Reflection: Not what I hoped for

So here's the short version of what I know about reflection after the last week or so.

I'm not very good at it.

The longer version is I'd like to be all high and mighty and pretend that this realization is a good thing.  You know, "Knowing is half the battle" and all.  But honestly it's just a bit disappointing.  I'm tired, I don't like my job, and I let being busy get in the way of getting a Godly perspective, more or less keeping one. I know that these are just excuses, and yet I can't seem to gather enough focus to get anywhere.  When I sit down to just remember, my mind bounces ideas around inside my A.D.D. skull like a hummingbird bounces from one flower to the next.

I honestly wish I could say I made grand leaps of comprehension about how my life has gone in the last few years and where I want it to go in the next few, but I haven't.  I know I wish I was in ministry somewhere able to direct my energy towards helping people instead of constantly focusing on how to produce more product.  I know that Life has not gone as I hoped it would in the last 4 years.  And I know that somewhere a long the way I have either lost or severely injured my desire to put others before myself.  In addition to being tired, I'm more skeptical now than ever.  I'm sarcastic, bitter, grumpy, and lack the confidence I once had that anything was possible.

To be flat out honest: I'm looking inside myself and finding that I'm an ugly guy on the inside and the task of reflection seems overwhelming as a whole.  Yet I am too dissatisfied with where I am to stay there.

So... I'm going to break it down into smaller more manageable parts and press deeper.  I am so disgusted by who I am sometimes that I nearly weep.  Yeah I'll admit it.  Call me a pansy, or a sissy.  I don't care anymore.  I know I must be brutally honest with myself in this process. I'm seeking a more real prayer life. I'm opening myself up to what I have messed up, and inviting God to look at those mistakes and me give me correction.

Pray for me to learn from his wisdom.

-Dave

Selah

It's been a long couple of weeks.  I worked a lot (12 hours a day for nine of the last eleven days) so blogging had to be postponed. It was too many hours to be honest.  It wears you out and takes away your ability to look at your life as a whole.  Don't get me wrong, there are times when you just need to work long hours on something for a while and to do so is the best thing you can do.  For example: the relief work in Japan after the earthquake is not a task that allows one to simply stop the effort and go home because it's that time of day.  However, these times must be balanced with times of reflection and intentional focus.

In Psalms the term "Selah" was often used to designate something worth thinking about.  No one actually knows what "Selah" means exactly. The general consensus is that it is either a musical term, used to mark a pause, or that it was meant to imply a break which was meant to be used to think about the weight of what was just said.  Either way the implication to me becomes clear that it's good to stop and reflect from time to time, especially before or after a period of hard work.

I feel like I need to take time to pray and reflect .  So that's what I'm going to be doing for the next several posts.  I'll be looking at the journey that God has been working on in my heart for the last several years and how I ended up where I am now.  Some of it will be stuff I have already figured out about myself, but hopefully some of it will be things I have grown in and I will be able to learn about myself and my beliefs.


Psalm 19:14
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.

Measuring part 2

My last post on measuring community was about practical and concrete evidence. Recently I had an opportunity to have a conversation with Bob Laurent, teaching pastor at Granger Community Church about how you measure true community. This brief talk with Bob led me to a fact that may seem easy to measure, but in actuality is not.  Here it is:

"What God touches grows."
  If we are in a truly God centered community, where His vision and purpose are central, then that community will grow in numbers, in maturity, and  in how it impacts the community around it.  It's not about numbers alone.  Strictly looking at numbers can be very mis-representative of the health of a community because there can be growth without God's touch.  What you cannot have is God's touch without growth.  Numbers are easy to count, so many churches will stop there: attendance, hands raised in commitment, size of the budget.  But how do you count maturity and community impact? How do you measure those? That was the question I had for Bob.

 Here is his answer: Sacrifice. Being willing to be vulnerable is one of the greatest sacrifices you can make.  To be willing to take off the mask you wear, and show who you really are is a huge sacrifice because it puts your very self on the table for examination.  It's personally risky because every one of us knows that it's like dying if that openness is cut down, judged, and dismissed as lacking.  And we all know we aren't perfect, so we know what we are revealing when we are vulnerable.  We know we are revealing something that is not good enough, and never will be good enough.  There's something broken in everything, including ourselves. We are broken, and admitting it to someone is risky.

 Here's what I would add to this: Christ calls us to go one step further into that sacrifice, to not only be real with each other, but to also openly confess to each other where we fall short.  And when someone confesses to you, your job is to forgive as God's representative.  There's a lot of meaning in offering this forgiveness.  For starters, we are being given the responsibility and authority of heaven with this task of forgiveness.  Jesus said when he gave his disciples the Holy Spirit in John 20:23 "If you forgive anyone's sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven."  And after he taught the Lord's prayer in Matthew 6 he immediately followed it with the words "If you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins."  So not only do we have the job of giving forgiveness, but we have a personal stake in doing so.  If we withhold forgiveness, God will withhold forgiveness from us.

So, if we are trying to measure a community by how well is sacrifices, here's how we do it:  look at how well that community offers forgiveness.  How gracious are we, when we are cut off while driving?  How forgiving are we when someone hurts us?  How patient are we?

Matthew 6:12  "and forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us."