The End of Your Breath is the Start of Mine

I love to ride my mountain bike. The more uncertain the terrain, the steeper the climb, the more determined and happy I become. For me there is absolute joy in riding in the wilderness, being in nature enjoying this God given gift. There are times when I feel as if I could ride forever, be totally at one with nature and my God; no greater feeling than this. Then there are other times, times when on a steep climb I reach the end of my endurance, when a cutting wind will not relent, when the rain chills to the bone, when the sun bakes the skin or the dust dries out my mouth. At these times I want to stop, catch my breath drink deeply of cool water and allow my heart to slow back down. I want a break; I want to catch my breath.

A few months back I was riding in the San Gabriel Mountains at my churches men’s retreat. A group of us had decided in advance to ride that afternoon. We drove up to the end of the street and discussed where to ride. Many wanted to ride down the fantastically steep road to the camp. What an adrenaline rush to ride a bicycle over 30 mph. A smaller group wanted just a little more. We set off up and up the trail at the end of the road. We climbed the steep trail to its end in the California wilderness. The beauty took your breath away, tall trees, crisp cold air, the faint sound of a river and wildlife in the background. Two of us decided to go a little further up yet, blazing our own trail through the pine covered underbrush and rocky ground.

I can barely convey the raw beauty of this place. To share it with a Christian brother and my God was almost too much for me. We prayed at the top of our climb basking in the glory of his majesty. While there a thought came to me. It was God speaking to me in his usual way, a quiet thought in the back of my mind. This day (this weekend for that matter) I was listening carefully for his voice. I heard him clearly and knew it would be the theme of this very post.

When you reach the end of your breath, you find the start of mine.

I knew what he meant. Stop relying on yourself and find strength in me. For in your weakness you will find my strength. This was a loving act, fatherly advice to an ignorant stubborn sinner. He was trying to save me from the grief he knew I would endure through rebellious acts of my own creation in the not so distant future.

He breathed life into me in the beginning, he will be there when I breathe my last, he will welcome me into his kingdom. His breath not mine.

On his earth I have been given an endowment. An endowment that can be used any way I choose. He wanted me to trust in him rely on him and come to him for guidance and support, for comfort and wisdom. I need to do this and stop relying on myself. I love the way he reveals himself to me. I loved that moment because I was immediately aware of his voice not some time after the fact, no it was real time.

It took a while to sink in, to realize the lesson behind the quote. Finally I get it, I understand. As I battled with sin today this story came back and guided me to surrender myself to my father in prayer. I reached the end of myself and gave the problem over to him and was delivered. I praise God for this.

I think it time to return to my mountain playground, to ride pray and worship. To lose myself in another ride and find him, that is what I seek. I want to be in him, he is my guide, my protector, my strength, my deliverer my breath.

Father I praise your name
I thank you and praise you for the gift of wilderness
I praise you for your word to me
For revealing to me a loving guidance
You are the air I breathe

Amen

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

Cellars of the Heart

When I was a child I used to have the odd nightmare. You know the ones where you are falling and falling and falling or the ones where you are being chased but your feet are in quicksand. There was one other that was not so much a nightmare but often turned into one on me. I would find myself in a strange house wandering through trying to figure out where I was. Room after room passage way after passage way you try to figure out where you are. At some point just like the "B" movies you go into the basement to see if you can find the electrical panel to turn the lights on. Has that ever happen to you?

A version of that scene came to me early yesterday morning during my men's bible study when our pastor clearly spoke about surrendering to God. Only this time I discovered in that basement the boarded up entrance to a deep cellar. Covered with cob webs smelling musty and unwelcoming, this is a place that screams Danger! Keep Out! Stout dirty beams nailed with large spikes ensured no one would ever be able to pull away the covering on this deep dark opening in the basement.

Whatever did this message mean? Unfortunately I know all too well. Like most men I compartmentalize my thought life. This is a really neat male feature; it allows you to function normally when you are angry, broken, hurting, or ashamed. Without this function most men could not pretend to be normal. They would be unable to function normally their brokenness would be too close to the surface; someone would find them out.

I was dealing that morning with a rebellious sin. I knew I had to address it but was content to keep it locked away securely in the cellar to be dealt with later. There was one little problem with my plan, the Lord wanted none of it. You see I have been reading a book called Total Surrender. This book was given to me by a Christian brother who has recently started investing in my faith life.

I want nothing more than to surrender completely to the Father and have prayed humbly to do so. Andrew Murray the author of the book clearly argued that to surrender we must empty our heart of our own selfish desires for the Holy Spirit to fill us with God's desires. See where this is going.

Ironically this subject of surrender has become a common theme these past few weeks. I am no different than most guys; a little slow in picking up spiritual clues. First the book, then the bible study. Sandwiched in the middle of these was a praise song sung at a worship service. The band that night had played wonderfully, until that song. For me it was like fingernails on a chalkboard. It was not that they were playing bad, it was that I am used to hearing Jeremy Camp sing this particular song; Empty Me. I am sure that my discomfort in hearing the band play this song was intentional. I needed to hear this warning bell.

Empty Me by Jeremy Camp

Holy Fire burn away,

my desire for anything

that is not of you and is of me,

I want more of you and less of me, yeah.

Empty me,

Empty me, yeah,

Fill, won't you fill me,

with you, with you, yeah.

I love this song. This night my quest to surrender heightened. I became aware of the fact that I need to be like an empty clay jar ready to receive. I need to uncover any blemishes, any closed off areas that keep me from full surrender.

So back to the cellar

As dearly as I have prayed to empty myself I have recognized that there is yet another cellar in the basement of by heart. One that has been long secured from the Lord. I cannot let him in, it must be held back. The funny thing is for the longest time I did not even know it was there. It was hidden amongst all the other junk in me. As this junk has been slowly removed by the Holy Spirit, this door became evident.

I cannot open this door on my own, it is too well secured. I need the help and strength of the Holy Spirit. The morning of the Bible Study I asked a brother to pray for me. The same man who has started to invest in my faith life. Have you ever confessed a sin to a brother and been afraid of what they might think? Ever done it anyway? I have. That morning, the spirit helped me muster the courage to confront my own rebellion. As he prayed over me, I could sense the Spirit washing over me covering me with what felt like a force field of protective covering. As much as I want to stick dynamite under this door in my heart and blow it up, I cannot. On my own I can do nothing to break into this stronghold of sin, but in the spirit, in Christ all things are possible.

This morning I could feel the thin edge of the wedge sliding into place behind the beams holding this door.

Father I need you more than ever
If I am to completely surrender
I need the intercession of the Holy Spirit
I cannot do the work in front of me
You can
Will you Father
I need you more than ever
Praise be your Holy name

amen

Larry the Biker

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Alright! The music just ended, we haven’t missed anything yet….

Our pastor spoke this oft heard quote that echoes the halls of our church as the praise music ends and the announcements and message are about to begin. Busted I was. My wife and I regularly show up during the first half hour of our service during the praise portion, reasoning, its just music we have not missed the message. How infinitely wrong we have been in this behavior.

Our pastor continued to teach us this Tuesday evening about the meaning of the greatest commandment

Love the Lord thy God with all your heart mind and soul Mark 12:30

When Jesus uttered these prophetic words to the Pharisees all those years ago, what he was saying that we need to worship at the feet of our heavenly father. Praise him, worship him, love him.

These words were a revolution inside my heart. In my stoic world of maintaining appearances I often consider my surroundings before I ever lift my hands in worship. Why is it so hard for a man of God to praise his heavenly father? Our pastor continued. As he wrapped up this message he shared a stance he had personally taken. He said he would rather be judged a fool by men then a fool by God. With that as a backdrop I considered my own behaviors. Truly I needed to be bolder in my own faith, to worship like David not caring what man said or thought. What a place to be left, resolute in finding my own voice of authentic worship.

The next day I found myself looking clearly toward my afternoon bike ride into the mountains. I knew what was coming. I was not just going to pray this day I would WORSHIP my Lord and Savior. At the peak of my ride I prayed earnestly for revelation, for courage, for peace. I interceded on behalf of some many people I love who are broken and hurting. Today my prayers were from my knees, where I belong. (The Lord had conveniently blown a piece of cardboard into the location where I pray each day, almost as if to welcome me and say I know what you need today). At the end of my prayer in abject humility I tried to cry out in song my worship of the Lord. Did I mention that I suck at singing. Not only that but no words came to mind from any of the worship songs I love.

Well the Lord will provide! (Remember a few posts back where the Lord told me to listen to my Ipod? He did so again. After all there are only about 300 Christian songs on the thing!)

I choose deliberately. Mercy Me came immediately to mind. Their music so soulful, the lyrics pull on my heart. I started “I can only imagine”. Yes imagine a grown man standing on the side of a mountain belting out, way out of tune, the lyrics of a song. No one else can hear the music; no one else knows what this crazy guy is singing about, just God and me. It was awesome, tears streamed down my face as I soaked in the lyrics (and yelled them out) of this beautiful song and for a brief moment could conceive of what it meant to really love God.

The ride down the mountain and back to my house was even more powerful for me. My poor bike strained under the continuous blows of rocks sticking above the trail. The chain rattled off the frame as I sped onward, downward fully engulfed in my own powerful, private worship session. I hit the bottom of the trail at full speed and attempted to make a gravelly high speed turn as Mercy Me pounded into my ears. The tires bit then slipped bit then slipped, over the top of the bike I went landing standing up. With a triumphant yell of praise I hooted and hollered to my savior. This wipe out is for you, you are my rock, my savior PRAISE YOUR NAME!!!

The ride continued onto city streets, the music even louder to drown out the sound of the wind whipping past my ears. 20 miles per hour 25, I was on fire. I could not go fast enough, sing loud enough. As I made the turn west to head home the wind was fully against me slowing me to a crawl. I labored to catch my breath, the fire of worship was now in my thighs. (I was tired, my muscles were burning). Each time I caught my breath I would rejoin the chorus of the latest song. I would run out of breath and stop singing long enough to start again. By the time I was within a mile of my house, everyone must of wondered who the crazy bikin singin guy was. What a powerful experience. I am left to ponder what my next worship experience will be and whether I will scare the kids in the neighborhood…

"I Can Only Imagine"

I can only imagine
What it will be like
When I walk
By your side

I can only imagine
What my eyes will see
When your face
Is before me
I can only imagine

[Chorus:]
Surrounded by Your glory, what will my heart feel
Will I dance for you Jesus or in awe of you be still
Will I stand in your presence or to my knees will I fall
Will I sing hallelujah, will I be able to speak at all
I can only imagine

I can only imagine
When that day comes
And I find myself
Standing in the Son

I can only imagine
When all I will do
Is forever
Forever worship You
I can only imagine

[Chorus]

I can only imagine [x2]

I can only imagine
When all I will do
Is forever, forever worship you

Father I praise your Holy name

amen