For just a little while

So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world. You love him even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him now, you trust him; and you rejoice with a glorious, inexpressible joy. The reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls. (I Peter 1:6-9)

One of the hardest things for some of us to come to grips with is that we have to face and endure trials. Yes, the timeframe may be limited, but why on earth do we have to face them at all? Peter was writing to a group of believers who were likely facing great persecution on a daily basis, yet he tells them to rejoice and take hope. How is it possible to rejoice in the midst of hard things like this? I think Peter wants us to realize these things are only temporary - they are for a little while. They will not endure, but when our faith is put to the test in the midst of these trials, it will emerge even stronger and purer than before the trials came our way. We don't have to understand how fire purges to see the beauty of what is produced - we just need to know the fire is necessary to bring forth the beauty of what would otherwise be hidden.

A trial has a way of changing our focus - we get a little less earthly focused and turn our eyes toward our heavenly Father just a bit more. We 'lean in' and find our foothold in him, not in our own strength. Most of the trials I have endured did more than just change my focus - they showed me where I am the weakest and where I have been attempting to compensate for that weakness in my own power or effort. If a trial can do that for us, maybe they aren't something to be dreaded, but something we might want to embrace. Another thing I have realized in each trial is that God never abandons me to my own devices - he remains with me, surrounds me with his love, and walks me through the trial. If a trial can help us see him just a little better, isn't it worth it?

A lot of things will attempt to shake our faith in this world, but a 'tested faith' is not likely to be shaken. Yes, there will be some 'shaking', but it won't take us down. It will bring to the surface that which needed exposure, as well as help us send down roots just a bit deeper into the soil of our faith. A tree without wind will not send down strong roots. The wind challenges the tree to 'take hold' in much the same way a trial challenges us to consider where we find our 'hold' in life. If it is only surface deep faith, we will likely crumble in the midst of the shaking. If we face each trial with the determination to set our roots deeper, we are likely to develop a strength of faith that is anchored well. Just sayin!

Not gonna stop

Confucius said, "It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop." I think he may have been describing many of the times when I looked at my own life and commented that I'd just like to settle in with what I had accomplished so far because things were just "stalled" or not moving. This can be especially true when I am moving toward a weight or exercise goal! It seems like I can get a mile walk under my belt pretty easily, but then my body is ready to take it to the next half mile, but the weight doesn't seem to come off despite my "extra effort" at lengthening the exercise. Just going further doesn't mean we haven't "quit" on the inside. The distance we travel, the goal we reach, isn't so much a matter of just putting one foot in front of the other - it has as much to do with how our minds and hearts are seeing the progress and the distance yet to be covered!

Any temptation you face will be nothing new. But God is faithful, and He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can handle. But He always provides a way of escape so that you will be able to endure and keep moving forward. (I Corinthians 10:13 VOICE)

You will hear coaches of sports teams say, "Get your head in the game."  I would have to say to the coaches that is probably more important to get heart into the game, head will follow. The truth is, we can endure a whole lot of things in this lifetime, but we don't always get as much out of them as we might be able to have if we'd have had a little more "heart" in the game.  Progress forward is good, but when the head and heart are both moving in the same direction, we are less likely to stop!  Confucius also said, "Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated."  Boy, isn't that the truth!  We want to figure everything out before we move forward, but God tells us to take the step and he will do the revealing of what we need to know as we do.  Confucius probably had someone just like me in mind when he said, "Wherever you go, go with all your heart." 

I don't think God is looking for us to "just make it through" in life. Nor is he looking for us to hit the first plateau in the journey and declare that to be the place we will settle in and put down roots.  We'd have never found out what was beyond the Rockies if the first brave souls hadn't endured the treacherous passes and hard climbs in order to see beyond those beautiful mountains!  There are all kinds of things trying to slow us down, even working hard to convince us to quit - settling for what we have accomplished so far and just becoming "content" there.  As I have frequently said, "settling" is just not what God wants for us - especially when it comes to vision he has for each of us.  It may not be clear where we are headed, but he expects us to continue to focus on what he has laid before us and then endure, endure, endure.  

There is power in focus. In reading our passage today, it starts with focus - Any temptation you face...  What you face is what you are considering at the moment - it is the object of your focus.  The temptation could be to go somewhere or do something we know will lead to compromise in our lives.  It could also be to just give up, settling for what we have been able to accomplish to this point, growing ever more so content to just stay where we are.  Either way, the power of focus plays an important part in whether we will stop or move on.  Change that focus ever so slightly and you might just see a totally different path than you had seen before!

That way of escape God plans for you is not always seen in our immediate focus - sometimes God wants to show us a different path, but we have to be willing to take our eyes off the path upon which we have been considering compromise in order to see the different path he has for us.  Just sayin!

Marching in place a little?

Father, may they clearly know Your will and achieve the height and depth of spiritual wisdom and understanding. May their lives be a credit to You, Lord; and what’s more, may they continue to delight You by doing every good work and growing in the true knowledge that comes from being close to You. Strengthen them with Your infinite power, according to Your glorious might, so that they will have everything they need to hold on and endure hardship patiently and joyfully. (Colossians 1:9-11 VOICE)

Although the passage we are looking at today was written as a prayer for the church at Colossae, it has some meaning for us as fellow believers in the grace and forgiveness of God. Most of us will quickly admit one of the most frequent struggles we face is this assurance we are acting in the will of God - knowing what to do, when to do it, and how it should be accomplished.  As we get more experienced with doing things in life, we often discover there is more than one way to actually do something - what you may accomplish one way, I may accomplish with similar end results, but in an entirely different manner.  What works for me may not work for you - because our abilities or circumstances are different.  For me to say there is one way to pray would be quite untrue - just as it would be to say there is but one way to get to a destination located in the center of town.  Paul's prayer for the believers (and that includes us) is that they may clearly know the Father's will - allowing them to grow like weeds in the depth and breadth of God's grace and love!  All the rest will follow when we are assured our steps are "ordered" - right, steady, and well-placed.

As much as it matters that we take the "right" steps in life, we also want those steps to "count". We want them to matter - to be of value to both us and those around us, including those who will come after us.  We don't want to just "bide time" - to merely "exist" leaves us with no real sense of purpose or accomplishment.  If we are just "marching in place" for a while, we might understand it as necessary even when we don't understand the purpose of the lack of progress.  If we are left marching in place for a long, long time, the lack of enthusiasm to continue on our journey is soon lost!  Why?  We aren't getting anywhere! We are people who want to see things accomplished, aren't we?  If not in the outward sense, we need to feel it inwardly.  I am on a journey to get my body back into shape and this includes losing a little weight.  To do so, I have had to "march in place" a little some weeks as my body adjusts to the decreased intake of some foods, increased intake of others, and the increasing measure of exercise I must add in order to see the pounds shed.  Outwardly I may not see much change from week to week, but inwardly I am feeling it!

The same is often true about our spiritual journey - we may not see much evidence of what God has set about to accomplish in our lives on the outside, but inwardly we know he is at work and the impact of that work is beginning to affect us (even when it isn't always seen on the outside or by others).  The greatest change God makes in our lives is the inward change which brings us closer and closer to him.  It is this transition which many of us have a hard time putting into words - we just know something is about to be different - either in the way we see things, how we react to them, or what we take away from them as we walk through them.  At times, we get discouraged because we don't see the evidence of what this "marching in place" is doing - but the seeming lack of forward progress doesn't mean we aren't still in beat with his heart.  God's heartbeat is much like the cadence being called out by the one who keeps the battalion moving forward in perfect marching rhythm.  That heartbeat may be a little faint when we are distracted by our own intent or purpose - but it gets ever clearer and easier to hear when we settle down, march in place a little, and let that rhythm establish our future movements!

Endurance may just be learned in the times we don't actually see much movement or change. It may be hard for us to imagine marching in place increases our endurance - helps us make it even further in the journey.  In fact, we likely don't even have a clue why we are where we are at times because we don't know what got us there.  We just need to settle into his arms and allow him the chance to reveal his purpose to us.  This is the hardest place for us because we are people of "action" - we want it done, in short order, and we want to move onto the next thing.  When we are called upon to march for any length of time without making much progress, our chances of being distracted by the lack of "progress" are greater. We don't see change happening - so we look around us to see if we can find it somewhere else - as though we "missed it" somewhere along the way.  A soldier marching in place will tell you "looking around" is not permitted because it is easy to get out of sync with the cadence when we do.  The straight-ahead focus marching in place demands actually keeps us in sync - it helps us to remain consistent in our "cadence".  A disturbed or disrupted cadence will mean a break in consistency - a chance for what was being accomplished in us to become disrupted or taken off-course.

I don't know what we each are doing today - some may be marching full-speed ahead, while others of us are kind of "marching in place" a little.  Either way, let us do with consistency, focused ever so intently on the cadence of God's heartbeat, so that in the end we will accomplish all he has purposed for our journey.  Just sayin!

And so it begins...

Are you a beginner, middler, or finisher?  You might think this question a little odd, but if you'd take a moment or two to actually answer it before you read the rest of this blog, I'd bet you might just come to come conclusions about yourself.  You see, there are those who begin a whole lot of stuff, but soon fizzle out in their pursuit of whatever it was simply because they lose interest.  Then there are those who get way into it and figure out it was going to be harder than they imagined, so they just abandon it right in the middle.  There are probably less in the last group of finishers because to actually get to the end of something, you sometimes have to push past the stuff which doesn't capture your interest with an awe-inspiring "hook" or keep you plugging along when the task gets hard.  Beginners make a lot of up-front investment, but seldom see any benefit from it.  Middlers might get a little out of their investment, but it isn't as much as it could be if they actually finished.  To get the most of anything, we have to finish it.  It isn't any different in our spiritual life - to begin is good - to finish is far better!

Something completed is better than something just begun; patience is better than too much pride. (Ecclesiastes 7:8 CEV)

I have begun a whole lot of things in my life.  I began to read War and Peace, but put it down after just a little while because it was hard to read and just plain didn't interest me.  I have begun on several occasions to let my hair grow out, but find myself soon losing patience with the effort it takes and cut it off again! I have begun many a diet, but I still don't follow any of them.  In beginning, we make a good effort to do something - but for whatever reason, the effort isn't continued.  Maybe this is the key - to go beyond beginning it requires effort.  At any beginning, we ride high on the emotional charge of beginning something new.  As we get into it a little bit, the emotional charge diminishes and now it becomes a little bit of effort.  Therein lies the issue - we just don't count the cost before we begin.

Those things in life which I have actually made it a little further with, but which I didn't finish, also required effort - sometimes beyond what I was willing to give, or just too much for my heart or mind to get into.  I can think of some dating relationships I have started, thinking they were going to be the right thing for me, then midway through I realized my heart wasn't really into getting past the hard stuff in them!  You ever been there?  It is pretty doggone hard to continue in something which you cannot put your heart and soul into, isn't it?  

I began a friendship with them because I found we had common interests, or we just hit it off to begin with.  Midway through it became apparent how much "work" these relationships actually required - they were "high maintenance" relationships. There was a lot of baggage.  If you have ever been in one of those, you know just how much they drain you of everything you can pour into the relationship.  If you have more than one of them at a time, they can actually exhaust you!  For a while, you can pour your heart into it, but if there is no "balance" in the relationship, you soon feel the "weight" of being the only one "putting into" the relationship and the "baggage" becomes too much to actually carry alone.

Finishing actually requires us to not only begin, but to persevere in the middle! We are kind of spoiled today - we want "instant" - so when instant doesn't happen for us, we sometimes get annoyed with the progress we are making and just walk away.  War and Peace I could put down - it didn't really matter if I finished it!  The Word of God, from cover to cover, was worth my investment - a hard read at times - but definitely worth the effort!  Yes, even those couple of dating relationships were okay to explore, but they weren't the right ones for a life-long commitment.  The relationship I have with Jesus on the other hand - I cannot walk away from this one!  

Now, the effort I put into my relationship with Jesus and in getting into his Word is not always "easy", nor is it "instantly rewarding".  Some days I am just like you - my prayers feel like they are bouncing back to me without any answer; the passages seem to be words on the page, but never striking a chord in my heart; and sometimes it is just plain hard to make time for either in my hectic life!  I keep in mind what Jesus said about beginnings - we are "born again" into newness of life with him.  But...we don't stop there - he then calls us to continue in the pursuit of this new life in him as followers - disciples.  Disciples are students of the Teacher - they put in the effort to learn all the Teacher has in store for them.  It may be hard at times, but trust me on this one, it is worth every investment of the heart, mind, and soul you will put into it!  Just sayin!