Stuff Christians Like

Serious Wednesdays

From the journal.

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Below is what I wrote in my journal a few years ago after reading Matthew 11:
28-30:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you
 rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and 
humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke 
is easy and my burden is light.”

I am not asking you to
 complete yourself and then come to me.
I am asking you to come to me.
 Broken and burdened, infested with the most hideous lies about me and 
my nature. Covered in perpetual sin that you just can’t seem to shake.
 Because I don’t see that.
I see Christ. I see the blood of my son all
 over you.
I know you think you need to work through your doubt
 before you come to me. But that’s not true. I can’t wait that long for 
you to come. And how ridiculous is that lie? That you have to figure me 
out, know me and trust in me without fail before you can come to me and
 get to know me. I do have gifts for you. Big crazy gifts, but the
 biggest of all is my presence.
That’s what I am inviting you 
in to. My presence. That’s a gift I am inviting you into. My presence.
 That’s a gift I am going to give you every second for every hour of
 every day for the rest of eternity. Come to me. Come be in my presence.
It’s so crazy to think you have to perfectly accept that gift before
 you can stand in that gift. I’m just saying, “Come stand in it. Bask in
 it.”
Come stand in it filthy and let me cleanse you.
Come stand in it broken and let me heal you.
Come stand in it drunk on doubt and fear and let me renew a spirit of confidence and trust in you.
Just come stand in it.
Come stand in it covered with lies and misconceptions about who I am and who you are and let me reveal the truth.
Come stand in it worried and stressed and trembling and let me cover you with a peace that transcends all understanding.
Come, just come.
Come 
stand in it with a past you can’t fix and a future you can’t look at 
without grimacing and I will comfort you in this very moment.

 

Quit asking fear for permission.

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Lately, I’ve had a lot of fun finding images that folks have created with ideas I’ve shared online. It feels like a fun collaboration whenever that happens.

I found one I really loved, and it reminded me of something I often need to be reminded of.

We tend to spend too much time conversing with fear.

We give it too many votes at the table of life, too much power in our decisions, too many words in our decisions.

But as I wrote before and, as Libby visually interpreted, we need to quit asking fear for permission.

 

 

Why I don’t believe in grace.

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The other day, Ray Lewis, played his last game in Baltimore’s stadium. After 17 wildly successful years, he’s retiring.

At the end of the game, he took off his jersey to reveal a shirt that said, “Psalms 91.”

I smiled at that. But then deep in my heart, I thought, “Yeah, but that guy was part of a double homicide. Whatever.”

And there it is.

I don’t believe in grace.

Or, I believe in it for me, and people who have sinned like me. But there’s a whole lot of people I don’t think deserve grace.

The problem is that, when we talk about grace, we often don’t use one of the most important words to describe it.

We say, “Grace is powerful and free and beautiful and amazing.” But we leave out one of the key descriptors of grace.

The truth is, grace is offensive.

Grace offends in its’ generosity.

Grace offends in its’ availability.

Grace offends in its’ depth.

Grace offends in its’ unwillingness to be controlled or owned or manipulated.

Grace is offensive, and when I see people who I think don’t deserve it, I am reminded of ultimately how desperately I still need it.

 

Fame is a drug and it's never enough.

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Turns out that if you chase “enough” outside of God, you never catch it.

Enough followers on Twitter, enough blog readers, enough books sold, enough money made, enough friends…the specifics of the chase don’t really matter.

Enough is elusive. Just when you think you’ve caught it, it moves again.

In this 3-minute video, I talk about how easy it is to wreck your life chasing enough and how that happened to me in the pursuit of fame. (Video was shot at the Catalyst Conference.)


Question:
Have you ever chased some form of “enough?”

Why are Christians such jerks?

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Recently a friend of mine started living for the Lord.

After a year of sharing his faith vocally, we had coffee and he told me something he found surprising.

He said that in chess, the pawn pieces are used to advance the more important pieces. They go forward and sacrifice themselves to create opportunities for the Queen, King and Bishop. He thought of himself as a pawn, trying to actively serve the needs of others and serve the kingdom, clear that life isn’t about him.

He said the biggest surprise though was that the more he served and lived a life for Christ, the more he felt attacked. But not by other people, by other Christians. He was confused because he’s never seen a King attack its own pawn in a game of chess. He’d never seen a Bishop take out its own pawn, but the more time he spent in church, the more he got attacked by the people who were supposed to be his fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.

I started to think about that because it’s an issue I keep seeing come up.

A pastor once said, “Nobody is as mean as Christians who are being mean for Jesus.”

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The S word that ruins most of us.

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For the last 7 years, I’ve been unlearning God.

He is not who I thought he was.

He is not who I was told he is.

He is not the greedy miser of joy I suspected all these years. He is not the boring happiness thief I cobbled together all these years. He is something different. Something wild. Something uncontrollable.

And one of the biggest surprises has been discovering how broken my understanding of the word “surrender” is.

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Let's murder this.

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A few weeks ago, someone on Twitter criticized me for saying a joke similar to one I said a year before. And they were right. Someone had done something in the news, and every time I see this particular news story, I tend to think the same thing. So, I tweeted about it because that was on my mind.

And so he called me out for it. Which is a bummer, because essentially what he was saying is “You’re not allowed to have the same thought more than once in a given year. I’ve read all 13,000 of your tweets, and I expect each one to meet my personal level of excellence. If I ever see two thoughts that are similar, I will let you and everyone who follows me on Twitter know about my disappointment in your creative output.”

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