Numb

No longer numbed by culture and my own ego I find the movement of my heart tough to bear. The energy and pain it takes to follow Jesus is much more than I ever expected. The church does not tell us the reality of this and they go so far as to tell us that Christianity is full of bliss and reward; the easy way. Maybe that’s numb Christianity, the so called DOING Christianity they are referring to. Numb meaning I shied away from any type of pain or sorrow. I avoid any sort of situation where compassion was needed. It felt awkward when someone told me they were hurting. I did not know what to say or do. Funerals no way! I looked for any excuse not go. I remember a good friend of mine died in college from a tragic car accident. His funeral was so unbearable to me. So I did life with an unreal positive outlook and convinced myself that if I was just positive enough nothing would go wrong. People that had problems just had bad karma from not being positive. How wrong I was, how dumb, how insensitive I must have been. In short I thought I was a little god that I controlled my world. Well in a way all that pain and sorrow built up in me stored in my heart and then over time I cracked. God started the process of cleaning me out. He took it all my marriage, a successful business, and all my materials thing after that he called my name and gave me my heart back clean and opened up. Now I can feel my heart again the numbness gone but not forgotten.

There is almost a guilt I feel when I tell people about my faith and love for God. Guilt in that I am telling them if they choose a life like I have (God chose me to have) they will no longer be numb and without the numbing medication of culture and their ego life will be painful. The pain I feel is seeing so many people losing their hearts and living for their own neediness and self satisfaction. I see the effects that anger and pride have on those they love. The harm this causes their wives and kids is hard to bare. I see through them into their brokenness; of the wounds their loved ones inflicted on them over the years. I see people walking around bleeding and in silent pain. I pray Jesus heals them; stops the onslaught from the devil on their hearts. Only thing that quenches this pain is love. Love of a woman, love for my kids and family. This only gets me back to feeling even, far from the joy the church promises. It is loving God that gets me above and beyond the pain.

So I tell you my friends that my life of old was like comparing a black/white TV when we had the old rabbit ears and most stations came in a little snowy/fuzzy to that of our modern color LCD flat panel TV. However, I am not seeing the Kingdom in high definition. I ask God every day to give me the eyes, ears, and heart to see His Kingdom. Lord will you give to me high definition for I want to know You more? I cannot go back to old way of life, no way I would rather die. In a way I am dying. In this process of dying to things of this world, I no longer find a need to acquire material things, conquer woman to make myself feel like a man, keep up with the Jones’, needing to make myself look good in the eyes of others, or worry about the judgments’ of others. I look forward to dying and my soul being released to be with God and loved ones who have passed before me. I look forward to eternity with those that I love.

My Salvation

I am being conformed to the image of Christ through God’s Grace. This Grace is the calling from God for me to follow His will not mine. His will for me was set before I was conceived. This Grace is brought about through the complexities and experiences of my life. The choices, events and circumstances of my life are all a part of the process of forming me to the likeness of Christ, His one and only Son He sent to us in the flesh so we could have a tangible teacher to show us the way to God our true Father. God provides this Grace and path to me for the sake of God’s Kingdom and the world around me. I experience God molding transforming me in the innate driveness inside me that is never content that I am always striving to be a better man and now that I have heard His call a holier man. What Jesus has taught me is both and accession but also a sense of losing myself or better put a dying to my own will (self actualization or self fulfillment). As I pick up my cross I learn to live not for myself but for the Father.

Interweaved through my life is the constant presence evil. A counter spiritual presence that wants to keep me from God’s love and will. I know deep within me there is something set against me trying to prevent my relationship with God. I understand I am living in a fallen world, one of intense evil and good. Good things happen and so do bad things. What I have come to experience is God makes good out of those times when I do succumb to evil and fall away from his Grace. For God understands the evil one is so adept to getting me to go the opposite direction from God’s love. I also know that God gave me a choice to choose His good or the devil’s fallen way. Choice is the foundation of Love. For God’s knows that Love is not something born out of any kind of force or coercion. I must understand there are two realms to the world in which my soul and body reside. One is the world of what I can see that is tangible this where my body resides. The other realm is that of my spirit. This spiritual realm is much like the physical world in that it has an order and a process to it. The major difference is that the physical world is bound by time where as the spiritual world is timeless. Both worlds invade each other or better put they are intertwined. God uses both realms in order to conform me to be in His image (don’t be conformed to the things of this world).

One of the biggest dangers that evil uses against me is to make me believe is the absence of a spiritual world. This lie is the foundation of the fallen world or as we call it culture to a great extent. For evil teaches me only to believe what I can physically see and what my human rational mind can validated. This is where God’s calling comes into place in my life. He nudges me and if need be He invades my life with His presence to bring me a reminder that I was created in His image to be more than I being. These nudges and invasions if not paid attention to go unheeded by me sometimes for years and years. I can recall now so many nudges and invasions by God in my past. I just did not know how to listen or understand what God was saying to me. Most of the time they came in the form of irritations; broken relationships, failures, and more often just sadness and depression feelings of something is not right with my heart. It is for me that looming thought “I am not where I am supposed to be.” As if I want to say out loud “Mike stop go the other direction.” This is to me is what repent means. I am learning to respond to God’s call more often. As I let God into my daily life He begins to purge those things in my life that have gotten in the way of knowing Him. I see life differently now. I have begun to have a deep personal relationship with Him. He has grown to be my best friend, my confidant, and my ultimate power. I love Him more than life or anything in it.

Now that I am listening God is always purging me of my old ways. He is now my General my true Father. I do nothing without Him. I have a passion to follow Jesus and to learn how He lived how he brought the Kingdom to Earth. So I see life differently and do things differently. I am trying to become of servant to the world just like Jesus did by giving up my wants and needs so I can serve others with my skills, talents, wisdom and most importantly with the love in my heart. This pouring out of myself often empties me. I become worn out, burned out on life and religion. I must therefore go back to the well of the Lord to fill up. The only way I find to fill up is to spend time with God; to BE with God to seek is His company and to speak with Him, to let Him put things upon my heart. As I spend time with Him, He pours into me his Grace and love. It fills my heart and soul so that I can again pour out to others in my life. This pouring out illuminates me, it shows me the Kingdom and I experience in my heart God’s true love for me. I feel on purpose, alive like I have never felt before. I now have the eyes, ears, and heart to experience how I was made to be; a Kingdom builder!

Being with God requires activities that put me in a place to recognize and receive his Grace which means the way he communicates to me. These activities are contained in my survival kit which consists of fasting, a letting go of or dying a little, removal of things in my life so that I can focus without distraction on God. I am learning to silence the world around, so that I hear His still small voice, that heaviness on my heart. I seek solitude to find Him then I sit back and notice what He is doing in and around me. My priorities are to remain in Him, loving all God’s children, and bearing witness to God’s goodness to all that will listen and watch in me.

In order to stop the onslaught of evil in my life I must be disciplined and I must take up the battle against evil. I need to train, practice, and go to war in order to maintain my relationship with God. He has provided me the spiritual disciplines as weapons and tools to keep his Kingdom in my life. It is this regular practice and training that always me to win the war and to work out my salvation for the good of God. I ask God my Father for the heart, soul, mind and strength to do His will. Lord I am yours do what you will with me. Save me from evil. Let me see the Kingdom. Take me from here to be with you.

Pain

Why is there so much similarity in the pain of pure joy the one that brings us to tears and the pains of failure, losing a loved one, and those wounds of our heart that our closet loved one’s inflict. Love is at the foundation of this pain for our brokenness which is really our failures and loses that having led us away from God. However God uses these to change and move our hearts close to how God wants us to be. Joy is having found God’s Grace in the midst of this painful life for we were made for something greater and we know that deep within ourselves, we were made to be hero’s and lovers. Take a close look at the joy you experience I will bet it wasn’t about any material thing but about an experience where we found our true selves in loving someone else and/or loving ourselves not in an ego self centric way just that feeling I like who I am for that moment.

We find it difficult to love our closest friends and family because this is where we get most of our pain. However we still love them and it is this love contrast of joy and painful wounds that allows us to understand that love is so painful. Why do some of us strive for the middle ground that place of numbness where there are no highs or lows, no tears of joy, no wounds to be had? I would say most of us strive to cut out the bottoms the place where we are wounded. We avoid situations where there is risk of failure or rejection of our true self. But in reality those wounds and rejections just happen even those we avoid them at all cost. This cost is that numbness or middle ground. This is where we find ourselves most of our lives numb, busy and terribly unconnected to our hearts. If we slow down, get quiet and pear into our own hearts we discover the lack of Joy and there is so much pain in that because like I said above we were made for much more, we know it. We need to take the time ask God to give us the eyes and the ears to experience the real contrast of His Kingdom. For God’s is in all the pain. Blessed are those that get to experience the complete pain in the tears of joy and also see God’s redemption in the most painful failures and loses. God knows that if there was no pain that we would not notice Him. So he uses pain for our good. It’s the way he shapes us to His purpose. Pain is necessary and no one is able to avoid it in their lives.

Pain moves us to action. Yes sometimes it moves us to the middle ground but that is good. This is God’s way of protecting us from too much or better put he give us the middle ground as a release valve. He does not want us to stay there but soon after the pains and wounds we usually get a choice to experience joy and redemption this is God’s way of filling us up and making us whole. This where we say “God is Good”.

Let’s get back to Joy and why it hurts. Joy hurts because we know it is fleeting, so temporary for most of us that the middle ground feels like joy to us. Wounds are different those last. They lie under the surface and stay there sometimes for a life time. We bury them in the numbness because we have not let God have them. This numbness and burying is the work of the devil. He uses this as a form to keep us under his reign. This is one of the devil’s main strategies just to keep us numb and lifeless. He knows his kingdom will increase just by shear accumulation of wounds.

However, when we abide in God’s grace we have more opportunities for joy but make no mistake there will be plenty of pain. All pain forces us to change to let go of something for God’s purpose. He uses it to change our hearts. Jesus was very clear about this when he said “Take up your cross and follow Me” (Luke 9:23). What he meant was die to your ego self live for something else. This takes the pain off of us and gives to God. No longer do we bear all the burden of our pain. God is the pain. He wants us to experience with Him. Look for God in the Joy and the wounds. He is there!

When God Wants To

When God wants to drill a man,
And thrill a man,
And skill a man
When God wants to mold a man
To play the noblest part;

When He yearns with all His heart
To create so great and bold a man
That all the world shall be amazed,
Watch His methods, watch His ways!

How He ruthlessly perfects
Whom He royally elects!
How He hammers him and hurts him,
And with mighty blows converts him

Into trial shapes of clay which
Only God understands;
While his tortured heart is crying
And he lifts beseeching hands!

How He bends but never breaks
When his good He undertakes;
How He uses whom He chooses,
And which every purpose fuses him;
By every act induces him
To try His splendor out-
God knows what He's about.

--Unknown Aurthor

Just thought this poem was so perfect! It so desribes our Salavation and God conforming us to His will.