You decide...

Did you know, if you listened and payed attention you can make every person you come in contact with you can make everyone feel SPECIAL?


We don't know people like we think we do, we judge more than we should, we worry when we shouldn't and we let the little things bother us.


I went to Denny's for breakfast two days ago, one of my friends that was with me was being sassy right away with the waitress. We had no idea how she was feeling, could have been a great morning, or a bad morning, but either way the sass was unneeded and could only do damage.


I was working a men's retreat at a Young Life camp I work at some Saturday's, and because of my mood, I got to pump these guys up for a challenging ropes. I was asking a lot of questions about them, people like talking about themselves. Some of the guys really opened up to me, a small group of some guys were the last guys in line and while waiting, we just started talking about their victories in the addictions and how they are getting through their marriages. I encouraged them to continue to stay strong without their old addictions, communication between them and their wife, and  just reminded them of how strong they are.


I could have been in a bad, tired, it's hot mood, but instead I took the chance to really love on these guys. I will probably never see these guys again, but if I do, I sure hope they remember how special they felt. I want these guys to feel different and important because they are. I got to ask hard questions and I got teased but I just played with them merely because guys can't only have serious, just not how most of them work.


When I come in contact with someone I want them to walk away feeling absolutely adore and loved.

Waiting in a long line in the grocery store, in class with a cranky teacher, listening to your mother tell you what to do even though your 35 years old, your roommate getting upset about the smallest things, your wife not listening to you, what ever annoys the heck out of you find a way to make them feel special, find a way to love them even if you think you can't I bet you can, in the smallest way, shine light on the situation. Be patient and have grace, listen and care.

Stop and think and go against how you feel and make someones day.

 

You are His Beloved....

Listening to the lie "I'm not good enough" keeps us imprisoned.

This lie is from Satin, and we have 66 books, in the bible, that tell us that we are more than enough. These lies come from deep hurts that we have covered up over and over because of sin.

We go through our life and sometimes we ask, who are we and why are we here? Most people say to glorify the God of the universe, because He sent his son to die on the cross for our sin.

But have you ever thought that you were created just to be loved. You were created to be loved, and because we are loved, we are filled and we want to glorify him and love others and shine, but that's not why we were created. You don't create things and give them a job right away.
God created Adam and Eve and told them to rest first, to soke up him and his love, and once they were rested they could work. GOD JUST WANTS TO LOVE US!

Telling yourself, myself, that "I'm not good enough" is keeping us prideful and keeps a wall up between you and Christ. We will never be enough for other people but we are more than enough for the God of the universe.

Who are you? Who do other people say you are? Who does Christ tell you who you are?

God sent you to where you are. -Isaiah 61:1.
You are the flavor of the earth, you spice things up. -Matt 5:13
You are a light, to brighten up the darkness, for the glory of Christ. You are not dim, you are bright- Matt 5:14
You are God's friend. You are different and attractive.You are wanted -James 2:23
You are God's little child. You will never fall out of grace, ever. -John 1:12
You are God's heir. His princess. You are held to high standards, out of love. -Gal 4:7
You are His chosen people. You are wanted, adore, loved, and cherished. -Col 3:12

You are enough, more than enough. Do not be chained down to the lies from Satin. You don't need to do good works, you just need Him and he will do all the work. He will shine through you, and through this you will only want to glorify him through love, but you do not need to impress him, because you are already enough the way you are. Run into his wide open arms and embrace his huge, his love, his joy.

'I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters,' says the Lord Almighty."
2 Corinthians 6:17-18,
"How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!"
1 John 3:1

Patience is a Virtue.

I think two of the hardest lessons my father has taught me and continues to show me is patience and grace.

The last couple of months I have been struggling with depression, something I may always struggle with. Most people do not know how to love someone that has depression, we have our good days and our bad days, and you never know what you are going to get. It gets frustrating for everyone including Christ. A friend that I hold very close to my heart, asked me what I wanted from her and all I want and need is patience and grace. With these two verbs you will show me love. You do not have to do little acts of service, even though I love those things, it is not needed. All I need is patience and grace. It gets tiring when all your friends are expecting one thing but not telling me what they want or need, because I will contently fail, and contently failing doesn't put anyone is a good mood.

What is patience? It is a big word that many people seem to not understand. "the quality of being patient,  as the bearing of provocation, annoyance, misfortune, or pain, without complaint, loss of temper, irritation, or the like." It is selfless. Accepting things where they are, even if it is not them or not where it is suppose to be, to stand side by side and taking step by step, together. Jesus continues to do this with us. We will always fail Him, but he will always be patient with us, because he loves us no matter what. His patience for us and with us is just a small way he shows us his love, but it is an important way he shows us his love. 


What is grace and how is it different from mercy? To me the best way to explain this is through a small story. 
A father asked his daughter to not eat a cookie out of the cookie jar while he goes to get his shoes on in the other room. When the father walks back in the girl has a cookie in her hand with crumbed on shirt. The father gently asks his little girl if she ate the cookie, she looks at him with a looks of "I know I have disappointing you"
Grace: the father says "that's okay, I still love you" and goes outside. 
Mercy: the father says "that's okay, I still love you, and because I love you I want to get you some ice cream so lets go get some ice cream,"
Grace, is letting go and forgetting where as mercy is letting go and praising you for it with a "reward" 


I only want patience. I just want you to work with me, not against me. One way that can help anyone and everyone is open communication and honesty. Open communication and honesty will only make patience and grace come that much easier.

Life goes in season, and some are harder than others. Have patience, grace, honesty and open communication.

"So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand." Isaiah 41:10

The Lord is my Shepard. 


Never understood this until I found myself running from myself. For so long until i found myself by myself. Into a corner, surrounded by FEAR and whispers of lies, finding myself tasting the poison of this toxic chemical. Falling deeper and deeper into a pit of despair and pity. 

Begin to hope...less. Until there was no hope, and fear become my boss, laying burdens on my soul, leading me to believe the "life is to hard".
Fear has put its self where God is meant to be. 

Fear is a lie. Fear is a prison.

I run. I run from my pain, into pain. I run from my past, into my past. I run in circles through my head, because my heart and my head are always fighting. My heart knows the truth and my mind listens to the lies, so I run. I run into despair, hopelessness, pain, everything not of God. I blame so I believe I am the victim. I run.

Like Jonah runs from God. He ran to get away from what God wanted for him, Jonah was told to preach at Nineveh, and he went the opposite way, got on a ship and rowed away, but God sent a big storm, making the boat crumble. His friends started to throw things off the side of the boat to make the boat lighter. He fell asleep and his friends said get up and pray to your God. Johan, scared, was determined that the storm was his fault. "If you get rid of me the storm will stop", he told his friends to throw him over too. But instead of drowning, he was swallowed by a whale. 
Jonah was in the whale three days. God commanded the whale, and it vomited the reluctant prophet onto dry land. This time Jonah obeyed God. He walked through Nineveh proclaiming that in forty days the city would be destroyed. Surprisingly, the Ninevites believed Jonah's message and repented.

 We run. From what God wants from us, out of fear. We run, because we don't really put our full trust in Him. We let our fear, our prison keep us tried down, like a bird in a bird cage. We want to be safe, so we run from God.

We run from life. From the giver of life. The root problems aren't going anywhere if you continue to run.

What are you running from? What are you running too? What do you fear?

Your choice to choose...

You know that hard moment when your parents give you the decision of what to do, like stay at home and be with them or go out with some of your best friends the last night you're in town. Or the moment that you want to stop running because your muscles burn and you think you can't get any further at the same place everything, and you feel like you can't get past that point, so you choose to stop.

Choices may be one of the hardest things God has given us. Free will is a powerful thing but so is your heart to make the right choices. It is always so much easier to fall instead of getting up, or continuing to sin than to get out and get help. The willingness to be free is one of the most powerful things God gives us, in our control.

I hate the fact that He give us this choice, to choose Him or choose sin. Why are choices in general so hard for us, do you think we naturally make the right choices, or do we have to go against our will more of the time?

Do our decisions reflect our values? When we follow our heart we get caught up in emotions. My good friend told me once "Emotions will never make logical sense. We all have many reason for feeling the way we feel but if we are focused on our excused we get stuck in our head." We decide to go against our values to see what really is important to you. Like do the little things really bother you, can you live with them, or do you not deserve them what so ever.

"Somewhere along the line of development we discover what we really are, and then we make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone else's life." -- Eleanor Roosevelt  


Our choices we make may cause pain and distraction and we have to be all in or all out, in our decision because being half in and half out will only drag out that hurt more and more. We are responsible for our decisions and all that it brings with it, the pain, the joy, a decision is dangerous sometimes.

So if our choice goes again our value and our heart, a war brakes out between our flesh and spirit. This is where the pain and hardness comes in,  because you know what you WANT to do and what you SHOULD do. Choosing want you should do is not going to be any easier after than what you want. Both are hard and bring this feeling of missing out sometimes, or that the other one would be easier half way through. But the decision is made and you have to be all in, in that decision that was made.


Galatians 5:13-35
Life by the Spirit

 ¹³ You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. ¹⁴ For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ¹⁵ If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.  ¹⁶ So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. ¹⁷ For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. ¹⁸ But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.
 ¹⁹ The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; ²⁰ idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions ²¹ and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.
 ²² But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. ²⁴ Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. ²⁵ Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. ²⁶ Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.

Making the right choice will show the love you have for the other person, in the way you are respecting them by choosing to live by the Spirit.

Notice the when you took verse 16 and 17 together the main point is not war, but the victory for the Spirit. Christ is the God of the Universe and if you choose Him you will win if you choose to live by the Spirit.

Finding hope...

One of my closest friend told me once...
"You are so strong. No, not all the time. But that's okay. Even when you're weak, the strength that it takes to admit that and to fight that battle is incredible. Your life has been far from comfortable and you appreciate all the little things, just like i do..." and of course we always under estimate ourselves and who we impact and what we do on this Earth. But at this point in my life that is all I needed to hear, and it gave me HOPE.

Hope is a word that is used a lot. Sometimes I'm not sure if i fully understand what it means until all I have is hope. I fall. A lot. We all do. But what makes us get back up? It is so much easier to just give up, but why do we consistently want to find for something more? We are scared of death, and we long for pleasure. Getting up for me is what gives me hope. And hope GIVES ME STRENGTH.

"It will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end."

What makes us strong? Our attitude, our vulnerability, our hope? Guess what? You are allowed to have a bad day, but do not lose your hope.

I think a lot of the time we get caught up in our world and our life and problems that we get numb and get start to lose that hope that has been there the whole time. Suffering sucks we all know that, but how do we show our strength through our suffering?

My dad told me about a year ago, "You see someones true character during the hardest of times." It is completely true, it is so easy to walk around with your head up, shoulders back while things are great, but when things start to get hard do we lose that hope, do we start to sulk in our own pity?

Romans 12:12  Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.

So are we really strong, because I am told that day after day and really I think we are hopeful. We hope because we are faithful. Faith in a God that uses the weak to help the strong. 

 

We are strengthen through His FREEDOM. Freedom from all suffering, but we have to choose His peace. He only wants to free us. We do not have the control but we do have the choice to choose Him, and until we do choose to choose Him we will suffer.

Find your strength IN HIM. Find His hope, His freedom. He will restore you.

"To miss"

Defined as:
 1. "to fail to encounter, meet, catch, ect."
 2. "to notice the absence or loss of."


Why do we miss people?

What is it that people bring in our lives that one other people can bring out in us.

My little brother and I hung out 24/7 until I was in 7th grade, and with him my other "little brother" Tanner. It was always us. Tanner died about 4 years ago, and when he did I was destroyed, but I thought it might bring my little brother and I closer and it didn't, nothing was the same after that.

Tanner brought something out of both my brother and I that neither of us could do for each other. People bring different sides out of us. This is not a bad thing, at all. We are all different, made up with millions of personalities.

"Missing someone means, that person makes you feel so good, and so loved, when you miss them you miss that feeling they give you because you feel so full"...a friend wrote this on a paper and is stuck in my bible.

When we are around our closest people the our hearts, the ones that understand us more than we understand ourselves, those are the ones we miss the most...usually. 

I think this is so beyond true. This is also so very true when we start to miss that feeling of fullness, joy, peace, satisfaction, freedom. We feel like something is missing, the Lord waits.

"The Lord isn't really being slow about his promise, as some people think. No, he is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent." -2 Peter 3:9

The star breathing God of the universe is so satisfying that we are contently feeling like we are missing someone, because we miss that feeling that he gives us. That warm heart, pure smile, and feeling of standing on top of the world, we are contently missing it.

"How precious are Your thoughts to me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand" - Psalms139:17

He misses us to, He wants more of us just as much as We want Him. The difference...is we need Him, He doesn't need us, but He still wants us. He gets that satisfaction of holding his child in his arms.

****

When we don't have the Lord in this holey heart we try and cover these holes up with Earthly things, but it will never be big enough to fill and never be small enough to fit. The Lord is the only one that can fill these holes, drinking, people, sex, drugs, addictions, control will NEVER fill the holes.

 
Stop trying to fill these holes and let God just heal you. Miss him, long for him, need him, because He misses you, longs for you and wants you.