04.09.09
Posted in community, relationship at 9:32 am by Administrator
I recently checked my yahoo e-mail and as I went onto the main site, there was a piece that talks about how kids curb marital satisfaction. I thought to myself, has our society gotten so selfish that it despises it’s own young? The truth is that it has. That being true, this article floored me with its underlying premise. Our society places more emphasis on “being happy” than doing the right thing and being responsible. We seek to be immediately gratified with our marital relationship than our being proud of raising a new generation. All we have to do is look at our culture of immediate gratification and divorce culture to see the massive scar of selfishness and self-centeredness that runs through our society.
I wish I could say that I was above this but I can’t. I look at my own life and how I get stressed out by my own kids and how they do affect my marriage. We place undo focus on our kids that make them seem like a threat to our marriages. I realize that when I do this it is like looking through a distorted lens. It’s a lens that focuses on what I want and now what Jesus really calls us to do.
“The greatest among you will be your servant. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” Matthew 23:11-12
It’s something we all should aspire to…..
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02.25.09
Posted in God Centered, community, love at 12:45 am by Administrator
Who are the people you feel closest to? What makes these people unique in your life? In many ways, we are shaped by those people that are around us both for our betterment and our detriment.
Coming through the ordeals I have had to face over the past weeks, I find that often the most intense level of community comes through a sharing of intense experiences. I have formed significant friendships with several of the people I recently was in the hospital with. Many of these people, I share very little common cultural or social bonds with as we are completely different in many ways. We aren’t the same ethnicity, socio-economic status, lifestyle, religious background and hang out in the same social circles. Yet, there is an intense bond I have with these people because of our intense shared experience of our hospital stays. It makes me understand it when they say the most intense friendships or relationships are between those who have fought in war together. They have the same intense experiences that forced them together and forced them to interact with each other.
Interacting with these people has been so refreshing to me. I find myself seeing things about myself that I don’t think I would have ever been able to discover if I wasn’t seen through eyes that looked from quite a different perspective. Before coming to a relationship with Jesus, I probably would have ignored these people if I came across them on the street. But now I have a love for these people that I can’t describe and I gain so much from my interaction with them. When I first got to the hospital I viewed myself as different, yet when we were forced together through an intense experience, I realized that these were people too despite whatever condition got them there. They were deserving of love, patience and acceptance just as much as I was. So for me, I have to thank God for the junk I had to go through because through it I was able to meet these people who have opened my eyes even more to what God’s kingdom here on earth really should be.
What prompted me to write this was my reading of Jonathan Brink’s blog and his work at acheiving authentic Godly community at Thrive Ministries . To read more on his view of what authentic Godly community is, read a recent post he wrote called Elusive Authentic Community
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02.19.09
Posted in God in general, community, love, relationship at 12:23 am by Administrator
It’s funny how we try to control things. We see something that we don’t like or that offends us or that hurts us in some way and we try to change it. This is something that I have discovered about myself over the past couple of weeks. It’s ironic that I have named my website Left of Self Center because in many ways I have been acting in a very self centered way. In many ways, we try to play God with the situations in our lives. We try to take control over things because we want to control them or manipulate them in some way. Often we claim it is because we have a “right”, or we have been hurt or offended.
It’s as if when others don’t meet our expectations, we try to make them fit the mold. A friend showed me a passage from the Alcoholic’s Anonymous handbook that really illustrates the point of giving up trying to control things.
“I have to discard my “rights,” as well as my expectations, by asking myself, How important is it, really? How important is it compared to my serenity, my emotional sobriety?….
Acceptance is the key to my relationship with God today. I never just sit and do nothing while waiting for Him to tell me what to do. Rather, I do whatever is in front of me to be done, and I leave the results up to Him; however it turns out, that’s God’s will for me. Alcoholic’s Anonymous Handbook p 420
So how often are we emotional “drunk” because we are so consumed pushing our “rights” and our expectations upon other people in a self centered way? It is one thing to stand up for oneself or protect oneself, it is another to try to control or manipulate another to one’s own way of thinking. So given our weakness to this, I have included the Serenity Prayer here. If you have issues with this like I do, please pray along.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him Forever in the next.
Amen.
–Reinhold Niebuhr
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02.03.09
Posted in community, love, relationship at 12:11 am by Administrator
Have you ever gone round and round with someone trying to show them how you are right? Yet how many times have we struggled to assert our correctness only to find we have lost in the end. Romans 2 really addresses this by asking who are we to judge? Who are we to determine who is right and who is wrong? Does God convinces us to turn away from our sins by judgement alone? If we take the Scriptures into consideration on this, we find that judgment is usually at the end of a long road of God trying to get us to come back to relationship with Him. Paul states:
You may think you can condemn such people, but you are just as bad, and you have no excuse! When you say they are wicked and should be punished, you are condemning yourself, for you who judge others do these very same things. And we know that God, in his justice, will punish anyone who does such things. Since you judge others for doing these things, why do you think you can avoid God’s judgment when you do the same things? Don’t you see how wonderfully kind, tolerant, and patient God is with you? Does this mean nothing to you? Can’t you see that his kindness is intended to turn you from your sin? (Romans 2:1-4 NLT)
So if we are trying to reach someone how should we do it? I think we are given the answer above. We do so with kindness, love, tolerance and patience as God himself shows us. It’s kind of a radical thought that God intends to turn us away from our sins by using His kindness. After all, wasn’t Jesus an ultimate gift of kindness to a cruel world? How can we take that sentiment and apply it to our own lives, our own families, our own communities and the world around us?
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02.02.09
Posted in Communication, God in general, community, love, relationship at 10:13 am by Administrator
Recently I read a post by my friend Jonathan Brink called With Great Patience . I found myself profoundly touched by this piece as it really struck home with some situations that I have been dealing with. I would suggest that if you haven’t read Jonathan Brink’s blog before, that you should check it out.
My friend Jonathan runs a ministry call Thrive Ministries . It is focused on bringing people back into relationship with one another as God truly intends it. He refers to it by the term communitas. In a way, many of my recent posts have been focused on my own struggles to come into communitas with several people around me. His post reminds me of how we can get caught up in being worried about “defending” ourselves instead of reaching out in love. His comments about how we build fortresses and walls that we think will protect us but in truth really isolate us and keep us away from what we are truly searching for. Relationship.
There was one phrase he used that really struck me and I think this is where many of us fail in this pursuit of communitas or relationship with others.
When someone reveals their brokenness in a way that affects the rest of the community, the natural impulse is to correct and to rebuke, even in love. We get the first half of Paul’s words. They’re empowering and important. But do we also include the words, “With great patience.”
I realized today that when someone doesn’t get it, it requires us to love even more. And we don’t like that, do we? We want relationships to be easy and fun. But grace has no end. God isn’t sitting up there wondering if He should break trust with us. He’s not wondering, “When are these people going to get it already?” His love is this insane ability to stay in trust with us even in our brokenness, even when we don’t get it.
I was stunned as I read that when someone doesn’t get it, it requires us to love even more. I knew this to be true but I wondered how I personally got so off track. I know I don’t like that. I want to be right. I want to win. I want to be heard. Yet that isn’t the example that God gives us.
Isn’t that what Christianity is really about? Relationships… both with our God and with others fostered by our love and service to one another.
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