment.

As for me, my aim is to 1) actively listen and 2) respond immediately when the Lord calls.

Too Much Stuff, Too Little Gospel

It’s about ten thirty in the evening. My wife and I stumble into our darkened house setting down our bags with a thud. My daughter, who at this point is far beyond tired, acts as if she has no skeletal structure and collapses into the floor in a heap as we attempt to get off her hat and coat. We are just returning home from a youth group Christmas party. It was a slow-burn affair culminating in a (most unexpected) chaotic game of Red Light, Green Light. It was good seeing the students who turned out for the event but it got me thinking: how much time, energy, and resources I spend putting together game nights, retreats, and overnighters. We have established patterns and systems that keep our ministry going throughout the year. Now don’t get me wrong, these systems are useful and serve the purpose of gathering us together (a Biblical command) but as I contemplate where the greatest percentage of my time goes I, wonder if my resources are being best allocated. If I’m honest, the bulk of my time goes into maintaining systems.

Systems serve the purpose of establishing rituals, streamlining procedures, and maintaining order. In the Christian life we each have our own systems: quiet times keep us reading the Bible, prayer gatherings keep us praying, tithing establishes the discipline of giving, gathering keep us meeting together. All of these things serve organizational and devotional needs, but is Jesus in them? It is a heart question that we all must ask ourselves.

If I’m honest, I’ve grown tired of maintaining systems for the sake of it. As much as I love ritual and routine, I’m afraid that they are keeping me from the Lord rather than leading me to Him. I’ve grown tired of events where we don’t talk about Jesus. As I grow older I’m less tolerant of talking around the edges of faith; of churchy banter. I’m tired of church gatherings that are more focused on small talk than seeing Christ move, on being transformed by the Word, and on praising the glory of the Lord. Mostly, I’m tired of the fickle shallowness of my own heart that elevates ritual over experience and routine over relationship.

As one involved in the planning of a ministry I can tell you (confess, really) how easy it is to create events for the sake of creating events; to gather for the sake of ourselves. The reason, at least for me, that this is so tempting is that it scares me to plan events (and our lives) about Jesus. It’s scary to gather solely for the purpose of knowing Scripture. It is scary to get together and ask questions deeper than what’s trending or about the results of some football game. It’s scary to ask in prayer what the Lord asks of us and be ready to do it. It is scary. I am scared, but I’m also dissatisfied. I’m dissatisfied of seeing how poorly my life lines up with the life of Jesus as demonstrated in the gospels.

This isn’t an indictment of systems or practices unless they get in the way of us responding to Christ; unless they insulate us from the life that the Lord truly wants us to live, a life of radical dependence. A gated community is great until it isolates us from the things Jesus wants us to be concerned with.

So what does this all mean? I’m afraid it means a break from the safety of our rituals and long-established patterns. There is no easy remedy for distrust other than trust. Often the desire to live a life for Christ demands a drastic reordering of priorities and a reimagining of what “normal” life looks like. A Christ-oriented life requires a state of expectancy for God’s movement. We cannot pray without expecting the Lord to answer. We cannot read without anticipating change. We cannot serve and still cling to any notion of pride. If we are for Christ, we can be for nothing else, most importantly, ourselves.

Lord, break us of our complacency.

Give us faith in the face of fear.

Give us the courage to abandon the good for the sake of the great.

The Futility of Regret

Darkness has a way of filling the void around us and boxing us in. There is something about the darkness that isolates us in a way that is divorced from reality. In the dark our inner world becomes the only world, or at least that’s the way it feels.  Those of us who have dealt with insomnia or altered sleep schedules know that one of the most frustrating and trying thing is to sit patiently yearning for sleep when sleep will not come. Blaise Pascal once said that “all of humanity’s stem from man’s inability to sit in a quiet room alone.” Those of us who know the debilitating power of darkness know these words to be painfully true in a number of ways. Too often the isolation of darkness releases our assailing demons. Ideas and fears stifled by the daylight often prevail in the sequestration of the night. The lusts of the flesh and doubts long stifled burst suddenly to life in the quiet hours.

Such has been my experience. Working overnight shifts have been difficult on my non-working hours. Often I find myself awake at unusual times battling the losing battle of imposing sleep that will not come. It seems so often that it is in times like these that the doubts and fears of our past take the opportunity of our weakness to show themselves like some shadowy slithering menace. We all have fears and regrets about our lives. Though we may successfully (and rightly) bring them into the light of Truth through Scripture it is in our times of strife that they reemerge, causing us to question our choices, our promise of hope, and indeed our very lives. I found myself battling regret in wee small hours of the morning yesterday. My intent had been to go hiking later in the morning but the darkness lingered on interminably and sleep seemed an insurmountable mountian. Assailed upon by hopelessness and regret, the very choices that I have made over the years became a bitter reminder of my own insufficiencies and failures. Lost in the tedium, of course, like the very light of day, were the blessings which the Lord has shown me; the ways in which He reveals Himself and His will to me in ways small and large. That is the power of darkness: isolation and fear. We all have things in our past that we wish we could have done differently. We all have areas of our pasts that we would prefer be secret even to those closest to us; expanses of our minds that we fight to crucify daily that would shock even those who know us best. Regret, as it so often does, fermented into bitterness and it was in this spirit that I set out to hike a nature area on the west side of Ann Arbor.

The park has an inclusive, almost claustrophobic feel, even in the leafless days of late autumn thanks in part to the numerous hills and ridges that bring the hiker in and out of gullies and small valleys. I traversed in the earliest daylight hours aimlessly only having the vague goal of reaching the farthest extremes of the park; anything to get away from the turmoil of my own thoughts. Hiking so often is just that for me, a chance to escape the troubles of life and the pressures of polite society. Most of the hike was a display of grey and brown as fallen leaves crunched underfoot with a crust of frost and leafless trees filled the horizon, however every once and a while the rising sun peaked over the buffeting hills and cast away the shadows. Hiking east I climbed a rise that was slightly more difficult that I had intended and was greeted with a view of the Huron River Valley, smoky in the morning air and glinting with the rays of the sun. Now I’m not stupid, I knew the geography of the area. I hadn’t misplaced the river but still it came as a contrast to the bland forest and its skeleton trees. There it was: something so beautiful and shimmering amid the brown monotony of the rest of the hike. I had thrown a Bible into my jacket pocket out of habit as I had left and now pulled it out and sat down. I have been (slowly) driving my way through Isaiah and turned to the day’s reading: “And yet, Lord, you are our Father. We are the clay, and you are the potter. We are all formed by your hand.”

It struck me in that moment the futility of regret. A thousand choices and sins might lay behind us like a vast wasteland, but if we know the Lord and set our sights on Him, nothing; not our past; not our doubts, can stop us. The Holy Spirit rescues us from the wreck of our lives. Decisions, good and bad, wise or unwise are meaningless unless done for the Lord. Conversely, even our limited, faltering steps move us closer if we have on our horizon the glory of the Lord. We are limited in our very nature: created things seeking to have the insight of their Creator. Of course we see only dimly the path before us, that is the point: to trust fully the one who draws us along, who leads us on. He has shaped us, molded us, and gifted us for His purposes. Even when those purposes seem elusive and shrouded in mystery our response should not be to lament our foolishly limited perspective but rather to trust in the Hand and Mind guiding us. Without Him, even our shrewdest decisions are nothing but a lesson in futility.

As I sat, the daylight exorcised the shadows from the wood. Unencumbered by the leafy canopy it immersed the forest in blazing light. The world seemed to swell as I viewed it but not in a way that isolated or frustrated. The expanse of blue sky, the shimmer of sunlight upon the river, the boughs of trees stretching out all spoke to me of the Lord’s providential will--- a plan free from shadows, darkness, and doubt. I would have sat there all day but the allure of the trail led me on. The promise of the unknown path before me led my steps. I think there’s a lesson in the walking.

My Heart is a Raging Fire (Once For All)

 My heart is a raging fire,

Ablaze by the spark of sin,

Covetous in every desire,

Devoid of hope within.

Even my best intentions

Find their root in sin.

What hope in my condition

But in complete abandon?

 Once for all you did died

 Once for all sin reconciled

Once for all my soul restored

 Once for all my life is yours

All these years I’ve wasted

In willful, wanton pride,

All for myself deluded.

Such a wasted life.

Once for all my flesh did die.

Once for all born again.

 In your grace I rise forgiven

With Thy Spirit favors win.

 Once for all you did die.

Once for all sin reconciled.

 Once for all my soul restored.

Once for all my life is yours.

In my brokenness and weakness

My life to you surrendered.

Take my days and hours in your service

My will to Thine is yielded.

In Thy eternal wisdom send me

 Out where’re Your Spirit make plain

In humility I’ll serve Thee

Your Kingdom glory be my aim.

More Like The Farmer

So I haven't written much lately, partly due to my new overnight shift and partly due to my own laziness. This morning's sermon by Pastor Glei reminded me of a poem I once wrote. So I shall share it with you.

Trust not as the hoarder

in cash nor pen

nor in the splendors of mortal men;

more like the farmer

who counts in bushels
the blessings sown
by winds and rains and hands unknown
to meet the needs of flesh and bone
grown by the grace of God alone.

Not by hands that toil or till
though in their place their purpose fill
no; but by the whim of One who sees
the purposes in bitter seeds
and the goodness in the roots of trees.
Of stones and clods that mar the earth
He sees but shadows of the coming mirth.
For all the streams flow from One source
though slow and winding be their course
and those in drought may pine away
for the blessing of some foregone day.
To those who fashion themselves kings:
Know the weight such appointment brings.
For He who raises in His time
will bring about His will through thine.
But to those who watch and pray
who take comfort in the coming day
the waters sweet which ebb and flow
will appear like springs from deep below
and quench the parched and green the land
bringing joy to the righteous man.

For sorrows in their time may yeild
a deeper faith and larders filled
by One whose stength eclipses thine
and knows the winding roads of time.
For luck and chance sculpt not the land
only the greatness of His plan.