One eye blind

The other day I staged an epic fight within my own house. I scratched and clawed for control but eventually found myself defeated. There was nothing I could do but stand powerless before the mirror, my eye bloodshot, dry, and tired. I would go another day with half of my vision.

As some of you might already know, I have a degenerative eye disease called keratoconus (KC). I’ll let you read more about it, but the basic idea is that my corneas are thinned out to the point where they form a cone. It distorts my vision so that I am unable to see clearly without some kind of correction. (Here’s a great example of what my vision is like if you’re interested.)

I view the world through two thin layers of plastic that I jab in my eye every morning and claw out each night. Without those filters on top of my eyes, I see nothing clearly. Sure, if I squint and tilt my head a bit I can make out what shapes there might be in front of me, maybe even a word or two. Without my lenses, I see nothing clearly.

I can see nothing clearly with my natural eyes, but what about with my spiritual eyes? Do I see a vision of Christ that is pure and exact, one that is a perfectly accurate depiction of who He is? Or are my spiritual eyes like natural eyes: hopelessly and incurably blurred? Can I squint and tilt my spiritual self enough to kind of make out what Christ looks like?

When we accept Christ, when that moment comes that we place our trust and our faith in Him, our spiritual eyes change. The fog begins to lift and we begin to see Christ for who He really is: the sovereign Lord of creation, the Savior of the world. We become what Paul speaks of:

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

- I Corinthians 1:18 (NKJV)

We see the things that we once thought of as foolishness much more clearly. When the Holy Spirit penetrates our hearts and jabs that ethereal contact lens onto our spiritual eye (and it sometimes feels that way), our spiritual vision is supernaturally corrected and we see the truth of Christ for the first time.

However, just like I have to go back to the ophthalmologist (never do spell that right) every year to check the condition of my eyes, we have to constantly improve the correction on that spiritual lens through prayer and time spent in the Word. As we grow closer and closer to Him, those spiritual eyes become more accustomed to seeing things through the lens of the Holy Spirit.

Some days we will have troubles. Often, when my soft lenses become dirty and worn, the only thing to do is throw them away and replace them. Those parts of our life that are dirty and worn need to be abandoned to Christ so that he can renew them and restore us to spiritual health. We will never be rid of this until our life is ended and we are face to face with our Savior.

Life is a struggle, and remaining faithful to Christ is a struggle as well. My eyes don’t want this plastic in them and they will sometimes reject it and fight back. Our natural, sinful, depraved selves want to travel the easy road of the flesh and not the narrow road that leads to victory.

So, what to take away from all this, other than if you meet me in person you’ll know what I’m doing if I’m fiddling with my eyes? Our vision of Christ is affected by the spiritual condition of our soul. How we see Him reflects how much we seek Him.

How do you see Christ?

3 ways to deal with life kicking you in the teeth

Leave a reply

Yesterday was an up and down day for me. It seemed that one moment I would hear of something that would fill me with excitement and anticipation, only to be followed in the next moment by an email that felt like it cut my legs out. Repeat this two or three times during the day and it quickly became emotionally wearisome. I was a wreck by the end of the day.

How do we deal with it when this happens though? Below I posit three different ways. This list is in no way exclusive. There are many more ways to handle these situations, these are simply the three directions that I felt myself pulled.

Get angry
This always solves the problem, doesn’t it? Embracing anger helps you to make calm, rational decisions in the wake of something bad happening. Except that it doesn’t, just about ever. Even if what happened to you was not deserved, choosing the path of anger takes you farther away from solving the issue, and it tends to make things worse. As a wizened old sage once said, “anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering”.
Pursue sadness
When life has the nerve to stand up to us, many times we simply decide to back down and go cower in a corner. This is also not an optimal way to handle whatever has been thrown your way. Where anger externalizes what you’re feeling, sadness turns all that emotion inside you. Anger destroys from the outside, sadness destroys from within. Sadness places all the blame for the situation on you, and then relies on you to fix it.
Embrace the problem and move on
It’s possible, if even likely, that whatever has happened is a consequence of a decision that you made earlier in life, or the result of decisions that you are currently making. Understand that the past can’t change, accept what has happened, learn from it, and move on. Apologize to whoever you need to apologize to. Will it be difficult? Absolutely. Will it be worth it? Eventually.

I went through each one of these emotions yesterday, and had a hard time finding sleep last night. All of the things that happened were consequences of previous actions or decisions that I had made. I apologized and now I’m seeking to correct what went wrong. Will it all work out? No idea. That’s a secret that the future holds and I haven’t finished my time machine yet. However, I’m doing my part to make sure what has happened doesn’t happen again.

How about you? How do you deal with days that have dramatic ups and downs?

Starting and starting over

Leave a reply

Sometimes in life, the most difficult thing is not starting, but starting over. Rebuilding a tarnished relationship, repairing a neglected friendship, beginning new an old flame.

When you start something, everything is new and fresh and unknown. When you start over, all of the things that happened in the past bubble somewhere near the surface.

The thing is, you can’t repair everything that has happened before. In fact, you can’t change a single thing about it. All you can do is take the reins of what happens from this point onward. Unfortunately, forgiveness is not always forgetfulness. We all make mistakes, and we all make bad decisions from time to time. We will remember what someone else did to hurt us, but we must realize that we can’t change it. Whatever has happened is in the past, and barring any consequences that must be paid for those actions, should stay in the past.

Sometimes we need to start over, give it that much more effort. The relationships worth saving are the ones worth fighting for. Are you prepared to fight?

Where do you need to start over today?

Clarity of belief

Leave a reply

Belief.

It’s a simple word, yet one heavy with baggage.

What is belief? What kind of belief are we talking about? Do you believe in yourself? Do you believe in God? If so, how do you believe?

There is a scene in the movie ‘Serenity’ where Captain Reynolds and his crew have sought refuge with Shepherd Book at Haven.

“I don’t care what you believe, just believe in it.”

Those are words that each of us don’t often take seriously. We play at our belief, embracing it only when it seems convenient to us. We say we believe in something, be it God, ourselves, our spouses, our friends, but when things begin to go sideways we let go of our belief and panic.

Christ BELIEVED. He believed in what He was doing to the point of death. We believe in what we profess to the point of being uncomfortable, then we usually pack it in. We allow those who are ‘professional’ Christians (ministers, missionaries, anyone with a seminary degree) to do the heavy lifting while we sit at home and think that watching the Great American Bible Challenge or listening to Christian radio shows how Christian we are. Our belief is wrapped up in what we feel when it should be wrapped around what we do.

14 What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? 17 Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

- James 2:14-26

When do we do what we believe? When does our faith call us to action, other than getting up on Sunday morning and going to church? Does our faith lead us to helping widows and orphans? Does it lead us to watching the children of someone in our church so that the husband and wife can have time alone to work on their marriage? Does it lead us to donate that things that we’ve collected in our lives to those less fortunate than us rather than having a garage sale so we can go out to eat a bit more? Does our belief bleed into our lives and spill out on those we come into contact with or do we carefully contain it, hoping that it won’t spread to others and won’t stain our clothes?

Do you believe enough to act on what you believe? Do you believe that the Bible is true in what it says enough that you will stand up for it? Do you believe in your job enough that you’ll go beyond what is expected, creating a better experience for you customers or a better work environment for your co-workers? Do you believe Christ enough to give your life if that is what it requires? I know those who believe in what Christ has called them to do so much that they give up everything that we think is normal in order to serve Him more. Are we willing to do that

Do you believe?

A world of fake truth

6 Replies

Last night I began an adventure. I guess it would be more accurate to say that I began an adventure again, one that I’ve already completed but thought it would be interesting to travel down the path one more time. The first time through brought joy and sadness, victory and defeat, conquest and pain. It certainly sounds like a glorious adventure, doesn’t it?

Except that it wasn’t.

In the last year I’ve stood with George Washington in Valley Forge, his men freezing all around us. I’ve traveled the far reaches of the galaxy bringing together various alien races in order to defeat a virtually unstoppable race of creatures bent on wiping the universe clean of life. I’ve won a Premier League championship as the high scoring striker on a nearly undefeated Chelsea side. I’ve fought valiantly alongside my son and his friend as we sought to end the scourge of the Sith spreading over the galaxy.

Except that I haven’t.

It’s becoming increasingly apparent to me that too many of my generation, myself included, spend our time doing great things in our minds through the window of a game console. The games I’ve mentioned above (Assassin’s Creed III, Mass Effect 3, FIFA 11, The Old Republic) are each impressively immersive. I can lose myself for hours in the worlds that they have built, whether it is Revolutionary War America or the bridge of the Normandy 2, looking over a burning Earth.

Why is this though? Is there something in my own life that is missing that drives me to fulfill it through video games?

I think the answer has to be a resounding yes. In decades past people would work hard on developing a skill and then go out and change the world using the skills they have learned. Life was focused on doing, on working and serving and living. Very few people lived in a cocoon in their own house. The only way to act out these world-changing moments was to physically act them out. People didn’t use their thumbs and forefingers to bring about a revolution, they lived the revolution.

Today, we think we’re changing the world by liking a cause on Facebook, or posting on Twitter about how much we think this politician or that celebrity should be admired. How much do we get outside and do?

I fully believe that this is one of my biggest faults. How many books could I read, how many articles could I write, how much wrestling with kids, how many dates with my wife could be accomplished in the hours it takes to play these games? Instead of spending my time with the 0s and 1s of the video game Earth, how about I give that time to the one wife and four kids in my real Earth? How about I spend that time working, writing, learning, and loving those around me who still move about even when the power button is off?

How about I spend my life learning to be a disciple, and not a button pusher? Talk about changing the world. I may not be hailed as the liberating hero of trillions of galactic beings, or the leader of a secret army dedicated to maintaining the peace. If the only credit that I receive is “well done, good and faithful servant” then I will have lived my life well.

16 Goals: Introduction

3 Replies

As many of you know, I’m a college football fan. I enjoy watching my beloved Kansas State Wildcats play, though I don’t get to see all of the games unless the team is really good that year. This year just happens to be one of those years. In fact, KState plays their bowl game tonight against Oregon in the Fiesta Bowl. The game should really be called the “Almost, Nearly, Could Have Been The National Title Game” bowl since both teams lost one game during the regular season.

Seriously, they lost to Baylor? Ugh.

Anyway, over the last 20 years, Kansas State football has been transformed from the stinking, wretched pile that it once was, dubbed “Futility U” by Sports Illustrated, to one of the better programs in major college football. Much of this can be laid at the feet of the man who is the head coach, Bill Snyder. Coach Snyder would probably be the first to turn down any accolades, but his dedication to his craft and to his players and coaches is what made the football team something to be respected and feared on the field.

Coach Snyder brought to KState the 16 Goals, described as:

The 16 goals form the foundation for success, and create the work ethic and discipline that goes with them. With players and coaches from all backgrounds, having a single set of core values unifies them under one vision. If each adheres to the goals as individuals, then team success will follow.

Snyder believes the 16 goals are not only critical to success on the field, but also in everyday life. Once someone has dedicated themselves to doing things the right way, their chance of success in any field is dramatically increased.

What I plan to do through this series is take each one of the 16 goals and apply them to the Christian walk. I hope to point out that by using these goals as guideposts we can greatly improve our ability to walk with Christ through dedication, self-discipline, commitment, and various others.

I want to make clear that what I am writing about is not a path to salvation, but a strategy for discipleship. Once you have accepted and believed in Christ, these ideas can help you to deepen that relationship with Him. And if these 16 goals can turn around a football team that was a national doormat, what might they be able to help us with in following Christ? We can use the finite as an inspiration for the eternal.

Update: Jim brought up a good point. I didn’t list out the 16 Goals. I’ll put that list here and then update it with links each week as a new post goes up.

1. Commitment
2. Unselfishness
3. Unity
4. Improve
5. Be tough
6. Self-discipline
7. Great effort
8. Enthusiasm
9. Eliminate mistakes
10. Never give up
11. Don’t accept losing
12. No self-limitations
13. Expect to win
14. Consistency
15. Leadership
16. Responsibility

What is my goal?

4 Replies

So, what is my actual goal this year? Is it to simply post something every day? Is it to grow my readership into the 10s of people? Is it to make you as uncomfortable as possible about what you read so that you think more about a particular topic?

The answer to all of those is a little bit yes and a little bit no.

Yes in that I would love to post every day, but some days may not allow it. I might have forgotten to schedule a post, I might have just not written one, or I might have written one and hated it, so I took it down and didn’t replace it. (This happens more often than you might think. I have about 10 unfinished screeds from last year. Some of them may get a rinse and tried again.)

Yes in that I would love to increase the number of people who read my stuff, but no in that it may be a purely selfish goal. Why do I want to increase the number of readers here? Is it because I want people to know my name, or is it because I actually have something to say that is worth reading? Only those who read can be the judge of that. Do I take steps to improve the likelihood that someone might stumble on my posts, or share them with others? Yes, I do. That is purely up to others to take advantage of them though. I can’t make anyone click a link, and nobody shares unless I have compelling content.

I think that my primary goal is to take the topics that I write and make them as accessible to the reader as possible, even those topics that can tend to fly over the heads of people. I’m running dangerously close to being over-educated and I can throw out big words sometimes. My home group pokes fun at me for wanting to read books as a group that are more college level. (This is not how they express it. They say that “Clay wants to read books with big words”. My explanation sounds better.)

However, in making topics accessible I also want to make them thought provoking. I’m starting a series tomorrow that mixes theology, church life, and college football. I’m sure I’m not breaking new ground with this, but I pray that the topics make you reflect on your own life and your own relationship with God.

My goal is to help people think about God and being a Christian in a new and different way. Sometimes I can be snarky, sometimes I can be serious, sometimes I can be funny, and sometimes I can be heartfelt. I always want to be pointing you to Christ though. If I haven’t done that, I haven’t met my goal.

New year, new ideas

2 Replies

Last year on this day, I declared that I would write a blog post every day for a year.

That lasted one month.

It all fell apart around the time that we went on vacation and I hadn’t written any posts to go up while we were gone. That was the first mistake. A lack of preparing for an absence beforehand led to an absence after. I violated #11 on the 16 goals, which is ‘don’t accept losing’. I accepted that I wasn’t going to get a post up every day and after that it become easier to do so each day.

My second mistake was trying to put it all together the day before. I had a plan, but I didn’t execute that plan. This seems to be a personal vice of mine. I’m great at the planning, poor at the execution. Some months our budget bears this out as well.

The third mistake was devaluing myself and what my contribution might mean to others. This is not a statement of arrogance, but simply that I found that others kind of looked forward to what I was writing. I let them down, and for that I apologize.

This year has been a struggle for me personally, financially, spiritually, and physically. I go into another year with many goals, all of them attainable, each of them important.

So, what does the new year bring? A new chance. A fresh start. A new beginning, in more ways than one. My family and I have an event coming up in about a month that will change our lives quite a bit. I’ll expand more on that as it nears (or more likely after it’s passed), but that’s for a different post.

All that being said, this is going to be a great year. I pray that each of you are blessed in the new year, and that God shines His love and grace upon each person reading these words.

Are we too comfortable?

Leave a reply

I started reading Francis Chan’s Forgotten God today at lunch and it’s a disturbing book. Disturbing in that it’s highly convicting of our modern church culture. Book in that it’s typed out on a screen, but not actual pages bound together. I didn’t have to explain that part, did I?

Anyway, this book will be a challenging one. Personally, spiritually, and theologically. It will be personally challenging because it is already testing what I believe about the Holy Spirit and conceptions that I have simply believed without looking into them myself. It will be spiritually challenging because it is already unseating me from my comfortable perch atop my acquired knowledge of the Holy Spirit and waterboarding me with pangs of guilt over what little I’ve made of Him. It will be theologically challenging, not from a scholarly point of view (and Chan admits as much), but from a practical point of view. This will challenge that part of me which lives out my theology.

A quote from the first part of the book caught my attention:

Let’s be honest: If you combine a charismatic speaker, a talented worship band, and some hip, creative events, people will attend your church. Yet this does not mean that the Holy Spirit of God is actively working and moving in the lives of the people who are coming. It simply means that you have created a space that is appealing enough to draw people in for an hour or two on Sunday. ¹

As I stated when I shared this on Facebook, ouch. This stings because it makes me wonder if we have grown so comfortable in our church culture that we forget what the point of our worship is? Are we able to let the Spirit move through us or do we try to bend Him to our will?

A second quote that caught my eye was:

If it’s true that the Spirit of God dwells in us and that our bodies are the Holy Spirit’s temple, then shouldn’t there be a huge difference between the person who has the Spirit of God living inside of him or her and the person who does not? ²

Another arrow straight to the heart. Is there a difference between us as Christians and those who do not accept Christ? Are we more loving, more giving, more content, more humble, or are we less? Have we striven so much for relevancy that we’ve stripped away our Christ-likeness in order to be deemed more acceptable to those around us?

“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.

- Matthew 5:13, NKJV

There is so much more in this topic. I know I”m not alone in this feeling.

Francis Chan, Forgotten God (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2009), 31. ↩
Ibid., 32. ↩

Golfing lessons

Leave a reply

I’m playing in the Second Annual ROH Golf Tournament today, so I thought I would pull this out of the archives. Originally published on May 12, 2011.

Last Friday I played in a charity golf tournament that benefited Reach Out Honduras, a missions organization started by our dear friends Alex and Laura. I use the word “played” very loosely, as I’m terrible at golf. My playing partners will now strongly attest to that fact. I don’t spend a lot of time at the driving range, nor do I work on my short game or my putting. In fact, the only golf I’ve played in a year was Tiger Woods 11 on my XBox 360. Rarely did I drive that little white ball past the women’s tee, a fact which would have earned dire consequences had I been playing with my three cousins.

Every time that I would settle in over that ball, I would run through all the things that I needed to do in order to hit the ball straight. Well, hit it straight and actually hit it, which often proved a more complicated task. I need to keep my elbow straight, bring the club back down at the correct angle to not fade or draw it, swing with enough power to make it go farther, keep my head down, use my hips in the swing, and on, and on, and on. I would inevitably leave one of these steps out (namely keeping my head down) and the ball would trickle off the tee, or I’d drive a chunk of grass farther than the ball, or I’d miss completely. It was very frustrating, but as my golfing partner and friend Charlie said, “you’re not good enough to be mad about it.”

I started thinking while out on the course that this is a good parallel to our Christian lives. How often do we try and do everything right morally and spiritually, yet find ourselves flailing away at life? We do the right things here and there, but most of the time we end up swinging completely wrong and blast it into the trees.

This last week I’ve been listening to a sermon by Matt Chandler where he talks about how we can’t be good enough to achieve what Christ has already done for us. His text is from I Corinthians 6:9-11:

⁹Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals,¹⁰nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.

¹¹Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.

Matt makes the great point that we look at this list and think, “Well, I’ve only done three of those, but Bob has done seven. Look how much more holy I am than Bob!” What we should be doing is comparing ourselves to Christ, for only then will we see how desperate we are for a Savior. It’s like me comparing my golf game to Tiger Woods. It’s futile because I can never measure up to Tiger’s ability. We will never measure up to Christ’s perfection.

The second great point that Matt makes is that in verse 11, Paul says, “you were washed”. He doesn’t say that you washed yourself, or you allowed yourself to be washed, or that you did anything to make yourself justified or sanctified. You were washed. All of the effort is on Jesus’ side, not on ours. Nothing we can do will ever allow us to reach justification by ourselves.

So, what do we do with this? First, we can stop comparing ourselves to each other, when our true guide is Jesus. Instead of allowing ourselves to feel superior morally to our brothers and sisters, we should realize that we are all inferior to Christ, put on the same level as thieves and murderers. Romans 3:23 says, “²³for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. All, not some, not just the people who don’t go to church with us. All of us, including you and me.

Second, since we are all in the same boat, instead of bludgeoning each other with our failures we should hold each other up in prayer and community. None of us move through life alone, we all affect someone in some way. If we truly love each other and devote ourselves to praying and supporting those around us, we can change the world.

While golfing, I have to take the attitude that I am not the best golfer in the world. I am who God has designed me to be, and that apparently didn’t include “moderately skilled golfer”. I can’t compare myself to Tiger Woods because I will always be short of that. It’s made easier by having players with me that understand this and support me even though I’m a boat anchor on the team. The tournament was a four person best-ball scramble, so we took the best shots from each person to move down the course. I contributed once (yes, once) the whole day, but Charlie, Mark, and Kelly never got discouraged or angry that I stunk. I leaned on them to pick up the slack where I was deficient.

In life, we have to treat each other the same way. We’ll all have different skills, different levels of education, be at different points on our walk with God. If we support and pray for each other, we’ll make it through this tournament of life. I hear the 19th hole in Heaven is quite a party.