(This has been kind of a stressful week where regular routines got tossed aside and our family had to call some audibles. Part of that change meant not having much time or mental energy to devote to a blog post. My teenaged daughter was sweet, saw that I was stressed about not having the time to write something, and offered to let me use something she wrote. So without further ado, here’s the worldwide debut of my daughter’s writing skills. Thanks kiddo!)
Witnessing to people is hard. You know that’s what God tells you to do, and you can’t imagine people you know and love going to Hell, but sharing the gospel can be very difficult.
Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5:2 that “for you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” Thieves come unexpected and unannounced. As Christ said in Mark 13:32, “But concerning the day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in Heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
But what if you did know? What if you knew God was coming back, say, tomorrow at 3 pm? What are some things you would do before His arrival? I know one of my top priorities would be to tell my non-Christian friends. I would not care what they thought of me because I would know, Christ’s coming back! I would just want to save them from God’s wrath before it’s too late.
Well, we don’t know when Christ is coming back. But what we do know is that sometime, anytime, Jesus IS coming back. It could be tonight, five years from now, or maybe even tomorrow at 3 pm. The possibilities are endless!
My point is, God’s coming back. Those things you would do if Christ was coming tomorrow? Do them as soon as possible, for all we know, the Lord may be coming back tonight. Don’t be caught off guard.
What are some things you want to have done before Christ returns? How can you make them happen as soon as possible?
Lord, help me to live my life as if you were coming back anytime, because no one knows the day or the hour. Amen.
If you follow my posts, you probably think to yourself every once in awhile “this guy talks a good game, but what does life look like for him when things get tough?” It’s time for a little bit of transparency. I’m human and I have failings, and it’s often difficult to worship God by pursuing His calling. The whole intent behind writing this blog is to push readers to use more of the potential God’s empowered them with. Here’s an update on what that looks like for me.
I’ve shared in the past that I feel led to write some Christian fiction books. The original plan was seven books that are each 40,000 to 50,000 words. From there it expanded so that a few of those seven stories had multiple volumes, leading to a goal of 10 books that are an average of 50,000 each. That’s a total of half a million words.
As I’ve shared before, this is an odd calling for me. I have a blog, but I don’t come from a writing background. I think I wrote a 10,000-word paper for a college class one time. My academic studies have mostly been science-focused, so venturing into creative writing (especially a creative writing endeavor of this magnitude) is wading into deep waters for me.
Truth be told, I’m pumped about this opportunity. My soul feels settled now that I feel like I know the purpose and manner by which I should honor my Savior. There are a lot of difficulties associated with a project like this, though. I had seven stories floating around in my head, and my imagination kept splitting its focus and bouncing between them. Where should I start? I’d sputter through some writing, but there were so many possible storylines that I couldn’t keep track of them all. Ideas kept coming and coming, and it was all I could do to write down all the ideas.
Taking a linear approach, I started with book number one, dabbled in book number two when I needed to think about something different, and put down some notes for books five and six as I went. I made some decent headway on books one and two, but the ideas kept rolling in for book five (which grew to three volumes), so I got more and more excited about that one. In the interest of focusing my efforts, I eventually stopped working on most of the other stuff and zeroed in on the book five trilogy.
The hardest part for me isn’t the enormous nature of the project. I’ve written down a lot of words. To date, I have over 135,000 words in draft for the different stories. For me the hardest part is how slow the progress is. I’ve got a full-time job, plus a family and all their extracurricular activities. I usually sleep less than six hours a night, I get home about 10 hours after I leave for work. I exercise, I write a blog, I do yardwork, and I pay credit card bills. I need to fill out another form for something? Now it’s time to do taxes. Since starting the series, I’ve twice been notified that my job would be ending and I need to look for a new one. There’s not much time (or sometimes, mental energy) to devote to writing. In fact, over the past year, the bulk of the writing I’ve done is when I take one of my kids to youth group one night out of the week. I find a quiet place in the church to write for a couple of hours while I wait for the event to be over. That usually results in 1,000 to 1,300 words a week. That’s not real fast when you consider the end goal (which, by the way, has been revised upwards to over 650,000 words after finding out just how much text it takes to tell the story you want to tell).
The frustration for me is finally having a clear vision of what God wants me to put effort into, but not being able to execute as quickly as I’d like. It’s aggravating to look at a lot of the junk that comes out of Hollywood and think “I have stories in my head that a Christian movie production company could make and Christian families would probably love, but I can’t write them down and revise them fast enough.”
And yet, despite that aggravation, it’s nice to trust that I’m working on God’s schedule. Ever meet someone that’s really eager to do something, or take on the world all at once? I guess God’s got to slow me down to meet His timing. I don’t know if that’s what He’s doing, but I have to trust that as long as I’m putting earnest effort into it, I’m going to make the progress He wants me to make.
I would love to be able to make a living off writing, but it looks like it’ll be a long time before that comes to pass. In fact, it might not ever be the case. I just know that I have to keep pressing on. Not only is this the task God laid before me, but I’ve now written too much for this to be something I give up on (I can’t just toss 135,000 words in the trash and not look back).
I share this with you not because I’m looking for pity. I’m letting you in on it because I want to be up front and honest with you. The jobs God gives you will not be easy. They’re going to cost you. Sometimes it’s a battle to even keep going. You’ll very likely ask yourself “should I give up?” I urge you not to. There’s no way for any of us to know what our obedience can set in motion, and we have a tendency to think too small about the possibilities. For example, there’s no guarantee that this is how things will play out, but what if there’s a major Christian revival that’s still to come, yet it won’t happen until one or more of the books I’m working on gets out there to shift people’s perspective? That view ought to keep me going. If God handed me a project to work on, I have to assume it’s an important one, right? It’s my responsibility to keep chipping away at it, no matter how long it takes. One of my favorite TobyMac song lyrics is “if I can’t walk, then I’m crawlin’.” If crawlin’ is the best I can do right now, then that’s what I’m going to do, but I’ll be looking forward to a time when I can stand up and walk or break out into a run.
I want this post to encourage you. Don’t quit. The Lord knows exactly what each of us is capable of, but we, His followers, are the weak link in this chain. When you receive a seemingly impossible assignment from Him, you’ve got to trust that not only is it achievable, you’re also going to have what you need at the time you need it. Don’t let a lack of resolve be the reason you don’t get across the finish line. If the Lord led you to do something, it’s got to be important either for other Christians or for unsaved souls. Please don’t let us down.
Years ago my two oldest kids were on a tee-ball team together. For those that aren’t familiar, tee-ball is the version of baseball little kids play before they have the skills to play actual baseball. Instead of pitching the ball to a kid, the ball sits on something that looks like a big golf tee, so the kids get to swing at a ball that isn’t moving. In the unlikely event that the fielding team is competent enough to get three outs in an inning, the batting team keeps batting until everyone on the team has had a chance to hit. Everybody gets to field the ball, and everybody gets to run the bases.
I’ll be the first to admit that tee ball is a good way to teach young kids the mechanics and basics of baseball. I’ll also tell you that it’s extremely painful to watch. You normally have nine or 10 kids out in the field, and when a batter connects with the ball, at least half of them start running toward the ball, no matter what position they’re playing. You also have kids standing around looking up at the clouds, singing songs to themselves, picking their nose, or sitting down in the outfield playing with dandelions. Usually those kids are the ones the ball gets hit to.
I remember the coach for my kids’ team also had a kid on the team. He was funny to watch. He was fine for a while during each game, but there would come a time when he would just be done with it all. He’d take off his sunglasses, hold them straight out in front of him, and just drop them on the ground and walk away, as though it was a mic drop.
Well as enjoyable as the game was to watch, we also had a very young third child, and she would only stay content in the stroller for so long. Since my wife is a better fan and cheerleader than I am, she stayed and cheered for the team while I picked up our youngest when she got too antsy, and I’d take her for a walk around the area.
On one occasion I took her out to a nearby area that had a large storm drain. I held her little hands and helped her walk around on the grass, but then another kid came over and stood on top of the storm drain, looking down into it. He seemed very interested in it, kneeling down and peering as far into the tunnel as he could see. He knelt there for a moment, and a smile crossed my face when I heard him shout down into the drain “Ninja Turtles, are you down there?”
Kids are fun, man. They’ve got big imaginations, they haven’t yet been beaten down by life, and in their minds, anything is possible. The summer months can be a little challenging if you’ve got kids with lots of energy and no school to attend, but hang in there. Love on ‘em anyway, because they don’t stay little for long. Foster that imagination of theirs, and it’ll serve them well as they get older.
And if you’ve got somebody in tee-ball right now, it won’t always be so painful to watch.
Before all the modern tools used in making today’s maps, cartographers had to do things the old-fashioned way, with surveying tools. As you might imagine, using the crude instruments of yesteryear could be tedious, and if surveying teams had the opportunity to take steps that would save them some work on subsequent projects, they’d be eager to hear about it.
Enter the idea of the benchmark. On a topographic map, a benchmark is a spot whose exact elevation is known. A benchmark is a small disc that’s permanently installed at such a site, and it’s inscribed with numbers that display the elevation of the spot where the disc lays. Surveying teams can show up and get right to work using the benchmark as a hard and fast fact; it’s something they know is true and can be relied upon to build accurate information off of.
Today’s society could use some reminders about one of the Lord’s benchmarks.
In many places the Bible condemns sexual immorality. Sexual immorality is an umbrella term under which several types of specific categories fall. Often times it seems like Christians are quick to condemn homosexuality as sin (which it is, according to several verses in the Bible, like Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:26-28, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10), but in focusing on just one type of sexual immorality, other types are ignored or somehow seen as “less bad.” In all cases we’re to love the sinner but hate the sin, but we also need to remember that all sin is detestable to the Lord and is something that should not be accepted, especially among Christians. Christians engaging in sin should be confronted (in love), and not be “given a pass” for something that eats away at their witness.
God intended marriage to be between one man and one woman. That’s the only acceptable combination in His eyes. (Don’t get mad at me, take it up with the Man upstairs.) Sexual activity you engage in with someone that is not your spouse is sin. The natural question is “How do you define ‘sexual activity?’” I’d say that if you have a behavior in mind that you’re already trying to rationalize, it’s probably something you shouldn’t be doing. Jesus described it this way in Matthew 5:28 – “but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Just be honest with yourself. Call sin what it is. One-night stands, quick flings, cohabitation, etc. If you’re doing something you know is wrong, come clean to God with it. (Trust me, He already knows; the coming clean part is mostly for your benefit.)
On the flip side, it’s important to recognize that we are all sinners, and all of us struggle with sin in some way. The attraction of a sexual sin like pornography that has a stranglehold on one Christian may have no power at all over another. At the same time, those that have overcome such addictions are in a prime position to come alongside a brother or sister that’s currently losing in their struggle with the sin. I urge you: if you’re one of those two types, seek to connect with someone of the other type. The fear is often “nobody would even want to associate with me if they knew what I’m keeping secret.” I understand why you may think that, but Christianity is not a spectator sport; it is to be lived in the trenches and we’re supposed to help one another in our struggles.
Sexual sin is one of, if not the only, sin where the advice we get is to outright run from it. First Corinthians 6:18 says Flee sexual immorality. Every other sin that a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. That means actively taking steps to prevent certain situations and outright extracting yourself from others. If you use a computer to access sites you know you shouldn’t, don’t use the computer unless someone else is around. Put your phone down, turn off data, or shut it off unless you’re purposefully using it for appropriate things. If you have a coworker or someone else in your life that you enjoy being around a little more than you should, actively avoid spending any more time than you need to with them. It’s on you to recognize the problem and start trying to do something about it.
You may think the things I’m saying here conflict with the messages you get from our culture. I hope so. The Christian’s message is supposed to do exactly that. We’re supposed to stand out. The messages you’re hearing from the world are the moral equivalent of installing numerous false benchmarks all around real ones. Keep track of what’s true and trustworthy, and it will cut down on a lot of the confusion you’ll otherwise face. Remember…sin is something to be avoided, not tolerated.
