Lay Servant Training Opening Worship – April 20, 2013

Good morning!  I am going to start today with the story of the graphic that I am proudly displaying on my Springville United Methodist Church T-Shirt.  A story that has Easter People written all over it!

Have you ever had an idea just pop into your head?  An idea that came from some place you did not know existed?  This is where the One Another cross came from, and where it goes no one knows.

I attended a church service where the pastor cited the large number of occasions in the New Testament where the words “one another” were preceded or followed by a command or request.  Searching an online bible database, I found 41 such instances.   They started with Jesus’ words in the Gospel According to John, Chapter 13, Verses 14 (^“So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”), 34 (“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”), and 35 (“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”). “One another” also shows up in Romans, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1^st Thessalonians, Hebrews, James, 1^st Peter, 1^st & 2^nd John.  It was in seeing the breadth of the commands where the idea of the cross was born.

And then my business background kicked in…how could any Christian NOT like this cross?  I thought, “I will copyright it and sell it on anything I can print it on.  Better still, I will license it to someone and collect royalties for the rest of my life.”  And I started down this path, sending inquiries to companies that I thought would be interested in some original Christian artwork…even though I am hardly an artist!  Alas, no responses came.

It was about this time that I had a long talk with God.  Did He not send the cross to me in order to help provide for my children?  If so, I reasoned, the offers should have been flooding my email.  Since that did not happen, what was His intent?  And then the classic series of consequences started.  Our Emmaus group wanted to raise money for worthy causes.  “What do you guys think about using this image?,” I asked the group.  Their approval was enthusiastically “YES!” and the project was started.

Pastor Ron Fike and I were discussing where this project could go, and we talked about getting $1 from each item sold through other churches for our local mission fund.  And then God and Julius had another chat, and the $1 charge no longer felt right.  The words were His, and I am pretty sure that the image is His; that I was simply the facilitator here on Earth.  So the charge went away…

And since then we have about 40 items floating around the village of Springville.  And the cross has made its way to Flint and New Orleans on the front of Siena Heights University Campus Ministry’s Winter Break T-Shirts.  And it is now in Marquette, MI and Los Angeles as gifts for my girlfriend’s family.  And it has been translated into Spanish with help from Nick Kaplan of Siena Heights and Rey Mondragon of Ypsilanti First United Methodist Church.  And the Spanish version is probably on its way onto t-shirts in Iowa, courtesy of Katie Waggoner’s sister Sara, who plans to use it to raise money for her mission trips to Guatemala, and to take shirts down with her.

So where is the Easter People connection?  In his recent Easter message to the United Methodist Church in Indiana, Bishop Michael Coyner gave some guidelines for Easter People.  First, Easter People know that the church is the Body of Christ, and not the buildings that we worship in.  How many stories are there of church buildings being wiped out by natural disasters, yet the congregation pulls together and continues to function until another building is secured?  Each one of us here today, the teachers and the students and the clergy, is a living, breathing part of the Body of Christ.  We not only understand that “church” is a living thing, we have a demonstrated commitment to further the Word of God.

We Easter People offer our best out of a sense of gratitude to God.  Sure, we will all take the tax deduction for our financial donations, but we all know that it is the non-financial donations that make God’s church the force that it is today.  Every time we step up to lead a small group, to preach a message, to add our voices to a choir, to lead a charitable effort, and so on, we share the love that He put in each one of us out of a sense of owing Him something for all of the good we have been given.  And without the efforts of our Lay Servants, our churches would be dark and uninteresting save for an hour or two each Sunday morning.  It is our best that makes our churches vital and alive with the spirit of Jesus Christ.

Jesus’ death on the cross and His rising are the things that fuel our faith, not the points that we collect for helping out or for writing our weekly check.  We understand that we were all redeemed on that first Easter!  We know that we are awash in His grace!  We know that He will not take any of this away from us even though we are all sinners!  We know that Jesus’ final act as a human being was the ultimate act of love, a love so profound that it can never be completely understood.  We understand that the Holy Spirit moves us to do the things that bring glory to God, the things that we could never figure out to have done on our own, including designing and giving away a cross graphic!

In wrapping up this morning, I would like to read from Paul’s letter to the Colossians, Chapter 3, verses 12-14: As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.  Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.  Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

And we Easter People place all of our trust in the Trinity.  We know that by believing in Him, and by sharing the love in our heart in same manner that Jesus shared His love, we have been granted access to all of the goodness that God created here on Earth and beyond.  There are no other conditions for His love of us.  As Chris Tomlin says in his song “Indescribable,” “He can see the depth of our hearts, and He loves us anyway.”

But we Easter People need to remember to be vulnerable enough to continue to share the compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness and love that we have in our hearts.  We need to share love when there is no promise of a return.  We need to share love when all seems hopeless.  We need to share love when bombs rip through our world.  For when we are vulnerable and courageous enough to share love when all seems hopeless, that, my friends, is the moment when hope is fueled, and God shows just how powerful and loving  He is.  He showers all of us in goodness.  He fills all of our hearts with joy.  And all of that, and more, makes us smile as He shows us just how much WE are capable of doing in His name.  We know that we cannot do any of this without Him.  And He needs more Easter People to make more good things happen here on Earth.  Amen!

Springville UMC: Sermon January 6, 2013

Today we celebrate the Epiphany, which happens to fall on the 12^th day of Christmas.  Yes, that 12^th day of Christmas, the one that makes you take a deep breath so you can sing about pipers piping, lords a-leaping, ladies dancing, geese a-laying, gold rings, and a partridge in a pear tree!  In fact, even our readings this morning tell of the gifts that surround the arrival of our Savior.  Over 500 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, the author of Isaiah tells us that a multitude of camels will bring people with gold and frankincense to proclaim praise of the Lord.  David, in Psalm 72, tells us that kings will render him tribute and bring Him gifts.  And this psalm was written between 970 and 610 B.C.  Matthew’s gospel reminds us that the gift of a savior was foretold over 700 years before it happened, in the book of Micah 5:2-5, which says:

“But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.  Therefore he shall give them up until the time when she who is in labor has brought forth; then the rest of his kindred shall return to the people of Israel.  And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.  And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the end of the earth; and he shall be the one of peace.”

But what does the Epiphany mean for us today?  Dictionary.com says that the meaning of the word epiphany is “a sudden perception or insight into the essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple or commonplace occurrence or experience.”  A commonplace occurrence like the birth of a child, albeit a special child!  The symbol of The Epiphany is light, and Jesus is commonly called The Light of The World, the one who helps us to see that which is shrouded in darkness.  So, for me, the Epiphany is a time to gain a deeper understanding of God’s gift to us and to spread the light of God's love through the blessed gift of Jesus.

But how do we share such a joyous and hopeful message when so many of us are prisoners of earthly things?  Prisoners, you ask?  Yes!  It is clearly after the traditional Christmas gift giving season, and many of us are experiencing guilt & regret.  I can see the guilt on your faces!  I can smell the regret!  We now feel guilt over all of the high calorie food that we ate at all of those holiday celebrations.  And we feel deep regret as the credit card bills start rolling in for all of the earthly gifts that we felt that we had to give to who knows how many people; bills that we will need to tap into our bank accounts to pay.  And then there are the resolutions that we, at least for a few weeks, are prisoners to…pledging to exercise, and to diet, and not to swear, and to spend less money on non-essential things, and so on and so on.  And all of them hold until the pressure of modern life crush our dreams into the dust of previous years’ goals.  So what can we do to make 2013 different, a year when we are successful in bettering ourselves and in spreading the hopeful news of Jesus Christ?  I have a couple of ideas that have worked for me.

I begin with that fountain of wisdom know as FaceBook, and a quote that struck me hard a year or two ago.  It goes like this:

People who don't love themselves can adore others, because adoration is making someone else big and ourselves small. They can desire others, because desire comes out of a sense of inner incompleteness, which demands to be filled. But they can't love others, because love is an affirmation of the living, growing being in all of us. If you don't have it, you can't give it!!!

In years past, the Christmas season was not one that I looked forward to because of the financial situation into which we had put ourselves.  Money was tight, and my ex was adamant about making Christmas memories for our family via the joy that our gifts would bring.  I was only worried about her exceeding the budget we had set, the bills that would arrive in January and how I was going to pay them.  I did not speak up.  I made myself small.  And I now know that it was because I did not love myself.  I was not a living, growing being, except maybe around my waist.  And that Julius was not a pleasant person, and I now stand before you as someone who has been divorced for three years and now gets it.  So what changed?

I realized that I needed to change my mind, and my heart.  I was living in the wrong paradigm.  I needed to let go of the wants of the material world and seek the needs of my spiritual being, needs that the material world were helping to hide.  We do not recognize our spiritual needs when we are busy chasing our material wants.  It is not possible.  You cannot pay homage to two masters and be successful with both.  So how did I break out of that life and find myself again? 

I realized that I was never going to find what my heart needed in the material world.  I was blessed to be introduced to people who challenged me to find God in my heart, and they were then kind enough to help me find God in my heart and in my life.  How did they do that?

The answer is actually in today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.  Paul speaks of the gift of God’s grace that Christ bestowed upon him; a gift that he was told to spread to the Gentiles of the time so that they could see God’s mystery in all things that He created for them.  Prior to his receiving God’s grace, Paul actually persecuted the church and cooperated in the killing of Stephen.  He was converted after seeing a vision of the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus.

I can say that my epiphany was not so dramatic…I had no vision of Christ.  I came to understand that the hardships I was carrying on my back were of my own doing…from decisions I had made to keep others happy…while ignoring my own needs, mostly the spiritual ones.  My “vision” was that I would have to drop that material world baggage in order to find my spiritual self.  I had to give up on the wants of the material world and feed my spiritual needs.  And I became convinced that I could not do this if I did not love myself.  When I found love for who I was, and decided to not allow others to judge me, I found God’s grace. 

God’s justifying grace reconciles us, it pardons us, and it restores us.  Through Christ our sins are forgiven.  Through God’s grace we are brought into a relationship with God.  We are only required to believe.  The Methodist church calls this process conversion, changing our earthly orientation to a spiritual orientation.  This can only happen when we see ourselves as right with God through his eyes.  It is a time of pardon and forgiveness, a new beginning in joy and love.  We turn away from behaviors that are rooted in sin and turn toward actions that demonstrate God’s love to others.  We are redeemed!!!

Seems like all I could see was the struggle
Haunted by ghosts that lived in my past
Bound up in shackles of all my failures
Wondering how long is this gonna last
Then You look at this prisoner and say to me "son
Stop fighting a fight it's already been won"

I am redeemed, You set me free
So I'll shake off these heavy chains
Wipe away every stain, now I'm not who I used to be
I am redeemed, I'm redeemed

All my life I have been called unworthy
Named by the voice of my shame and regret
But when I hear You whisper, "Child lift up your head"
I remember, oh God, You're not done with me yet

I am redeemed, You set me free
So I'll shake off these heavy chains
Wipe away every stain, now I'm not who I used to be

Because I don't have to be the old man inside of me
'Cause his day is long dead and gone
Because I've got a new name, a new life, I'm not the same
And a hope that will carry me home

I am redeemed, You set me free
So I'll shake off these heavy chains
Wipe away every stain, 'cause I'm not who I used to be

I am redeemed, You set me free
So I'll shake off these heavy chains
Wipe away every stain, yeah, I'm not who I used to be
Oh, God, I'm not who I used to be
Jesus, I'm not who I used to be
'Cause I am redeemed
Thank God, redeemed

In closing, I ask you to give yourself a gift before this holiday season officially closes.  Take all of the earthly baggage that has been dragging you down and holding you back, and lift it up to God.  First off, He can handle it!  Second, it is an amazing feeling!  And finally, it will give you incredible energy to share His Good News with the world.  

Springville UMC Sermon: November 18, 2012

Have you ever noticed that sometimes when you have what appears to be a difficult task to do, a second, wider look reveals the task to be simpler than you originally thought?  Yeah, that happens to me from time to time, too, and it happened in the preparation of today’s sermon.  The gospel reading from Mark starts with the admiration of several buildings by one of the Apostles, only to have Jesus reply with some line about the buildings they are looking at being demolished.  Boy, did I volunteer for the wrong day!  I struggled with my task and finally picked a direction, I wrote down a lot of notes, and crafted it into a message…a six and a half minute message.  This would not do!

So I went to what has become an old standby in my life, I looked for inspiration, and God provided it!  Why was I limiting myself to only the Gospel reading?  There are no such rules for writing a sermon!  So I read the other three readings, and a common theme emerged.  The same common theme I was already working on!  I was relieved!  I felt blessed!  I did not need to start with another stack of blank paper!!!

The first reading from the first book of Samuel details a change in the life of Hannah, mother of Samuel.  She was taunted & teased because she had no children, one of the major life accomplishments of women in those days.  The taunting led to her depression, a common sequence of events even today.  Even in her depression, Hannah found her faith in God, prayed to the Father, and her prayers were answered!  She had a son, Samuel.  Faith can do that, if we only let it!

Psalm 113, like many of the Psalms, is full of praise for the Lord, whose glory is higher than the heavens.  In this psalm, God lifts the poor from the dust, and the needy from the garbage dump.  In doing so, He elevates them to the status of princes and princesses upon their arrival in Heaven!  Faith can do that, if we only let it!

The writers of Hebrews then remind us that, unlike the frequent animal sacrifices of the Old Testament, Jesus’ sacrifice was good enough, or should I say great enough, to forgive all sins, everywhere, for all time.  We are able to enter into Heaven and enjoy God’s house, if we are sincere in our faith and fully trust Him.  The authors then ask us to motivate each other to acts of love, and to encourage one another, two things that we enjoy doing here at Springville United Methodist Church.  And faith can do all of this, too, if we only let it!

Today’s Gospel passage from Mark has Jesus talking to only 4 of the Apostles, who have asked him when the magnificent buildings they are sitting in the shadow of will be reduced to the stones from which they were built.  Bible scholars believe that Jesus, in response to their questions, foreshadows events that would take place after his eminent death.  Indeed, there were a series of wars after His death, including the Jewish War.  It was during these conflicts that Jerusalem was destroyed.  These scholars believe that Mark’s gospel was written after the Jewish War, and was composed to set the stage for Jesus’ return to a world that desperately needed Him.

Peter, James, John and Andrew are told that they will be persecuted and challenged for believing in and teaching about Jesus, just as the Son of Man and John the Baptist were.  This comes as no surprise to us today, because we know that Jesus life and death and the birth of the church shook the fabric of society for hundreds of years.  Mark’s gospel speaks of wars and earthquakes as the beginning of birth pangs, the world’s labor pains of Jesus’ return.  Some of that chaos was generated by those who held strongly to the teachings of the past several hundred years, as they did not believe that Jesus was the Savior they had been waiting for.

The Old Testament, as many of you know, is filled with stories of war and battle.  God clears out many a land to make room for his people.  In the book of Joshua alone the troops of Jericho, Ai, Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, Eglon, as well as those of the Amorites, are defeated by Heaven’s Army, and those in only the first 10 chapters!  He also does a do-over with His people a few times because they will not obey Him.  God does all of this destruction and killing for an important reason: He is clearing the way for something better!  God does these things without warning, for what He has planned is so much better than what already exists.  We need to remember in times of war and natural disasters that God’s worst plans are better than even the best plans of we humans!

His swift, decisive actions are also meant to serve as a warning to future generations…a warning to be prepared!  In the Old Testament, He used the “fear of God” strategy to try to keep His people in line.  But, still, His people sinned openly and lusted after the things that other people had…and that lusting eventually led to sin, which then led to war.  For when we lust, we lose sight of God and our individual goodness, and we begin to seek greener grass.  Alas, the grass is not greener, and God is not happy with us.

I would like to read from Jeremiah, Chapter 7, verses 20 through 26.  “Therefore thus says the Lord God: My anger and my wrath shall be poured out on this place, on human beings and animals, on the trees of the field and the fruit of the ground; it will burn and not be quenched.  Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices, and eat the flesh.  For on the day that I brought your ancestors out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to them or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices.  But this command I gave them, ‘Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and walk only in the way that I command you, so that it may be well with you.’  Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but, in the stubbornness of their evil will, they walked in their own counsels, and looked backwards rather than forwards.  From the day that your ancestors came out of the land of Egypt until this day, I have persistently sent all my servants, the prophets, to them, day after day; yet they did not listen to me, or pay attention, but they stiffened their necks.  They did worse than their ancestors did.”

We know that God sent a long line of servants and prophets to lead His people to Him.  This did not work well.  God needed to reevaluate.  Perhaps God decided that His ways were too obscure, too divine to be understood by humans.  Might that be why He sent His Son to live among us and teach us a way of life centered around service, and forgiveness, and love?  Yet, even this kinder, gentler approach does not appeal to many on planet Earth today.  The golden rule proves an elusive life objective for many!

Returning to our scene across from Mount Olive, Jesus talks of the destruction of the buildings.  WE know that Jesus had little use for the majestic, the shiny, the refined.  His people were simple and humble, with a deep faith in Him and the Father, a faith that could save them.  Faith is all that is required to receive His gifts, not fancy buildings or vestments.  Faith can do this, if we only let it!

Jesus tells the four to beware of those who claim “I am He.”  There were many deceivers, seducers and impostors back in the day, and there are even more among us today.  Who or what are these deceivers?  Then, as now, they are the people we choose to idolize.    They are the earthly things that we long for, and lust for, that are supposed to bring us happiness.  They may different from the golden idols and the carvings of the Old Testament, but, yet, they are quite the same.  You know them as Hollywood stars, cars, houses, clothes, professional athletes, vacations, food, Internet sensations, big screen TV’s, sexual partners, and so on.  And they all have the power to make us happy…for a little while…and none will last forever!  We use our God-given free will to choose these things, showing our humanity, our weakness.  We believe that these things are “the one thing”…the Holy Grail!  Then we learn again and again that “things” are never forever.  Only God is forever!

Knowing that everything comes to an end, many of us wish to know God’s timeline, as the four inquire of Jesus.  “When will it all happen?” they wanted to know.  We want to know!  They wanted to be ready.  We want to be ready!  God, however, has a different plan.  He would prefer we live the kind of life where we are always prepared for what comes next, be it a good step or our demise.

Jesus tells us several times in the Gospels that the end is near, but what is this end of which He speaks?  A few years ago, the song “Closing Time” had gained some popularity, and its lyrics tell us that every new beginning comes from some other new beginnings’ end.  Again, every new beginning comes from some other new beginnings’ end.  This is very true!  These beginnings often come from the birth pains of a new you!  But only God knows when it is going to happen, how it is going to happen, and how it is going to end.  We live a life where new rules are made occasionally, and God had made us flexible and adaptable and resilient enough that we thrive in new beginnings.  That is His way to help us to grow closer to Him, and closer to always being prepared!

I can tell you from personal experience that life is a never-ending series of renewals.  I saw new things when I went to high school, and I grew because of those experiences.  I went to college away from home, and saw first-hand how the families of my friends were different than my family, and different in a good way.  I had opportunities I never expected to have, and took advantage of them to gain useful experience.  My professors encouraged me to go straight onto graduate school, and it is one of the best pieces of advice I have ever received.  Little did I know it, but I was evolving under the guiding hand of the Maker.  My work life provided more experience, and I was still changing.

I got married.  And I changed, but this change was less than good.  Looking back, it was one long period of my life when I did not think of or thank God very much.  And the financial problems grew.  And the stress grew.  And my depression grew.  And my waistline grew and my health got worse.  And at the height of all of this bowing to these earthly pressures while ignoring God, about 5 years ago, I looked like this on the left…and as I look today on the right.

Almost 4 years ago, a series of unrelated events put me on the path back to the me I used to be, and back to God.  I found a counselor who I could relate to, who brought me back from the floor of Hell.  I found a website that showed me how to release the fears and limitations that I had placed on myself.  I had a friend tell me that my comfort zone had disappeared along with my family, and my job, and my home.  Good riddance!  It had long grown uncomfortable, anyway.  I had the support of friends and family to build a new comfort zone.  I found a new career in teaching when my research career had seemingly reached a dead end.  I had an old friend invite me to a Via Di Christo weekend, think Walk to Emmaus, and my faith in God was fed by the grace He offers to all of us, yet too few of us readily accept it.  And I was blessed to meet a woman who challenged me to find God in my life, and to let God do His work for me by lifting my needs up to Him and thanking Him for all that He provides.

Mikeschair, “Someone Worth Dying For” video

We are God’s creations, and YOU, every one of YOU, are as magnificent as the most beautiful structure you can imagine…no, actually, we are more beautiful!  You are someone worth dying for!  We are made not in the image of some architect, but in the image of God.  As we grow up, we are exposed to the ways of the world, the temptations and all that.  We sometimes lose our focus and succumb to the deceptions of our world, falling into an abyss, and sometimes we even fall to the floor of Hell.  We feel alone and ashamed.  We are challenged and we crumble.  Yet we are built on solid rock…the love of the Redeemer and His Father!  They gave us birth pains and many warnings of a new life in Christ.  It is His way…to break us down…to make us the most vulnerable we have ever been…the most weak…the most unworthy…and give us not that which we want, nor deserve, but what we NEED…and what we need is His love and the chance to go out among His children to teach, to evangelize, to serve, to forgive, to love, to spread His Good News.  Yes, faith can do this, too, if we only let it!

He makes us better than we were yesterday, more beautiful, more able to resist the deceivers, with Him as our foundation!  And we are better prepared for His return, whenever it may be.  For we love Him and He loves us, each and every day!

Hanover Chapel Sermon:Spring, 2012

I was an adjunct professor at Hanover College in Hanover, IN from January, 2011 until May, 2012.  It was during that time that my spirituality was reawakened, and I gained a deep understanding of the love of God for each of us.  I was asked on a couple of occasions to share my story, and was then asked to give a sermon for the weekly chapel service in the Spring of 2012.  What follows is the sermon I delivered that day.  I hope that you enjoy!

"If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn't love others, I would only be a noisy gong of a clanging cymbal.  If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God's secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but I didn't love others, I would be nothing.  If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn't love others, I would have gained nothing.  Love is patient and kind.  Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude.  It does not demand its own way.  It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged.  It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.  Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.  Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless.  But love will last forever!  Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture!  But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless.  When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child.  But when I grew up, I put away childish things.  Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity.  All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.  Three things will last forever - faith, hope and love - and the greatest of these is love."  -1 Corinthians 13:1-13 (NLT)

Verses from the first letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13, are often used at weddings, since it is at weddings where love always fills the air.  The readings in the church are selected, often by the couple being married, to emphasize that they love each other and that love is the greatest gift.  While we can only hope that this is true for each and every married couple on the planet, these words from Corinthians are not meant as a profession of love.  They were written to remind us that love must show up in each and every day of our lives, whether married or single, if we are to fulfill our promise to God.  Love cannot just kick in when we find “the one” with whom we will spend the rest of our lives.  Most importantly, we must learn to love the person we see in the mirror each morning, and not feel as if the sin of arrogance is creeping into our lives.  Arrogance is defined as an “offensive display of superiority or self-importance; overbearing pride.”  It is not love.

Each one of us was created with special gifts bestowed upon us by the Father.  One of the ways that we demonstrate our love for Him is the cultivation of those gifts, the use of those gifts, and the sharing of those gifts with others.  Sharing our gifts visibly demonstrates our love of others.   And when we share our gifts, others, in turn, will be willing to share their gifts with us, and so on, and so on, and so on.  Human beings are social creatures; in the story of Genesis, it’s why God created Eve.  Most of us crave interaction with others at some level.  We cannot hoard our thoughts for very long, lest they ultimately consume us.  We must share and expand upon what we know and believe so that we can move beyond thinking and reasoning like a child toward the unachievable goal of seeing everything with perfect clarity.

So, if the destination of seeing everything with perfect clarity is unachievable, why are we here on Earth?  What was God thinking when he put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and allowed them to be tempted by the fruit of the tree?  Could it be that He has so much love inside of Him that He wanted to let some of it out and allow it to grow in crazy multiples, just to see what would happen?  Perhaps the experiment changed once the apple was eaten?  Maybe it became even more interesting to Him?  It seems to me that He set up the classic struggle between good and evil…white hats versus black hats.  Whatever his reasoning, what did not change is the love of the Father, nor the potential for goodness and love that is installed in each one of us on our “born on” date.  It just got a little more challenging for us to allow our goodness to come forth, since we are all now swimming in a sea of sin.

At a time in my life when allowing the goodness to come forth was particularly challenging, I came across a passage by Marianne Williamson.  Those who have been to my office have seen it hanging on my door.  I strive to live my life by it.  Why?  You decide:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.  Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.  It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.  We ask ourselves: who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?  Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God.  Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.  There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.  We are all meant to shine, as children do.  We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.  It’s not in some of us, it’s in everyone.  And as we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.  As we’re liberated from our own fear our presence automatically liberates others.

If we believe in God, we know that we are powerful beyond measure, because He made us, and everything that He made was good.  The potential brightness of our light must scare us.  After all, we are all sinners and are attracted to the darkness in our world at least once in a while.  And we do this even when we know that there is a better way, as we are told by Paul in his letter to the Romans, Chapter 12, verses 1-3.

Don't copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.  Then you will learn to know God's will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

Because we are children of God we are by definition brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous!  Our brilliance, however, must be cultivated via education; we must do some heavy lifting and study…all of us!  Give us a basic understanding of a subject and our collective imaginations fly to new discoveries.  Our gorgeous-ness is deep under the layers of skin we live in, which simply serve to hold our bones and muscles and inner workings in place.  No matter what we, or society, may think we look like externally, we each have beauty in our hearts and souls, and it is multiplied when we decide to share it with others in the form of love.  Our talents lie dormant until given the opportunity to burst forth and surprise even ourselves with the breadth of what we are truly capable of becoming.  And fabulous?  You know it!  And if you don’t know it by now, you’d better embrace it!  Again, God created you from the dust of the Universe, and you are here to do his bidding on Earth since He has a universe to manage.

Since we have all of these gifts inside of us, shrinking inside yourself is a sin.  Not using your talents is a sin.  Not living a life in homage to God is a sin.  Not being “fabulous” so that others will not feel inferior is a sin.  Sharing your love is using your gifts to brighten the world we live in.  The light of the world is in each one of us.  We are duty bound to turn our light on and let everyone see how awesome our God is to give us such gifts.  We have nothing to fear, for God is on our side.  He loves us!  He continuously bathes us in his grace!  And when someone finally sees your light, they will be less afraid to be liberated in Him and turn their light on and share their gifts.  As Paul told the Philippians in Chapter 4, verse 13:

For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength.

God does indeed liberate us from fear through His love for us.  Always has, always will!  FEAR, I have believed for a long time, stands for False Expectations Appearing Real.  Think about it…How often does all that we fear actually happen?  Answer: rarely, if ever!  What do we have to fear?  We have the ultimate safety net: God!  Turning your fear off and turning your light on WILL give someone else the courage to believe in Him and turn their light on.  So, how do we turn our light on?  From the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 16, verses 13 and 14:

Be on guard.  Stand firm in the faith.  Be courageous.  Be strong. And do everything with love.

The Sea Is High: Mid-Life Crisis

“I'm 45 for a moment,
The sea is high,
And I'm heading into a crisis,
Chasing the years of my life.“

          -from 100 Years, written by John Ondrasik

The song 100 Years was quite popular several years ago; so much so that it was used in a credit card commercial that showed us why a certain card was so good for us for our entire life.  Yes, we all got sick of the song and were glad to see it move down the charts and into a feel good place in our memory.  And when we hear it now it brings back fond memories of that year, or that time in our life, or we remember how overexposed it got and we still hate it!

The lyric I have cited had deep meaning for me when the song was popular.  I was around 45 years old at the time, and things in my life were not going according to the script I had written many years earlier.  The sea in my life had risen to a very high level, and I knew each and every day that a crisis was just around the corner.  The only questions were which corner and when I would find it.  There had already been plenty of times when we had to pull out the life rafts until the water could be bailed off of the good ship Nagy, but we always managed to re-board and proceed with life, hoping that a happier ending was in store; hoping being the operative word.  Most of the time I was sailing along without GPS or a functioning compass, not sure of how both got broken.

The day my now ex-wife decided to stay on vacation with the kids was the day the water came on board so fast that one man could not save the ship.  The hope for my marriage was all but extinguished, an end that I saw coming, but felt clueless and powerless to stop.  Clueless?  Yes, I had no idea how I had gotten there.  Powerless, you might ask?  Yes, because when I was in the center of the hurricane I could not see what was causing it.  I later figured out that it was…ME!  I was off course because I had not locked in the coordinates for the dream that I once had with my spouse, or even in my own mind.  Let me explain…

I began wondering during my walk today if many people, men and women alike, reach middle age and see that a something is on the horizon, a dim figure, so far away that they cannot make out what it is or where it is headed.  And without knowing those things, they maintain their course with very little to worry about.  In my continued wondering, I then determined that the unidentifiable object on the horizon is the time when we check in with ourselves, seeing where we stand against the hopes and dreams that we had when we were younger.  In those dreams we had enough to put the kids through college, we had enough to retire, the kids were very well adjusted with no issues of their own, our parents were wonderful grandparents and emotionally supportive, and so on.  My guess is that there are very few of us that have lived out the dream just like we laid it down in our youth, or like we laid it down with our spouse or significant other.  And I also bet that when the difference between the dream and the reality of today reaches a certain magnitude, then a mid-life crisis appears.

I thought that I had done a lot of things to attain the dream: college, grad school, worked for major companies, got great performance reviews, and so on.  What I now realize is that there were many things I did not do: I did not write down the dream in goal form, I did not make sure that the dream of my spouse was coordinated with the dream that I was wishing for, I did not stay conscious of the things that were important to me.  I fell into the trap that many of us fall into, particularly when stress begins to be an everyday occurrence: I became an amalgam of all of the people who raised me and I did all the things that they did when they were under stress.  I yelled at my wife.  I yelled at the kids.  I found funding wherever I could.  I shut down emotionally with my wife.  I literally did everything I swore I would never do the day I left my family for college.

How?  Why?  Every experience we have, from the moment our brains begin to work while we are still in our Mother’s tummy until today, is stored in the marvelous machine we call the brain.  And if we are not fully conscious of what we are doing and where we are going, the brain is very willing to pull chapters from our lives for us to replay.  “Let’s see: when Dad had this stressful situation he lost control and yelled at the kids.  Check.”  And we do it.  We later regret it and remember exactly what Dad did, but we did it anyway.  Because we are so stressed that our life is not what we thought it would be, and we are so obsessed and/or worried about how to get it on track, that we are not and cannot consciously live OUR dream.  We are really living the dream/nightmare that we saw when we were growing up.  And that can make not living the dream all the more painful.

Mid-life crisis?  Yes, I guess that I had mine, but I do not have a Corvette or a vacation house bought on impulse, nor do I have a young, hot blonde on my arm.  What I do have is a consciousness of what happened, my role in what happened, and a very strong resolve to live the second half of my life by a script that I have recently written:

• Love my children as best as I can.
• Find work that I enjoy doing.
• Get out of debt.
• Share all of the love and goodness that I can find with as many people as life allows.

I never thought that Saint Peter was going to ask for my balance sheet when I showed up at the pearly gates, and, for me, that is a good thing!

Until Next Time,

Julius

HOW WE BECOME WHO WE BECOME: Part V

If you have missed previous parts, please drop down the page and click on the blog archives on the right…Thank You!

We are human beings.  We like to have fun.  We love to be pleased.  We love pleasing others…in every way imaginable.  And all of the things we choose to do come from our experience, our comfort zone, our individual map of what is good to do and what is not so good to do.  We sometimes look outside our comfort zone, and even allow others to take us outside our comfort zones.  But we live 99% of our lives within the parameters we have learned previously.  Much of what we do we do not even think about!  The routines of our everyday lives are automatic.  We wake at the same time each day.  We have the same things for each meal.  We are on autopilot, even in our interactions with others.  And most of the time, this serves us well, giving us no reason to do anything different.

Then what happens to our lives when the comfort zones that have been built in our minds begin to not work so well?  The decisions we had been making without thinking very much are no longer getting us the desired results, and we don’t even see the impact on those around us.  There is stress at home, with the spouse and with the kids.  There is stress at the office.  There are missed commitments.  There are missed or cancelled appointments.  We are not on our “A” game, and those who we are closest to can see it.  They may even, usually after some period of time, mention something to us, and we tell them that they are imagining things.  So we keep on doing the same things, and the list of things that are no longer working is getting longer.  And then we begin to notice some things going not so well.  And we take notice and fix things for a day, or two, or three, and then we are right back walking the destructive path.

How do I know?  I lived it!  And I lived it with the people I loved most, my wife and kids, for the better part of 17 years.  For most of that time, I swore that it was not me that had changed, but everyone around me.  Logic should tell us that when many people notice that things are not right, it is us who need to adjust, but we are in serious denial because we are living off of our map, and it has been right all of this time, right?  Instead of using the shovel to fill in the holes in our life, we just keep digging, and the hole gets bigger.  And one day it gets so big that everything we know just vanishes into it!

What do we expect when our loved ones are telling us that we need help and we deny that we do and redirect that THEY are the problem?  Why would sane people continue to live in a world that gets more chaotic each and every day?  After some time, they don’t.  They get it, and they see that leaving is the only sane alternative.  And with them, they take our comfort zone, the day-to-day life that we were mostly enjoying and had become used to, even the chaos!  What are we to do???

There are several options…some of which might lead us to a better place…some might just continue the nightmare.  The bottom line is that we need to take a long, hard look into the person in the mirror and answer some really tough questions.  And that is where we will go next time…with my sharing the steps that I had to take to figure things out!

Until Next Time!

Julius

HOW WE BECOME WHO WE BECOME: Part IV

If you have missed previous parts, please drop down the page and click on the blog archives on the right…Thank You!

Throughout our school years, no matter how long they last, we are acquiring information and building our comfort zones.  At some point, we begin to realize that the things that we see and hear are either consistent with what we have come to believe, or inconsistent to some degree.  It is at this point when we begin to alter the zone that exists to be more consistent with our current values and beliefs.  We may choose to reinforce the lessons taught by our parents and family and friends, or we may choose to modify for any number of reasons.  Those reasons for change could be guided by new friends, the love of our life, the politics we choose to follow, the realization that our family is not a good model for how we want to live our life, etc.  The point here is that our comfort zones are evolutionary, constantly changing to some degree, based on what we encounter in the world we live in.

It is here where the bad elements that have been previously installed may come into play.  If our comfort zones include places where bad influences are alright in small doses, we may grow into accepting those influences in increasing doses until they begin to negatively impact our lives.  This becomes more possible when we move away from the limits imposed by our parents.  Drugs and alcohol are the two that are most obvious, but the evils of overeating, excessive sex, narcissism, gambling, and so on can be just as distracting and destructive to a developing life.  The endorphins that are released when we are feeling pleasure are powerful substances, driving us in directions that may not be in our best interests.  Our comfort zones do not make wholesale changes overnight, and the changes are in fact so subtle that we often do not even see them happening.  We may even have the same values and deeply rooted beliefs, but we fool ourselves into believing that our current behavior is consistent with who we really are.

And some of us may reach the stage when we see that we are a lot like the people who raised us.  Even though they taught us from their experience, the lure of pleasure was so strong that they were not able to live without the temptations of life on Earth.  And how do we feel when we realize that we are like our parents?  When we hear ourselves say the exact same things that we hated hearing as a kid and swore that we would never say ourselves?  For some, I suppose that it could be reinforcing and comforting.  For others, it could be enough to scare us into a major shift in our comfort zones.  And many of us never see it coming, and continue down the same paths.

But what happens when our comfort zones no longer work for us?  When the things we hold dear to us begin to slip away, when the things we allow ourselves to be seduced into begin intrude upon who we want to be, what we want to have, where we want to go?  What happens when we are kicked from our comfort zones, with no safety net to catch us?  What do we do to save ourselves?  Physically?  Emotionally?  Spiritually?  Mentally?  We will begin to explore one man’s journey in our next installment.

Until Next Time,

Julius