Weeds Grow Naturally

Weeds grow naturally. You don't have to cultivate weeds. You don't have to loosen up the soil or make sure you water them, they simply are a fact of life. Why is that?

Part of the Fall was simply the fact that weeds happen when cultivation doesn't. It's that simple. The Fall ensured that if we allow nature to take it's course, we won't get tomato plants and apple trees, you get weeds.

It's the same with our lives, if we let life just takes it's course, we will not get amazing fruit, we will get weeds. Character and growing in the Spirt does not happen by accident. It's a choice. It is a choice to cultivate those things that really bring us life. The reality is that things will grow if we let the garden of your hearts go unkept, but the soil, the water and the nutrients that those plants consume will crowd out any space for fruitful plants. In other words, letting your garden go unkept will get you living plants, they just won't be plants that give you life. These kind of plants are the weeds, the things that take from you. Good plants don't just use up soil and nutrients, they produce a crop.

Friends, let us be people that live life cultivating those kinds of plants that give us life. If we do, there is no telling how many will benefit from our garden.

Relevant to Who?

I've been bothered by the word 'relevant' when it comes to how Christians are to engage culture. It seems like lots of my friends and I myself have been tempted to jump on the relevant bandwagon without even knowing what damage we are doing. The question must be asked, "what is the 'matter' to which we are trying to be relevant as Christians?" Are we trying to be relevant to culture, or are we trying to be relevant to the human heart? If we are trying to be relevant to the human heart, then we would offer what the human heart really needs- God himself. I think we have missed what we are trying to be relevant to. Our desire to be relevant has been focused on the wrong thing. We have been trying to be relevant to culture, but we have missed the absolutely relevant heart of Jesus for the world, and inso doing we have ceased to be relevant to the human heart.

I am worried that we spend so much time trying to stay current with our culture that we miss the relevance that would be ours in Jesus. The same people that are trying so hard to be relevant to culture are the ones who have come to me in secret confessing just how non-existent their prayer lives are. Could it be that we are so focused on being relevant that we have lost touch with the very Source of relevance?

Jesus is the most relevant man alive. He knows exactly what people need. If you are reading more from Dan Brown than Scripture, and are watching more movies than gazing at the beauty of God, then I think you may just have as much to offer culture as culture itself. The world does not need more experts on culture!!! The world needs a dynamic, vibrant encounter with Jesus himself, and if we are spending more time trying to figure out culture than being passionately in love with Jesus, then we have absolutely missed the meaning of relevance.

Friends! Please hear me! The world is not looking for more cool people. They are looking for substance. They are looking for people whose lives are so radically different than anything the world can produce that they have to ask the question, "Why do you live like that?"

If I am at all honest with myself, trying to be relevant is simply a cover-up for having nothing original to say. I really don't think we become more relevant as Christians by being more concerned with what the world has to say about itself. We become more relevant by being more concerned about what Jesus has to say to us about the world. We become more relevant as we encounter more of Jesus. And when we encounter Jesus, the world will encounter Jesus because there is no one more relevant than him. He knows the latest news, and he knows the deep secrets of people's hearts.

If you want to impact someone in a relevant way, try asking God what they need to hear or experience that day and then deliver the message. I can't tell you how many times I have delivered a relevant message from God to a complete stranger simply because I spent time asking what God's heart was for the person. I guarantee you that those kind of encounters would not have happened if I spent my morning catching up on the latest LOST episode. Jesus' words to a person are infinitely more powerful than anything I will ever have to say.

Let's be relevant friends. But let's do it by spending our time with the most relevant Person alive and giving what we have received from him, to the world.

The Fragrance of Thorns

There's a rose called the David Austin Rose. In the early 60's, it was bred specifially to sell at flower shops who were tired of dethorning their roses. Scientists found a way to alter a particular gene that produced the rose's thorns. This wonder rose quickly became a flower shop favorite until patrons began to complain that the roses had no fragrance.

Scientists decided to investigate why. Their conclusion: the gene that produces a rose's thorns is the same gene that gives it its fragrance. To this day if you buy a genetically enhanced, thornless rose, you will smell nothing. There is no way to separate the fragrance from the thorns.

I think the same is true of life. If you get rid of the thorns of life, you also lose the fragrance. In this lifetime, there is no such thing as bliss without pain, love without hate, or life without death. The same gene that produces pain is the one that slows us down to what is. Pain forces us to take deep breaths and to smell the fragrance we may well have missed. So, let's embrace life with all of it's thorns and we will once again begin to smell it's fragrance.

Busy

What is it about busyness that makes life feel so exciting? When I rush from event to event I feel important, needed, wanted. When I have friends around me I feel like I belong. When there are emails in my inbox, messages on my voicemail and mail in my mailbox I don't have to feel how lonely I am.

But the reality is that all this busyness is lifeless. It holds the appearance of life, but it is not life. True life cannot be felt at the speed of an open freeway, it cannot be felt when I am consumed so much by the next moment that I cannot enjoy the one I am in. So, I slow down. I wait. I enjoy. When I can slow down enough to feel what I really need, and not just what I want, I can feel life emerging. So much of my busyness is driven by what I want: I want to feel apart of five different groups of people. I want to be wanted. I want to be needed. I want to feel important and popular. I want to feel excitement.

What I want though, is not always what I need. Sometimes I need to experience how unimportant I really feel. Maybe I simply need to be reminded that I belong to God and not to any one group. What if what I need is to be stopped?

Passion

I've noticed that I am attracted to passionate people. I've also noticed that some of the most passionate people are pursuing passions that leave them empty and wanting. This especially happens in Christian circles where service seems to be the place where most passionate people pour their passion into. Helping the poor, saving orphans, rescuing sex slaves, showing mercy to the homeless- these are all good things to pour our passions into, but it is not the ultimate passion.

The ultimate passion is God himself. I really beleive that those who are seeking God the most are on the front lines of service, but I also think that they are two steps to the left of their true passion. Jesus is the only person that can define us and I find that so often those invloved in service tend to define themselves by their good deeds. I say this becasue I am one of those passionate people. I spent years and years traveling to different countries, serving the poor, helping the needy, hanging with the homeless, but I was empty. I still needed God myself. In fact being with the poor forced me to consider my own need. They forced me to articulate my own need for a Savior. My passion has since turned. I am passionate about service. But more than that, I am passionate about being loved by God. I have been on a path to pour all of my passion into being loved. From this place, my passionate heart can be filled with the passion from above. I feel lighter, less inclined to define myself by how many people I help. My passion to be with Jesus leads me to compassion towards others.

Posture

Learning to live a new way is like learning to walk around with new posture. It hurts. I have lived 25 years of my life slouching. Shoulders slumped and chest concaved... but I've been learning to walk with my head high, my chest out and my shoulders back. It feels good, but walking with new posture is painful too. I feel more erect and alert, but my back hurts, my neck cracks and my abs feel like i've done 40 crunches.

Just like my old posture, the "self" I thought was me dies hard. It hurts to live out of who I really am. It's unfamiliar and awkward. It's painful to give up the ways of relating and living life that have become so apart of who I am. But I'm finding that there is another me. There is a true me that is beginning to shine forth. Just like good posture, it feels good to live out of who I truly am, but it's painful too. No wonder Jesus' statements about following him seem so paradoxical. "you must deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me?... He who loses his life will find it?" What does that mean?

I think Jesus just means that to "die" is to give up everything you are not! To lose the life you thought was life is the only way to find the life that is hidden behind it. So that's my journey, to lose all the parts of myself that keep me from who I truly am. Saying "No" is painful, cause it forces me to reject a way of living that has worked for me. It takes time to reject the old ways of relating, but it feels so good when I live out of who I really am. New posture is worth the pain.

The Divinely Beautiful Woman

My mom hosts international students in her home, mostly girls from Germany, Switzerland, and the more 'beautiful' parts of Europe. About two weeks ago I spent the day at my mom's house and just so happened to be very attracted to one of the German girls. Honestly, as a guy, something instinctually powerful overtook me as I spent the day with her. I was drawn to her beauty. I was captivated. I longed for intimacy. Connection. Depth. Love.

Throughout the day, I noticed two extremes in myself. One extreme was my tendency to sexualize beauty. I objectified. I made her beauty into an object to be consumed. Because we were both free that night, I asked her to hang out and truthfully, my intention was to be lip-to-lip and face-to-face by the end of the night, (a Christian one-night stand). Even as my feelings raged, I was aware that more than making out, what I really desired was intimacy. Apart from all of my sexualization, I wanted connection, depth and love.

As the night went on, and I knew that we would have an empty house to go back to, I could not handle how easy it would be to simply sexualize my feelings and consume this girls beauty. This is where the other extreme comes in. The other extreme was to completely cut off my desire for beauty. This was to shut my feelings down and to fail to confront and feel how deeply I longed for intimacy. In this extreme, I distanced myself from this woman and her beauty. I didn't allow her beauty to evoke in me my deep desire for connection and my deep desire for love. I began to fear that I was not mature enough to handle my feelings without acting out physically. And because of my inappropriate management of my desire for intimacy, the only other thing I knew to do was run.

And that's exactly what I did. A friend of mine called earlier to see if I wanted to smoke hooka and in the middle of the date I start texting him because I knew that if I got back to the house with no options, I would have made out with her. So, I planned it just right. Within 30 minutes of our arrival back at the house my buddy picked me up and I was FREE! I didn't make out with her! I avoided temptation! VICTORY! YEAH ME! WHAT A STRONG CHRISTIAN AND MATURE THING TO DO!

Now if you are a typical Christian, you would probably praise me for my Joseph-like self-control and my temptation-avoiding fast on my feet thinking. But I did not feel "praise-worthy" when I left that night. In fact, I felt very disappointed and even angry. At first I thought I was angry because I passed up the opportunity to make out with a beautiful girl.

But as I sat through my anger, I realized I was angry that i could not appropriately hold my desire for beauty and translate that into appropriate behaviors of connection and intimacy. I was angry that I am still not integrated enough, still so broken that I had to split between two extremes. I only saw two options: either I stay with her and make out or to run and avoid 'temptation.' I did not see a third option.

But what if a third option existed? What if I could stay with her, hold my desire for intimacy without sexualizing it and yet engage her in appropriate ways? What if I didn't have to shut down my desire for intimacy by running, but I could actually feel it in her presence and move toward her, even showing her a bit of God's love at the same time? What if I was strong enough to see beauty not as an object to be consumed or a temptation to be avoided, but as a impetus to intimately connect with a woman and ultimately with God?

The reality is that a woman's beauty is not bad! It is not something to consume or something to fear, it is something to reflect the beauty of God. Beauty is something that I desire because I was created to desire it. Guys, have you ever just let yourself feel how much you want a woman? Not in a sexual way, but in a desire for beauty way. It actually hurts in the pit of my stomach. Sometimes I'll just let the feeling linger. It feels so alive. So passionate. Every guy has had the urge to tell a beautiful woman just how beautiful she is. It's like we're built to detect it, like a radar. You know why? Because we were created to name the beautiful.

Adam was stoked on Eve because God put in him a desire for beauty. He named all the animals, but none was as beautiful as Eve. And in Eve he named what was beautiful. And guess what Eve means: "Life." I've noticed that if I direct that same powerfully intense desire for a woman towards God, that the same alive-ness and same passion results.

God is the ultimate Beauty. When we gaze at him, and allow our hearts to feel how deeply beautiful he is, we will be captivated by him. His beauty actually gives us life. A woman is captivating because her beauty actually gives life. She is a beauty formed from the beauty of God. She is a representation, a reflection of our Beautiful God who gives life. When I want to feel alive, I open my heart to the Beautiful One. Unlike my desire for beauty in a woman however, my desire for God does not leave me wanting. A woman's beauty is something that I cannot always have as a single man, but the beauty I find in God is something I have access to all the time. So I allow a woman's beauty to direct me to the Beauty that I can possess in God. In God, I find that my desire for beauty is fulfilled. I don't have to split. I don't have to desecrate a woman's beauty or avoid it, I can use it to direct me toward intimacy with God and with her as a woman.