"And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity." – Colossians 3:14
“If you show up, there is no gaurantee that anything will happen. If you don’t show up, then there is a gaurantee that nothing will happpen.”
I heard the above sitting in church on a Sunday several years ago. You know something is important when your remember it vividly years later, and you didn’t even take notes. It was an application point given about taking part in community and as some people say, “throwing in.”
We all like to think that we are our own person. However, we’re not. Our lives are influenced. We are influenced by our family, friends, colleagues, mentors, and even our enemies in some cases.
Just like work the media, other people can influence in good or bad ways. I once had friend begin to realize that the friendships my friend has were not extremely beneficial. They were influencing bad attitude and bad behavior. This was hard, as this friend didn’t want to change their social climate.
Friendships are tricky. Most of is probably have friends from our past that we can say didn’t have the best influence on us. However, in many cases it’s a mixed bag. Friends encourage us, push us, and love us. When it comes do the bad things our friends may do, it’s easier to overlook when they make us laugh or feel special.
Grace is required in any lasting friendship. However, friendship cannot be defined by foolishness. It’s great to be goofy sometimes, but it’s not great to be stupid anytime. That may come across harsh, but if friends are encouraging you to do things that cause lasting harm to yourself or others, they are not your friends.
When it comes to the people that influence us, it is important to have someone who can speak truth to you. It is important to have a person or persons who can challenge you, ask you hard questions, and push you to grow. These are mentoring relationships. I encourage everyone to have at least one of these. This is the good of influence.
When it comes to becoming who God created us to be, it’s important to have a group of people who can see us clearly. It’s important to find people we can trust so we can confidently share who we are.
When you find this, you will have friends that will know the good and the bad. When you can’t see the goodness on your life, they will see it and speak it.
These are the friends to pursue.
In the road to discovering and living out our gifting, we must tackle our fear. Fear keeps us from doing too many things in life. It keeps many of us from doing what we want to do and what we are called to do. I’m not going to bore you with statistics, because I have found they don’t really provide me much inspiration. A friend of mine described statistics as an average. At best they are a baseline to provide perspective. At worst, they are just numbers designed to scare people.
Instead, think about how many people you know who have graduated college with a degree that they don’t use in their job. What about you? Are you doing what you went to school for? Why did you go to school? Did you go to school simply to learn things that would provide stability? I was a creative writing major, so you know I’m not banking on my degree to provide any kind of stability, and I don’t really use it from 8-5 on Monday through Friday.
Over time, I’ve found this this to be true regarding why I haven’t pursued the things in life worth pursuing: Safety provides comfortability. Living requires transparency. That is scary.
This is true both professionally and with relationships. If you want to be married someday, you have to date. If you are a guy, that means stepping up to the plate and asking a girl out. This also means taking a chance on someone who may not be 100% put together. I’m not saying to sacrifice the things that are important, but create a good list of “must-haves”. Both of these things require some amount of inventory and a lot of transparency. If we have a shallow list, then we have to ask ourselves why. If we are pursuing the wrong people and wrong things, we have to ask ourselves why.
It is scary to take an honest look at ourselves. With gifting, we may want to be gifted in one area, but God has created us with a completely different gifting. Through our own past circumstances, we may also feel like we aren’t gifted at all. This is an outright lie, especially if you have made a decision to follow Jesus. Lets look at a couple of reasons why:
“4 I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus. 5 For in him you have been enriched in every way—with all kinds of speech and with all knowledge— 6 God thus confirming our testimony about Christ among you. 7 Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed.” – 1 Corinthians 1:4-7
If we choose to follow God, we make ourselves available to be used for His purposes. God does not waste anything. When you choose to follow Christ, you open yourself up to being, “enriched in every way–with all kinds of speech and with all knowledge.” This is not for our own gain, though, but it is for the specific purpose God has created us for as Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians:
“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” – Ephesians 2:10
God has prepared work for us in advance to do. The work is there. He made us for a purpose, and if we choose to follow Him then we may fulfill that purpose.
So then what do we do with fear? Again, we can look at Paul’s letters and read, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” If we work within our gifting, God will make good use of it. The God who made the heavens and the earth created us this way.
With God on our side, lets destroy fear and dive deep into what His purpose for you me is.
“Don’t settle.”
These two words are super popular in our culture. It can be really good advice, but it is important to ask ourselves what those two words really mean. What is settling?
It is a trap to think that settling has to do with self fulfillment. No job or relationship is absolutely perfect. We live in a broken world with broken people, so not settling can’t mean waiting for a perfect job or a perfect person.
To be able to define what constitutes settling, one has to do some self reflection. What is non negotiable? Is it right for that thing to be noon negotiable. Mat Kearney sings, “Still looking for the right things to call pretty,” in his song “What’s a Boy to Do”. He doesn’t sing, “Still looking for the things that are pretty, ” but sings that he is looking for the right things to call pretty. Our hearts and minds can be incredibly self deceptive and easily influenced by the culture around us.
Don’t settle, but don’t settle for the right reasons. If a job opportunity or person doesn’t cross off all the desirability check marks, then look at the check marks that aren’t met. Are they truly deal breakers? If so, then don’t settle. However, if you find yourself like many others, then you are like Mat Kearney. Continue to do the work to refine your definition of pretty.
I used to call Valentine’s Day single’s awareness day. I used to be with the bitter crowd decrying that Valentine’s Day was a made up holiday so that Hallmark, chocolate, and flower companies could make a buck. What has changed? I’m still single, so why am I not dreading Thursday?
There’s been a paradigm shift. I can be spend my life grumbling, or I can spend my life blessing and loving. I have decided to bless and love. Grumbling doesn’t accomplish anything besides maybe making me look like a dope.
Maybe you just got through a bad break up. Maybe you are going through a break up right now. Maybe your marriage or relationship has just hit a rocky period, and Valentine’s Day just seems like another thing to throw a hitch in the road. Don’t like the day get you down on yourself or your situation. Just ask one question, which should be the same question we should ask ourselves everyday: How I can I love and serve the people in my life?
For a long time, I have driven on highway K-96 and passed cyclists on the path next to the highway. Every time I passed, I thought to myself, “I wonder where that path starts, because I would kind of like to go down it.” Today, the weather was absolutely beautiful outside. My allergies have let up enough this weekend that I felt I could brave the outdoors, as well. So I got online and looked up “Wichita bike paths” in Google and found out that the trail starts not far from where I live.
The path is about 8 miles, so its a nice ride. However, it is important to keep in mind that since the path runs along a good stretch of highway, there are a decent number of hills due to exit ramps. These hills provide a nice little break when you’re going down them. So, heading out eastward, the ride is pretty nice and leisurely. But then, its time to go home.
Hills are not fun to bike up. After awhile, the quads start to burn. Going to a lower gear is a catch 22, too, because on one hand your legs aren’t working as much but on the other hand, it feels like you are actually working harder to go a shorter distance because your legs are still pumping but the bike is moving much slower. Then, the wind is another added factor.
Life can be kind of the same way. Some choices look like great choices. The potential of these choices seem great, however once we reach the bottom of the hill then we have to turn back around and go back up to get home. All bad choices end up this way. Going down the hill may seem fun and may even produce some worthwhile memories, but when we reach the bottom it comes to that awful realization that we’re at a dead end and have to turn around and trudge back home.
I find this metaphor works better with things that just don’t pan out like we want, though. A guy is friends with a girl and feelings start to develop. Guys should count the cost before moving to pursue anything more. What if she says no? What will the friendship look like after that? No doubt it will be awkward, and either way the guy will have an uphill battle as he gears himself up to go to bat again, but also as he tries to discern how to lead in a friendship where things just got weird.
That’s the thing about relationships, they are messy. They are never nice, neat, and tidy. We can try image management to make them look that way, but under the surface we’re peddling in 3rd gear and making slow headway. However, in the end, its worth it.
Why is it worth it? I’ll post on that later…
musingsonlife 