Must wake his soul unnumbered times a day,

And urge himself to life with holy greed;

Now ope his bosom to the Wind’s free play;

And now, with patience forceful, hard, lie still,

Submiss and ready to the making will,

Athirst and empty, for God’s breath to fill.”

~ George MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul

What stirs you?

Stillness is a gift, a necessity, a discipline we all need to embrace in order to be whole.

On the other hand, lethargy is strong as gravity, pulling, drawing, sucking, robbing—overtaking us all if we stand still too long.

So I ask again, what stirs you?

What infuses you with vision, energy, passion, focus, and godly desire?

Drink in the word, yes. Pray, always. Worship, listen, obey. Yes.

But we must find divine inspiration wherever it’s hidden.

I’m stirred by epic love stories like the film Last of the Mohicans.

I’m stirred by music that paints a picture on my soul and invites me to dance toward the upward call in Christ Jesus.

I’m stirred by heroism, by integrity, by sacrifice and triumph in the face of pain.

I’m stirred by people who are farther along the path than I am.

I choose to drown my cynicism and waffling in rich eddies of truth swirling around me.

I look for inspiration, I drink it in, I relish it, I feed off of it.

I awaken my soul, shaking my head like I’m driving the night shift and trying not to drift off. Maybe not a hundred times a day, but often.

Don’t wait for inspiration, go find it.

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God pushes me sometimes. It works because he’s so much bigger than I am. Bigger, and immovable. I don’t like it, but He’s God, so I bend. Usually before I break, but not always. I prefer nudging to pushing, but God can do what he wants.

Most times God pulls me, and for some reason I don’t mind being pulled. I guess it’s more of a tug when it comes down to it. Like today. I took a Stat day and had the house to myself. For about half the day, I sensed a freedom to just be, to flake, to relax and let my brain wiggle like jell0. The other half of the day I was being tugged—to pray, to clean something up, to pray again, to text a buddy about doing lunch.

The moment I give in to a tug, there’s a surge of joy to get me over the decision-hump. I love it.

These tugs are subtle, you understand. Little urges no bigger than quiet ripples on the pond of my heart. Tuning in to them releases such a sweetness in my soul, such a delight to be walking with God. But they’re so easy to ignore.

So very easy.

Can you relate to these nudges and tugs? Tell me about it…

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I’d love to hear your thoughts—how this video struck you, stuff you’ve learned about abiding in Christ, etc. Have a great day.

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I thought I’d unpack it for you.

First thing we need to know: anxiety and worry are two different things. Worry is something we do; anxiety is something we feel. They are husband and wife, so to speak, but each one has it’s own personality.

Anxiety, like the frantic fishy I felt a minute ago, seems to come out of nowhere—just raw emotion. But nothing comes out of nowhere. Being an emotion, it also seems irrational, but again, it’s not. It makes total sense, if what you believe about a particular thing happens to be true. It usually isn’t, which means anxiety is a byproduct of something else, a ripple caused by careless stones tossed into the pool of worry.

I know what you’re thinking. I sat with an experienced counsellor over lunch last year and asked him about chemical imbalances. My question to him was, “Do chemical imbalances create anxiety, or amplify it?” “They amplify it,” he replied. They make it more difficult to deal with negative emotion, but they don’t create that emotion per se.

My experience would bear that out. My take? Anxiety is created when our past and our future hook up and give birth to a false prophecy. I’ll show you what I mean.

Our brains work by association, collecting trillions of bits of information as we live our lives. Our minds then grab this raw data and work tirelessly to organize it on the fly—creating boxes, file systems, tags, keywords, you name it. Why? So we can access it later, when our minds think we need it.

When I was in Junior High, I was utterly humiliated half-way through the dance unit in Phys-Ed. So now, more than twenty-five years later, the thought of dancing pretty much gives me hives because when I face a dancing situation, my mind says, “Oh, you’ve done something like this before.” When it pulls up the Junior High dance file, all the emotions locked into that memory burst loose like a barrel of rogue monkeys, stampeding into my present moment shouting “Abort, abort! You’ll be humiliated just like last time!”

Of course, this all happens in a millisecond. All I feel when faced with dancing is humiliation, and the anxiety associated with that happening again. So I don’t dance (except with Shauna or my daughter or Jesus, but that’s different). We shouldn’t feel guilty for any of this, it just happens. (Jesus can reach back into that memory and deal with the monkeys, but that’s another post for another day). 

Worry, on the other hand, is a choice. It happens when I choose to focus on the false prophecy and suck on it like a bad candy I picked up off the floor in the Airport when my mom wasn’t looking. When the monkeys scream “Abort!” worry grabs what they’re saying and scans ahead, projecting this “false prophecy” into my future. I imagine being humiliated, and my dancing career is done for.

Worry is a choice to leave the present moment to focus on a future that may or may not arrive, and certainly won’t arrive exactly like I’ve been rehearsing. Funny thing about worry, you can’t do it while you’re in the moment. Moments, you see, can only be lived. Worry is a head-trip into a fictional future, spending the present doing something other than what you’re doing. Worry can’t solve anything, and never results in fresh traction on a problem. The only fruit of worry is anxiety.

I’m finding that the best defense against worry is to simply be present. To celebrate the moment and refuse to leave it for monkey business of any kind.

Does this make any sense?

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Get it? A joke? See, it’s just that when all three… usually they… aw, forget it.

As you probably know, I’m a pastor. And I kinda like it. But I’ve been thinking that maybe priests and rabbis have a place, too. Stay with me, I’ll explain. Can we drop the theological connotations for now (I’m a Jesus-follower) to focus on the function of each?

A pastor, quite literally, is a shepherd who cares for the sheep by leading them (his or her congregation).

A priest is an ordained minister with the authority to administer certain rites and sacraments.

A rabbi is a scholar teacher, and in Jesus’ day, a kind of guru who took on followers as students.

After reading these functional definitions, I think I may just be more of a rabbi than a pastor. Weird, huh? As familiar as evangelicals are with their pastors, I think we all need a pastor, a priest, and a rabbi to walk into a bar… uh, our lives. That’s not a joke. We need people in our lives who care enough to lead us. We need people willing to be Jesus with skin on to us. And we need to be taught.

Taking this a step further, I think we’re all called to take on these important roles in some capacity.

We’re all called to take an interest in people’s spiritual well being, taking the lead wherever God calls us. Right? And we’re all ordained by God to live as sacramental channels so that Christ can flow through us into others. Not only that, we’re all called to be students of scripture so we can share the truths of God with people hungry for his reality.

So there you have it: You woke up today a regular Joe, digested this blog post, and now you’re a pastor. A priest. And a rabbi.

Go get ‘em.

Just be careful when you walk into a bar.

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You know?

My kids display the curse of knowledge with expert precision. Noah will come up to me, eyes full of passion, and say something like, “I was thinking about it, and I don’t agree at all. That guy with the thing really is sort of strange and I think we should just do it.”

Uh… are we referring to something he’s played on his X-Box, maybe? Or what happened at school? Inter-planetary space travel, perhaps? I have no idea. But I can tell this strange thing he’s referring to makes perfect sense to him. He can taste it, it’s so clear. But he’s forgotten that I haven’t been along for the ride. I have no context.

Christians forget they may have taken years to find Christ, expecting their friends to “get it” right away.

Sometimes I work on something all day long—let’s say, a holiday idea—so when I get home from work I’m brimming with excitement. I share this product with Shauna (refined by five hours’ worth of mental capital) in thirty-two seconds flat. And expect her to be there with me when I’m done, praising God for my brilliant idea without a moment’s hesitation.

It happens in church when a leadership team shares the launch of a new initiative they’ve been working on for months when the rest of the church is hearing for the first time.

We so easily forget the power of slowing down and using subtitles. “Meanwhile, back at the ranch…” Ok. So we’re back at the ranch. Got it. Proceed.

We need to remember what it felt like to resist an idea at first, to work through good and bad alternatives, to forge the path we’ve now chosen. We also need to allow people time to take the journey too, instead of teleporting them to the destination. No matter how shiny it feels to us once we’re there.

What about you? Have you ever been the victim of someone else expecting you to “get” something they worked on a long time? Do you ever do that to others?

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This morning I thought of a few more tensions we ought to keep:

Process vs. finish line. For some people, it’s all about the journey and the growing we do along the way. For others, it’s about pragmatics: does it work? Is it bearing fruit? Making a difference in the real world? Biblically speaking, it’s both. We never quite arrive, so the journey is all we have; and yet, by their fruits ye shall know them.

Individuals vs. the group. For some, it’s all about individual relationships. For others, it’s about the health of the group as a whole. Relationship people need to realize there is something greater than the sum of the parts, that there are times when the health of the group is more important than the happiness of the individuals within it. Others need to realize that groups really are made up of individuals with their own set of needs, wants, and dreams.

Being vs. doing. Our culture vilifies doing, as though being is far more spiritual. Not a biblical distinction at all. Our model is a God who does who he says he is. When we don’t do what we say we are, it’s called hypocrisy. Try and tell me I’m not a pastor, it’s just what I do. True, our actions aren’t everything about us, and our flesh prompts us to do things that are no longer true of our new nature in Christ, but our actions are still mysteriously part of us. Drawing an artificial line between being and doing is the first step toward rejecting accountability and justifying hypocrisy. On the other hand, if I locate my identity solely in my actions, I’ll lose myself in endless doing.

Biblical vs. Christlike. This one is particularly bizarre, and I don’t grasp how it’s possible, but after over twenty years of ministry, I know it’s true: There is often an inverse relationship between how biblical we are and how Christlike we are. I can hear you muttering something about heresy, but let me explain. Those that focus most passionately on biblical precision in their theology tend to be some of the least Christlike people around. It’s as if they conclude, “As long as I’m right, it doesn’t matter how I treat people.” I’m not saying all theologians are pagans, I’m saying there’s something about leaning into this extreme that is toxic, just like it was for the teachers of the law in Christ’s day. On the other hand, people who tend to lean to the Christlike extreme tend to lose themselves in causes and kumbaya over time. We need to remember that the most important theology we hold is the theology we live out, that if it’s not changing me, I don’t actually get it. The most important measure of my theological correctness is my behaviour. And on the other extreme, we must remember that Christlikeness must be biblical to truly count, that Jesus was a man of the Book who cared about the power of words and nuance in scripture. After all, he wrote it.

What do you think? What other tensions do you think we should wrestle with?

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Now that I’m sitting here in the pews with ya’all, here’s what I have to say: Getting more out of church begins with choosing the right attitude. For example:

1. It’s not the preacher’s job to change my life. It’s my job to hear what God has for me, and run with it.

2. I’m determined to get something out of the message. If I don’t, that’s my own fault because God could speak through the phone book if he wanted to.

3. I want the speaker to let me have it. I’m not here to be massaged or coddled. I want to change! I want to grow! Don’t hold back!

4. I’m preparing my heart not just for what the speaker says, but for the “rabbit trails” God has planned for me, the places he wants to take me using the sermon as a springboard. Believe it or not, good preachers get very excited when people do that. It doesn’t mean the sermon isn’t enough; it’s proof that God is using them beyond what they’ve prepared.

5. Take a page from a pastor and listen with the intent to share what you’ve learned later this week. It changes the way you hear truth, how you take notes, how you internalize the message.

6. What else? How do you posture yourself to be touched by God each and every Sunday?

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