4 Horses

It is said that there are four kinds of horses; excellent ones, good ones, poor ones and bad ones. The excellent horses will run slow and fast, right and left, at the driver's will, before it sees the shadow of the whip; the second best will run as well as the first one does, just before the whip reaches its skin; the poor ones will run when it feels pain on its body; the bad ones will run after the pain penetrates the marrow of its bones. This is how most of us view ourselves and the world. When we hear this story, we want to be the best horse, the one who has the easiest time changing, improving and succeeding.

But what if the measurement of the horses is wrong? what if instead of running, they should be measured by which horse experiences the run the most? Because the "bad horse" actually has to feel the whip deep inside of him, he knows the sacrifices needed to run. The excellent horse never thinks it has to sacrifice. This is how I believe God sees us and measures us. It is not how easy it is for us to live the Christian life, but rather how much we sacrifice to do it.

Happy Birthday

Today, Christmas day, is my mom's 60th birthday. Being at my parents home the past few days has really got me thinking about what my mom has taught me and how our relationship has been redeemed in the past 5 years or so. It is inevitable that parents will wound us, and my mom has been no exception. But what is amazing about my mom is how she has been an instigator of change and reconcilation in the same areas that were such wounds to me. So I decided to make up a quick list of the most important things I learned from my mom in the past few years.

1. You are never to old to completely change your life for the better.

My mom will freely admit that this time of her life is the best time of her life. She is more alive and more of who she was made to be than ever before. Most of this process of change started in her 50's.

2. The more secure you are in who God made you to be, the easier it is to express grace and kindness.

Over the last year or so, my wife and I have been amazed at how kind and giving my mom is. I never noticed it before. She was always a nice person and willing to sacrifice for others, but now she has the confidence to be abundantly personal, and I have benefited from the intention of this. I have begun to see this in my own life, that I really am much nicer and more giving than I thought I was.

3. When you are with someone who is fully present, everyone benefits.

My mom has become a person of intention and candor. She is less afraid to share her opinions, and she is never slow to acknowledge goodness and growth in others. Her presence in a group of people, has opened up conversations and relationships in ways I didn't know mothers could.

Should we pray?

I just read something I wrote a long while back that really shook me up. I was going through an old notebook and found a section called crazy prayers, written May 7^th 2003. I wrote out a bunch of prayers I had that were very fantastic and large, and in any logical sense they weren’t things that would naturally happen in my life. They weren’t needs I had, but rather far-fetched desires. I remember thinking a lot about abundance at the time, and coming to the realization that God is not working against me but rather for me. God wants to bless me abundantly, and at least according to many verses in the bible, is waiting for me to ask. So I asked.

On my list I prayed that God would give Stacy and I a huge house that we could minister from, bringing people in and always having it be a place of healing and hope. I prayed that we would become people of great influence and that people would want to be apart of whatever we were doing. I prayed that we would have many great people around us, people desiring great things and making them happen. And maybe most implausible of all, I prayed that I would become focused and manage my time well. But all of this still sounds great to me, and seeing this list again made me hunger for the place I was then, really believing in the abundance of God and waiting expectantly for it. What did surprise me was that I prayed that I wouldn’t have to work fulltime by the next two years.

If I remember right, what I was thinking was that God would provide some surprising blessing where I could spend more time ministering to others. What I got was very different, and until looking at the list, I never realized the connection. Within a year and a half of praying for this specific request I started to get headaches every day. By January I finally told Stacy that I have had a headache non-stop for a month. A month later I went in to the doctor, hoping he would give me a better pain reliever than what I was used to. He was hesitant about that; sure it was my new glasses. But I persisted, and he ordered me an MRI. A month later when that came back I had a brain malformation, and the only possible cure would be surgery. I am still waiting for that surgery.

Soon after that I had to quit work because the pain was too much. Since then I have tried to find ways to alleviate the pain, but it is still very bad. I have learned to work around a lot of the pain, and am in graduate school with at least decent odds of being able to pull it off and graduate. But what do I do about this prayer? I prayed that God would pull me out of fulltime work within 2 years, and I haven’t worked fulltime since. This is why I have a hard time praying such huge prayers. I am afraid of the size of God. I am dealing with someone who has a very different sense of what I can handle than I do. If I open up to God, I have no guarantee that I will end up okay on the other end. So this is where I am now, a part of me scared out of my mind at the otherness, the unpredictability of the creator of the world that I have never seen or heard, and the other part of me saying what the hell.