Sermon on the Mount lived out

I had this friend at moody named Todd. His parents weren’t Christians, and when he was growing up he really got into martial arts. (He told me about whatever belts he had. I, who know nothing about such subjects, asked him if I should be impressed, and he humbly said, “Very”.). So anyway, he got caught up into Buddhism and after a while, also started to like Jesus, but he still considered himself Buddhist. Made for very interesting conservations, but that is now why I am writing this story.

One day he was late to whatever he was doing. I asked him why and he said he was mugged. He said he was walking alone, minding his own business when he got whacked on the head with a stick. He said he turned around and it was 3 or 4 or 5 (I can’t remember) teenagers, maybe 12 or 13 years old. He stood there as they took his wallet and phone. Remember, this is a guy who had multiple impressive karate belts. He just stood there with his arms over his head. The kids grabbed his things and were running away when one of the kids stopped, noticed that Todd wasn’t going to retaliate, walked back to him, looked him in the face and grabbed Todd’s belt and pulled it off. Todd was left with his hands in the air as the little kid ran off to join his triumphant friends. This is a man who is an expert at martial arts. It would have taken him no effort at all to defend himself.

I still think about this story all the time, even though I didn’t keep in contact with Todd after moody. It took this Buddhist to show me what God was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount about turning the other cheek. Turning the other cheek is not weak. It requires much more strength than retaliating. I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be for Todd to sit there and do nothing when a single young kid slowly pulled his belt off and walked away. This is what God asks of us, not as a suggestion, but as a command. God’s ways are contrary to any common sense and often don’t seem to work. He says we must give up our wisdom, rejoice when we are persecuted, be thankful when we are tested and that the last will be first. If we take what he says as literal, we will be mocked, taken advantage of and frustrated. But God says we must do it anyway.

Teen Tears

When I was in high school, I wasn’t a crier. I would see people crying and see through their tears how shallow it really was. They would cry to feel better, that is all. I remember when one of the girls in the youth group came to the group and talked about how she had sex before marriage and was now pregnant. Some of the girls came and cried by themselves, then it must have been too much, because they were soon laughing and having a good time. The girl was left there all alone while the other youth group girls were in a circle gigling. The weight of tears was too much for them.

But the girl who was talking wasn’t laughing with them. She was still in her pain, and they left her alone. I hated the idea of having an emotion getting in the way of caring for someone. I felt strongly and I felt with strength. I was moved greatly, but I longed to be moved towards the other person. I saw this people as weak, and their tears were not helping the person who needed it, it was separating them.

Now I cry all the time. I cry at church, I cry when I watch Oprah, I cry when I read Harry Potter. I don’t really cry for myself, but that is another issue. I cry so easily for emotional stories that my little brother warned my wife that “Finding Nemo” might be too much for me. My path to crying took many years and is connected with me being more connected with myself. But I don’t even want to loose sight of the reason for my crying.

I now I see that in high school I was longing to love in strength, not in my weakness. I believed that another person needed to feed off my strength. But now I know that I can’t sustain another person. When I cry I show my weakness. I reveal that I have also been hurt, damaged, destroyed. If I can name this hurt, and be not afraid of it, then live in it, then let another in, then they can join me and we can live together in our pain. That is usually a good start.

Good ol Maslow

Annie is hypoglycemic. She carries food around with her at all times, because when her blood sugar drops she falls apart. She gets really weak, can’t think straight and often has to fight an uphill battle just to get food in her mouth. She says that struggling with this has completely changed her views on issues of Christianity, sin and human nature. She says that unless people have their basic needs met; don’t even talk to them about Jesus, or their need to confront their dishonesty, or how they could get ahead when if they got an education. First, they need food.

Turns out she didn’t make this up. This concept is called “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs”. Only when the lower level of needs are met can someone move up the pyramid. I think this concept that really helped me see people and their situations differently, and removed some judgment and criticism in my life that I didn’t even know I had.

The untrained Mind

People

1. Tend to believe what they want to believe

2. Tend to project their own biases or experiences upon situations

3. Tend to generalize from a specific event

4. Tend to get personally involved in the analysis of and issue and tend to let their feelings overcome a sense of objectivity.

5. Are not good listeners. They hear selectively. They often hear only what they want to hear.

6. Are eager to rationalize

7. Are often unable to distinguish what is relevant from what is irrelevant

8. Are easily diverted from the specific issue at hand.

9. Tend to oversimplify

10. Often judge from appearances. They observe something; misinterpret what they observe, and make terrible errors in judgment.

11. Often simply don’t know what they are talking about, especially in matters of general discussion. They rarely think before speaking

12. Rarely act according to a set of consistent standards. They tend to do whatever they want to do and then find whatever evidence will support their actions or their beliefs.

13. Often do not say what they mean and often do not mean what they say.

“Most people want to feel issues are simple rather than complex, want to have their prejudices confirmed, want to feel that they ‘belong’ with the implications that others do not, and need to pinpoint an enemy to blame for their frustrations.” J.A.C. Brown Techniques of Persuasion.

“The Untrained mind will usually take the path of least resistance.” Robert J. Gula Nonsense

“The tendency to avoid challenge is so omnipresent in human beings that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature. But calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial or unchangeable behavior. It is also natural to defecate in our pants and never brush our teeth. Yet we teach ourselves to do the unnatural until the unnatural becomes itself second nature.” M. Scott Peck Road Less Traveled

Can I be Excellent? Part two

I am going to go directly into answering these questions from my last post

1. Do I think that this is true?

After thinking about this for a while, I do think it is true and it seemed to confirm a lot about what I already have learned. This gave me hope, because if I use this knowledge effectively and choose the right field I could actually achieve excellence. This idea that I could achieve excellence in anything during my life has usually been only in my fantasies and far off dreams. Only in one stretch in my life, the last years of college and the next two following, did I ever have confidence that I could be anything other than mediocre and undisciplined. But ever during that time I never felt I had a plan to get there. I just thought that I now had the ability to be disciplined and the confidence to take risks. But this concept could give me a plan to lead somewhere.

2. What field would I want to be great in?

What I am really interested in is people and change. I am interested in the church because I think that is the primary tool God has given us to interact with people. I am interested in leadership because I think everything rises and falls based off of the leadership of that thing. I am interested in counseling only because it helps people change. I am interested in racial reconciliation because it brings positive change.

But all of these things could be replaced as focuses in my life other than people and change. So primarily I want to focus on the things that will make me be excellent in the fields of people and bringing change.

3. What are the components that make up these fields?

This is everything I could come up with (with a special focus on counseling skills)

1. Listening

2. Body Language

3. Networking (tipping point connectors)

4. Knowledge of people

5. celebrating

6. Learn to ask good questions

7. Learn to be a true friend

8. permission

9. Presence-seeing someone as a person, not an object

10. Let go of control

11. co-creating

12. Confrontation

13. Know when to take risks

14. intuition

15. bringing the here and now

16. acceptance

4. Am I willing to pay the price for excellence?

I don’t know yet. This is a step in that direction, I hope.

Any thoughts?

Can I become excellent? part 1

I read this article in fortune magazine writing about true excellence in any field. The article said that there is a myth that the people who are truly excellent in anything got there by being born with amazing natural abilities. Albert Einstein was born an ability to understand relativity, Warren Buffet was born with an innate ability to analyze companies, Tiger Woods was born with a one-in-a-million talent. But the truth is that all people who reach excellence usually have to work at it for at least ten years before they reach their potential.

The other truth that was so striking to me was that there are specific fields that each individual have the ability to achieve. No matter how much I practice at basketball, I could never make the NBA. But there are many fields, based on the talents and temperament I was born with, that I could reach the level of excellence in if I focused myself for ten years.

But it is not enough to just have experience. You have to be intentional and disciplined about your experience. The article gave the example of golf. Any golfer might hit three hundred balls a day, but someone building towards true excellence is much more focused. He or she would hit 300 balls with a specific club and try to hit them all 150 yards at a specific target. Then he would study to see how many were within 10 yards and try to narrow down what made a difference. Then he would come back the next day and using what he learned from the day before, try to get more of his 300 balls within 10 yards. It is this careful, intentional work with feedback that leads to success.

So this leads me to a series of big questions

1. Do I believe this could be true for me?

2. What field do I want to train toward excellence?

3. What are the components of my field that I could practice?

4. Am I willing to pay the price to get there?

Tell me your thoughts, and I will soon publish my next thoughts

The Holy Spirit is the giver of life

Life in the spirit is

1. Everything that holds the integrity of life

2. Everything that integrates life into community

3. Everything that affirms life through love

4. Everything that reconciles broken relationships and liberates those who are oppressed

5. Everything that brings new beginnings

6. Everything that relates to God’s covenant with Mankind/everything that breaks Mankind’s covenant with death

7. Everything that makes Christ present

8. Everything that drives us to create life and be creative with life.

Experiences in Theology

Trinitarian hermeneutics of ‘holy scripture’

Hermeneutics of hope

Jurgen Multman

Positive Ten commandments

1. Love the only true God

2. Love God in Spirit

3. Praise the name of the Lord

4. Model the example of the Lord

5. Be a blessing to your parents

6. Have a passion for the lives of others

7. Enjoy the oneness of marriage

8. Be an example of honesty with your possessions to your neighbors

9. Live in the joy of honesty and healthiness.

10. Enjoy and realize the blessings that God has given you.

The importance of themes

I believe everyone sees two different types of passages in the bible. They have primary passages and then passages that they translate through the lens of their primary passages. The first they value as very important, the second they don't throw out (usually) but just give them less attention. Dean Ahrens (jackass from undergrad) reads the same bible as I do and comes up with different conclusions than I do. Where I see grace and love and freedom, he sees obedience and denial and respect. Charismatics also see the bible differently, as do people who believe in liberation theology, and people who believe in the openness of God. While there is some difference between what they think a specific passage says and what another group thinks it says, the primary difference in beliefs has to do with emphasis. A certain group thinks that God values some of his truths over other ones and those should be emphasized first.

Everyone does this because there is no other option. The bible is huge and there are so many things to talk about. There are only so many Sundays to preach, only so much one person can write on. People have to choose what they spend time on. If charismatics can preach year round on such a small percentage of the text that they focus on, there is no shortage of options to make the most important.

The other problem is that the bible is seemingly contradictory or at least very confusing. This also makes you choose. Should we encourage people to stay single (Corinthians) or get married (Genesis)? Should we focus on the God of the torah, that had so many rules that must be followed to please God, or the God of Paul that says there is nothing you can do to please God, he is already pleased. Should we focus on the prepositions of proverbs that show you how to achieve in life, or on Jesus who says you should not store up treasures on earth? Should you emphasize discipline more than grace? Parenting more than prophesy? Theology more than Christian life? There is an unending amount of choices, and we haven’t even gotten to dinosaurs.

This is why I think it is so important to focus on themes and emphasis’s of the bible. I think it is important to know if the bible talks more about money than spiritual warfare. I want to know if the bible emphasizes Grace more than discipline, not if the seminary my pastor emphasizes discipline more. Should we have messages on homosexuality when it is only mentioned in a few passages? What about the end times when most of our beliefs come from our readings of obscure passages at the end of Daniel that don’t make it to the children’s story?

I want to learn to think this way more. I want to care about what God cares for the most.