The Kingdom belongs to such as these

Today I want to share with you a story of obedience and hope. What began as a simple urging to fast and pray for my wife and children turned into so much more, so very much more. In this post I will share the first half of my journey to meet the Lord in the mountains.

A Hike

It was two Saturdays ago. I asked my brothers in my men’s group “Have you ever felt the urge to get away and pray for an extended time? Half a day in the wilderness, I feel called to go on a hike to be with God and pray.” In these moments I felt a sense of self consciousness come over me. I love these guys, they are like brothers, I did not want to appear self righteous, I did not want to seem better than them. Actually I know that they are in many ways my betters in the faith. My question came from a sincere and vulnerable place. I had never felt this urge before and pondered if they had.

Their answers were non specific; they talked of seasons of prayer for specific causes, for the need of prayer lists, even good books on prayer life. As happens to me from time to time, their answers seemed fuzzy and missed the heart of my question. I came away feeling like they had not answered me at all. Had they never felt this urge? Did I word the question in an unclear manner? I do not know. What I did know was that I had an odyssey to plan.

Planning the Trip

I chose the day carefully, December 27^th. Far enough after Christmas to be uncomplicated yet prior to the weekend when my couples small group had an event planned. The most significant activity to plan and execute was the 24 hour fast prior to the hike. This had to be entered into prayerfully and with commitment. I love to eat I knew that only for God would I forgo eating. The fast was hard. Taking my mind off of eating was very challenging especially with Christmas leftovers sitting temptingly in the fridge. When the urge to eat became unbearable I would bow my face and pray. Each time I did so the Lord granted my temporary relief from the hunger gnawing at my belly.

The day began innocent enough. I packed a backpack with hiking boots, frozen (the night before) water bottles, nutrition drinks (just in case), my cell phone (emergency use only), my ipod (with a vast array of Christian music), the book Restored (Neil Anderson) and most importantly my Bible.

A Cold Winter Wind

I was dressed in layers to ward off the early morning chill and what I expected to be breezy conditions on the south side of the San Gabriel Mountains, I would not be disappointed. I walked the two mile distance to the edge of suburbs to the start of the North Etiwanda preserve. Those who have read my posts will know this is the place I ride my mountain bike and go to pray often. I listened to Restored the whole way thanks to Brian Hardin who read the book as part of his podcast ministry Daily Audio Bible. Mr. Anderson’s book is excellent and a must read for Christians at any stage of their walk. I stopped to pray often as the hike up is intense, a great primer for what was to come.

The early part of the hike was to retrace the path of my mountain bike rides. I stopped and prayed at my normal bike ride place. I continued on to the site of my private worship session when I was promoted a few months back and prayed again. Then onto the areas I had not yet covered. There is a high plateau in the hills just before the actual mountains that can be seen from anywhere in the city. It is unremarkable except that there are two mature Pine trees standing sentinel over it. It is such a contrast to see deep green pine tress in a sea of scorched brown hill side. For the entire 7.5 years I have lived here I have considered hiking to this place, all the while imagining that God himself would meet me there. The hike was hard straight up no breaks other than those I took. True to form there was a strong cold gusting wind working against me the whole way up. The fast I had been on was now taking its toll digging into energy reserves I did not know I had. Yet I soldiered on believing that God would meet me on this plateau.

It was both distressing and fascinating to see the hand of man on this hillside. I had expected pristine hardly touched landscape but instead found spent shotgun shells, broken beer bottles, and random debris scattered along the worn out trail. At one point I saw an old Dodge Van used as target practice. I rusted hulk riddled with the blast holes of gunfire.

A Plateau but not a Peak

I arrived at the plateau with a sense of jubilation. Now I will pray, now the Lord will meet me. Funny how things worked out, this was the most underwhelming part of the trip. I said a prayer but felt that although God was with me he had something else planned. So I took a break, took some photos and took in the view of the inland empire stretching our before me. It was quite a sight but this place was not to be the highlight of the trip.

I continued onward and upward, I hiked up till I ran out of trail and the very mountain range was upon me. The wind here was bitterly cold and the sweat off my back soaked my cloths turning into a chill to the bone.

I will post the rest of the story of this wonderful trip in a few days.

In the meantime I wish everyone a happy and blessed new year

May our Heavenly Father bless you richly and be with you always throughout this coming year

Ron

Merry Christmas Everyone

Merry Christmas

Last week I shared how difficult it is for me to enjoy the Christmas season. I am excited to share that this year was different. For all the reasons I cited in the past two posts I took steps to change. I made what gift giving I did engage in meaningful and specific. I spent time quality with my family but most of all Christ was in the center of our Christmas.

Christmas Eve was spent in worship with close friends at our church. The “carols” were powerful and focused on Christ’s entry into our world and the providence he represents. They were so powerful I found myself swept up into the worship of the moment praising our heavenly father. Christmas morning was spent first in scripture Isaiah 7:14, 9:6-7, 53:2-6, Luke 2:1-7 this was followed by earnest prayers by my children. Rather conveniently our pastor had made a point of sharing these verses and placing them in a prominent place in our bulletin. Not like an answer to prayer to earnestly seek to start Christmas morning in the bible… Nah!

The best part of the day was watching the emotion of my wife as she opened the gifts I had carefully selected for her. What a joy! A great day in the loving embrace of family. At the end of the day I realized I had not yet listened to my daily bible reading courtesy of Brian Hardin at the Daily Audio Bible. As I listened to Nehemiah, Revelation, the Psalms and Proverbs, it was if being wrapped in a warm loving Godly hug. As the bible readings ended I played Chris Tomlin for a while and had my own private worship session as I slipped off to sleep.

Merry Christmas everyone

Ron

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, your mind, your soul

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The second is this: “Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these." Mark 12:29-31

If you have been a Christian for any length of time, you have no doubt heard this well known verse. It echoes through the halls and rafters of churches throughout the world. After the great commission and John 3:16 this has got to be the most famous of verses in the bible. Yet for all the time I have known this verse its meaning has always seemed so obvious to me. That is until about 5 weeks ago when our pastor used it in discussing authentic Christian relationships.

Maybe you already get this, but in the past I looked at this verse and saw the instruction to love God and to love your neighbor only. The neighbor part can be difficult at times especially when someone wrongs you, but the message is clear. Love your neighbor anyway. In fact there is another verse that says very clearly to treat your enemy with kindness, no mistaking the instruction right?

Well there was a nuance in the words that our pastor pointed out which was not previously clear. Love your neighbor how? Love them as yourself? WOW!

Do you love yourself?

In my last post I mentioned that I was going to pray about why I struggle with Christmas. The Lord very clearly gave me this verse as an answer to my prayer. I will explain.

What exactly does it mean to love yourself in a Christian context?

Do you accept yourself for who you are? Do you wish you were taller, better looking, richer, more eloquent, more healthy, less lonely?

At various times in my life I have struggled with some of these. As a leader I know that physical appearance inexplicably matters. To be six foot instead of five foot ten, to be charismatic and energetic in a room of strangers. I would be lying if I said I did not sometimes want this. To not have to deal with the uncertainty of life and be financially secure wouldn’t that relieve some stress. Heck I have always dreamed of being a professional hockey player too, lets through that old bone in!

These wants and dreams are not who I am in Christ. My heavenly father made me in his own image, he knew me before I was born. He had plans for me!

For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jeremiah 29:11

Who am I to imply through selfish desire that the Lord’s design for me is imperfect? An arrogant ungrateful ignorant fool perhaps. Who am I not to embrace who he made me? Who am I not to discover who I am in Christ and live it for all I am worth? Who am I to selfishly consider myself over his creation?

Well who am I? I am a child of the most high God, created in his own image, designed for a purpose, made to love and worship my heavenly father, made to serve his people. As I have discovered and grown in the gifts he has bestowed upon me, I have learned not only to accept myself for whom I am but to marvel at how wonderfully the Lord put me together for his purpose in my life. The closer I get to his purpose in my life the more joy I feel in my being.

So I accept myself but Love?

Well yes it gets a bit complicated here for me. Emotion and empathy are not my strong suit, yet the Lord has been growing these in me steadily. I have come to embrace who I am and find joy in being who I was made to be. The more joy I feel the stronger the positive emotions I feel about myself.

There is another side to this though. I have come to see where I am weak, where I am challenged. While I still dislike these aspects of myself, in the past there was shame, disgust, embarrassment and many other negative emotions. The Lord has revealed to me that the areas I am weak, the areas I struggle, they too have a purpose. When I hear of someone who fails publicly in areas I struggle I have empathy not judgment and condemnation. I have a strong desire to minister to others and love them because of my struggles not in spite of them.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,

he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,

and by his wounds we are healed. Isaiah 53:5

In some small way I think this is similar to what Christ did for us. I believe we are called to take on the burdens of others, to help them through their pain, just as Isaiah prophesied Jesus would.

Forgiveness

A key piece of this love puzzle is this concept of forgiveness. We cannot truly love ourselves and hate ourselves at the same time. So when we behave in some way that contradicts who we are we must confess it to the Lord to receive his forgiveness and we must forgive ourselves also. After all our sin was nailed to the cross of our savior, who are we not to forgive ourselves.

So I have learned to love myself. I accept who I am, I embrace God’s gifts in me, I use my weakness for God, and I forgive myself.

When I live this model well my ability to love others increases and my desire to spend time with others also increases. When I stumble the exact opposite happens, I detach and desire distance from others.

Christmas

When I was a boy the real meaning of Christmas was a mystery to me. My focus at the time was on the presents, I am not proud of this, embarrassed actually. The thing is I knew the Christmas story early on, it was told each year in mass. The story never came to life for me though; it was simply an elongated gospel reading that prolonged the time away from my new toys and stuff. As I grew the story did not change much. It always seemed that the commercial aspect of Christmas trumped the spiritual but then I had an unstable foundation. In the renaissance of my faith I have a strong yearning to connect with Christ, to put him in his rightful place at the center of Christmas.

So you see there are significant forces that always seem to steal the joy of Christmas. (Or said more correctly there are forces that I allow to interfere with my Christmas experience. I am responsible here, no victims allowed!) First my own weak sense of experience in a joyful meaningful Christmas and second my tendency to withdraw when faced with parts of me I don’t like. So each year I enter into the season as a broken record hoping for a better result and unclear how to change the experience. The result: yet another disappointing Christmas.

It is often said the first step in learning is to become aware of what we previously could not see. Is the greatest commandment the answer to a joyful Christmas? Yes I think so. I must love God fully and all the while love my neighbor as myself.

Merry Christmas

After more prayer and thanksgiving I expect this will be a different Christmas for me.

Father I praise you

for your Son

for you word

for revelation

for Christmas

for the greatest gift ever given

I praise you

amen

Ron

Tis the Season...

Christmas…

For all the significance this event has, for all the wonder that is Christ, I struggle with Christmas.

I would really like to understand why. When I am done with this post I will pray about this very thing.

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. Is 7:14

I love the Old Testament prophesy announcing the virgin birth. I love all the wonder associated with the Lord Jesus Christ. I often want to find a way to make Christmas worship more meaningful. I want to thank God for the miraculous gift of his son.

All the while the world swirls around me and my family. The pervasiveness of consumerism is oppressive. Buy this, indulge in that, no payments for 90 days, credit trouble we can finance you, spend spend spend.

This is not what Christmas is about.

I want a Christmas where Christ is central. I want a Christmas where we wake up on Christmas morning and pray first. I want a Christmas where the glory and honor go to God not to man.

I am not big on Christmas carols. I struggled with this for some time. Fortunately I have learned that it is not that I do not like carols. It is just that I am frustrated with the same ones over and over and over and over and over. You get the point.

Last Christmas out of frustration, I purchased a Mercy Me Christmas CD. It was a mix of older songs sung their way and their own music. I loved it. This year my wife and I purchased a Jars of Clay Christmas CD, I love it too.

Praise God I can honor him in song with music I love that does not seem tired and old.

There are some things I like about the season. I eagerly anticipate this months Adopt a Block Saturday. Sharing the season of life and giving with those in need, now that is exciting! Of course I do this every month though. I look forward to meeting with my small groups and basking in our friendships, celebrating the season. I look forward to spending time with family and friends reinforcing the love that exists between us. I look forward to reaching out to old lost friends and strangers and the hope of new or renewed relationships.

What will bring me a true sense of joy in this season? Worship? Giving? Service? Time with family? New traditions? Old traditions? All these will play a role I am sure.

What works for you? How do you put Christ in Christmas?

I think it is time I prayed…

What if God ran Google…

The other day I was messing around in Google analytics marveling at the statistics it provides. It shows me where people who visit this site come from, how they found it, how long they stayed etc. I wish it told me your names so I could thank you for reading this work, but it does not.

What I have learned is that most people who visit do so organically. A googleized term meaning you typed in a search word and clicked onto the site. No big deal right? It is actually. 80% of the people who find the site do so through organic google searches.

You see I did not set out to build a popular site, frankly I am happier to be in obscurity since I am being uncomfortably transparent here. So if you don’t tell your friends about the site, fine, really! I set out to honor God. I set out to document my own faith journey and in doing so hoped that it might touch some person who might find God themselves in part from reading my story. That is it the only goal.

Funny thing happened in Google analytics when I realized the significance of an 80% organic score with a healthy growing reader base. I was hitting near the top of search phrases in google! That is the only way people who do not know me were finding the site.

I am humbled to discover that for certain search phrases I was coming up on the second and even first page of google results. This stunned me. Imagine being in the top twenty results of hundreds of thousands of hits even in tens of millions. For those of you who may not know it is commonly believed that if you do not show up on the first three pages of google people will not find you since they either refine their search or stop looking further. So here I am on page one and two. What keywords were amplifying my search results?

how do I know if I am saved

This question when entered into google spits one of my blog posts out at # 17 of 12,900,000 results!

When I saw this and realized the post actually was not even intended to answer this question directly I was shaken. You see google has a complicated algorithm it uses to rank the importance of web articles and returns them accordingly. It returned my post in the top 0.000013% of all results.

I do not believe this is accidental, a coincidence, even a fancy algorithm, I believe this is God at work using this post to reach out to those curious about what it means to be saved.

So then I started to get creative…

What if God ran Google

• It would not be spiders crawling web sites it would be saints
  
  
• It would no longer be pay per click, but kneel per click
  
  
• Safe search really would be
  
  
• Search result 12,900,000 would of course be shown first and mine would be ranked 12,899,983’rd
  
  
• Never again would you skip past a seemingly unrelated result but stop and wonder “What is he trying to tell me here???”
  
  
• Somehow the words Prayer, Worship, Faith Hope and Love would mysteriously appear in every search. Love would of course be first and in bold font.
  
  
• No matter how hard they try to remove his name, God would appear in the text of every search
  
  
• You could conduct the same keyword search day after day and get completely different and richer meaning from the results
  
  
• The poor of spirit would always get the quickest response times and best search results
  
  
• Somehow the rich guy, he just couldn’t get the search button to actually work and return any results
  
  
• All the old school web experts would be offended and refuse to consider what their search results meant
  
  
• And when the final search was hit it would return a simple message that every knee should bow and every tongue confess the name of Jesus.

Do you have any others? I would love to hear them. Post a comment.

Father I thank you for all you do to draw us near

I praise you for the creative spirit you have blessed us with

I praise you for keen intellects

Father I pray that you continue to shower us with your blessings

That we continue to seek you in all our actions in all our heart

I thank you for our salvation and hope in your son

Our savior

Jesus Christ

Amen