You Listen for Me

You listen for my voice always. You hear my falling tears in a crowded room. You see my heavy heart from behind hearty laughter. You know the pain that pulls at me. You know what I am. I cannot hide in the thickest darkness, your piercing beams of love cut to my marrow. There is no escaping the convicting power of your love. There is no shame in shouting your name. Everywhere you are needed, everywhere you are rejected all day long. Yet you do not take back your outstretched hand. How must it hurt you to love so much, and to be loved so little. How much strength it must take to be anchored in love to a people who drift from you like the ocean tide. You traded perfection for folly.

From darkness to light, from hate, to peace and love. I would that I would grow up to be a son by nature more than by name. I would that I was strong enough to stand with you while the tide came and went around me. I would that I never grieved you with sorrow again. I would that your love for me did not require so much forgiveness. I want to be love for you and with you. To love like you love. But you see my sorrow, know my pain, my weakness. My heart wants to want you more than I know how to let it.  My heart cries out within me. It shouts at me. But I don’t listen to it. Help train my heart.

Sip-Savor the Day Down to the Last Drop

Life has been a blurry hurry,

haven’t even had time to stop and worry

But it’s about time that I did something right,

I’m gonna sit still until dawn becomes moonlight

I’m gonna live life like I ought to, love it like I use to

Do all the things that I somehow forgot to

Think I’ll give it a try, sit down while I eat my pie

Chew before I swallow live a little before I die

Sip-savor the day down to the last drop

Take a time-out, maybe walk to the top

Forget what it's like to need to yawn

live out dreams 'till the brink of dawn

For too long I’ve out-raced by my own pace

Sick of being straight-legged and suit-faced

Going to get rid of my slacks,

change em’ for a backwards baseball cap

Done speeding on a one-way road to regret

I'm the happiest guy you've ever met

Got my heart a whole new mindset,

gonna’ soak me up some soft slow sunsets

Shrugging off the bad that’s been bugging me,

Bidding farewell to everything unwell

I’m diving headlong into so-long-sorrows,

I hear the sound of a hundred happy tomorrows

Got my feet moving to whole new rhyming rhythm,

Sounds so sweet I can’t help but hum along

It’s got me move’n to an up-beat melody,

say’n hello to a brand-new mellower me

I’m in synch with every single moment

Making laughing my new favorite habit

I’m ready to make some new memories

I’m going to stop and talk and just be me

I Just Don't Care

Apathy is a tomb which one chooses to lie down in while there is yet air in one’s lungs and a heartbeat in one’s chest, while there are still years yet to be lived. Apathy is an enemy. I think that we choose apathy because it is a painless solution to problems that are otherwise painful to fix. Rather than care, or have an opinion, it is a simple solution to avoid the discomfort, pain, or whatever problem may be associated with caring and just be apathetic.

The question then becomes, is it better to feel nothing than it is to feel hurt. Those who believe that the answer to be yes in an extreme sense choose to opt out, not just of emotions, but life all together. Yes, I am saying that suicide is the worst case scenario of apathy, the point to where continuing to live is a discomfort to the extent where nothing is a more agreeable choice than death. I am, then, saying that apathy is a form of suicide. Apathy is choosing to kill something, a part of you. Apathy is the decision not to care, not to have an opinion, not to strive and hope and dream and work to be whatever it is that causes fear. Apathy is an excuse not to do the things that should be done operating on the basses of avoiding pain. It is permission slip to do nothing.

The next question one could ask is why is living in apathy towards one or more things bad? Why is feeling pain good? Why would it help anyone to be open to hurt? The answer is simple. In order to get something, something must be given first. That is the general rule. Money does not show up for nothing, even in the case of winning the lottery, one still had to buy the ticket, even in the case of finding a winning ticket on the street, it still took caring enough to stoop down and pick up the ticket to see if it was a winning ticket. The same principle is true for relationships. You will never one day find that you have a deep relationship with someone who you did not know the day before. Relationships take being interested in cultivating something that was is not there before. It takes saying and doing many things. Trusting someone with details that could be used as a dagger to pierce all the way to the heart, but the potential reward is even greater than the pain. You can’t walk through doors that you don’t first open. If you want to open a door that could lead to love, you must be ready to face the many other things that could be behind that door. But, that is all life is, it’s opening whichever doors you wish to out of millions of possible ones, and it is not always possible to know what stands behind the door.

Topsy Turvy

My heart found a love it didn’t know about

don’t know how I ever managed to do without

            You’ve made me out of my mind mad in love

This feeling is stronger than anything I ever heard of

            It’s difficult to say where I actually am

But it’s a beautiful place I’ve never before been

           Seems Love set me somewhere up in the clouds

It’s got me straight-up singing out loud

            I’m so far gone I’ve lost sight of the ground

This must be love that you and I found

           Every single second with you is so sugar sweet

You’ve won me over, no one else competes

           Lost my hold on time, reality is in standby

My head is spinning as the world zooms by

           I’d heard about falling head-over-heels

Now I know first-hand just how it feels

           My Life was a puzzle missing a few pieces   

Now it’s better than museum’s masterpieces

I've never felt so beautifully topsy-turvy

Feels like I’m riding in a roller-coaster derby

 I miss you each time I blink my eyes

 Nothing is worse than saying goodbye

 Being near to you makes my heart melt

 It is better than anything I have ever felt

 Among the mess of me I’ve become

 There’s always a joy I can’t help but hum

 You are someone special it’s clear

 Nothing else matters when you are here

Lost and Found

It’s not possible to simply say how your love brought me from so far away

It’s not possible to simply say how much your love does for me today

I was so far gone, beyond hope and lost, nothing left but my own despair

I was gasping for but a single breath of air, at last I cried a desperate prayer

I had nothing but last wishes, just a grayscale shadow of brokenness

But buried beneath the weight of a heavy heart you heard the words I left unspoken

From far away, I could feel something heavenly drawing nearer and nearer

A mighty calm filled the air with a sense of peace never before clearer

He came and rescued me from my self-made misery, wiped away my sorrow

He saved me from myself, repaid all of the future days that I had borrowed

He rescued me back from beyond the brink, broke my chains that kept be held down

Every single knot that I had ever wound, God’s great gracious love quickly unbound

This Means War

As a witnessing tool Christians often give to-be converts God-candy to help persuade them to accept Christianity. The candy that Christians give away to get non-Christians to see their perspective is the positive promises that God makes to His children, the gifts of the hope, the love they want, and many of the other beautiful riches that being a follower of the footsteps of Christ ensures.

However, I can’t help but find this approach a bit deceptive. Following Jesus is not an easy trip. Jesus went places where dragons be. He went armed with a loving heart, the Words of his Father, with wisdom, and the Truth. Not with armor, not with an army of trained soldiers, not with weapons made from metal or stone or wood. Jesus said follow him and believe in him and who he was. But he did not promise us a pleasant easy life. He gave us a promise. The promise was not a promise of affluence and comfort. The promise was a place with him in eternity. But until then, every life that dare breathe will suffer.

Creation groans under a heavy burden, it has been yoked to load heavy with evil. The promise of Jesus is that he will endure with us, interceding for us. He sent the comforter to us. Why do we need a comforter except we be discomforted. Lion is against lamb. Creation has been set upon itself and consumes itself. When we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, Jesus does not come down and build us a nice little house out of sugar-cubes. No, now we are no longer of the world. The world does not like that. In fact, we are at enmity with the world. Now we are in a wrestling match with a fallen world and with an evil ruler who still childishly throws a temper-tamper like child who knows that bedtime is coming yet still fights it. Only the devil is not a child, he is strong and he has many fallen angles with him. He enjoys the taste of tears and the sound of weeping!

So, promising could-be converts a paradise during war is not an honest representation of the assignment to follow Jesus. It would be better to speak of the glory and hope that is set before those who follow Jesus. I am not seeking to dissuade anyone from accepting or taking seat with God’s elect, I am simply pointing out that following Jesus is not a placid walk through a rose-garden. When Jesus was on Earth, he fought without relenting with those whose hearts were set on this world. God is not going to write you a billion dollar check and your life will not become perfect by taking making Jesus Lord. What will happen if you accept the mission to follow Jesus, is you will endure until you die or the coming age arrives.

But, there is rejoicing in the suffering! It seems impossible at first, but if you think of Jesus as the captain of an army and his followers as solders, then it is not such a stretch. Solders fight for an idea, a future, a better tomorrow at the cost of their life if need be. When we stand with Jesus not only do we stand now in this present time where there is pain, but more we stand in the hope of our future that is assured through Jesus the Lord. Today and tomorrow and all earthly days are short in comparison to forever once the world has been taken back from the adversary of life. I stand and rejoice in today, in the battles of today, in the suffering of today because it is not counted as anything compared to the invaluable depth of my assured future. And that future is worth all the pain in the world.

So, rather than offer potential converts a helping of heaven-on-earth, why not offer them the truth and tell them that there is an eternal trophy waiting if they endure the race and reach the finish line and then offer them a helping hand. After all, war with the world is fought with weapons of kindness, respect, service, love. Let’s go to war, let’s fight, let’s raise up our courage in God and fight until death has been defeated. Let’s join in arms against the present times and capture eternity.

Article first published as Book Review: Speaking of Jesus: The Art of Not-Evangelism by Carl Medearis

It's easy to get lost in the arguments and opinions that surround Christianity. It's easy to find yourself looking through tinted goggles at Christianity. Yet every Christian wants to see God in His true colors and live according to His wisdom.It's not always discernible that there is something in the way of viewing Christianity for what it is.

In his book Speaking of Jesus Carl Medearis deconstructs a cultural and religious construct that stands between Christians and those yet apart. He treats his reader to a sobering and honest revision of how Christians should go about speaking to non-Christians. He proposes a revolutionary approach thousands of years removed from Christianity; he proposes that we shift our paradigm from being Christians to what the original paradigm was — being a follower of Jesus.

Carl proposes that rather than drag a potential believer into church and dunk his head into the Holy Water, that instead simply talk about Jesus. Rather than get into a violent debate about the historical and religious baggage that accompanies Christianity, we should shed that burden and do what the early Church did — talk about Jesus.

Medearis points out that many times the Christian approach to evangelize is to draw a line in the sand and tell "sinners" to cross it and repent and come to Christ. Instead, Meadearis says, why not do what Jesus did and go to people — go meet people where they are at now. Through real-life examples and passages from the Bible, Meadearis cuts right through the misconception of what it is to bring Jesus to people. According to him, Jesus already came, and all we have to do is speak about him.

Speaking of Jesus personally confronted me and opened my heart to realize that I had been seeing myself as a Christian, as a member of an elitist club, when I should have been seeing myself as a follower of Jesus, the most humble and meek man to ever walk the Earth. However, Medearis did not write a book without blemish, which he knows. He does not explain his perspective at all points with enough detail and depth to ground his view soundly as the right view. At some points he nearly steps down from being author of his book to person-to-person conversationalist to the reader. It's as though he is someone you'd meet at a grocery store, which deserves applause in that he writes from highly understandable place, yet it undermines his authority as an author in the middle of challenging a paradigm that permeates the world's largest religion.

Nevertheless, Medearis overwhelms the negative qualities in his writing with witty delivery of a confrontational topic. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a Christian and to anyone who holds a negative perspective of Christianity. It just may change the way you view yourself, God, religion, the people around you, and the world.

Check it out on Amazon.com

Article first published as Book Review: Speaking of Jesus: The Art of Not-Evangelism by Carl Medearis on Blogcritics.

Big Business is Best

It’s easy to hate a bully, they are big, they are mean, they crush other people and take from them because they can. It’s easy to recognize a bully in person, but what about corporations? It’s not so obvious. It’s easy to confuse success with being a bully. It is very tempting to look at a large business that undersells and runs out other smaller businesses and judge it harshly. I like to root for the underdog too, but thinking about it is that really the right way to judge a company. It’s as though being successful as a corporation is enough evidence to convict a corporation. To an extent it is true that large businesses can and do throw their weight around, and I’m not saying that is always right. I think there are certainly a lot of large companies that absolutely do wrong. But I also think that a lot of smaller businesses do a lot of things wrong to. Being successful is not a legitimate excuse to condemn a company.

Large companies such as Wal-Mart, McDonalds, K-Mart, and so on are frequently blasted with hate for no other reason than they are successful. The reason most all large corporations are successful is because they are better than smaller businesses. (If you worship small businesses as some sort of American historical figure-head, please take a minute to cool off and then keep reading). In America, your dollar is your vote. If you don’t like something you don’t vote for it. If you go to a place that you don’t like, then you quit going there—you vote against it. Big businesses did not steal their standings at the top in consumers’ minds because they forced people into going there to shop. People chose to go there, they chose to spend their vote on the big businesses we have now. If you want to complain about big businesses, you may as well complain about America as well. This is the formula that has made America so successful. I know that the capitalistic system has some problems, but it has worked pretty good for us. Don’t complain about a system that works and propose illegalizing being successful—you may want to consider moving to a different less democratic nation actually.

It’s just like politicians that we vote into office; we are never unanimous about who is in office, but that is who the general masses of people chose to support. It is the same way for our large companies, that majority of people voted for them, and continue to vote for them. I have heard people say that companies are so large that they can’t fail; they are too strong to let anyone else rise up to compete with them and my analogy above is no longer true. That argument is wrong. Yes, it may be difficult to start a company that competes with and eventually overtakes a large company. But don’t buy into the idea that big businesses are invincible. It’s pretty easy to find a list of large companies that have failed recently. In fact, I think I remember hearing about how the government actually bailed-out some of our large businesses that we deemed too big to fail. This is actually good, it’s my opinion that they should have failed. The American people voted them out of office when they quit buying their products.

It is the fierce competition between companies that ensures that we get good products at good prices. If there was no competition, then there would be no incentive to do better, no reason to improve. Right now, big businesses are highly competitive. That means that companies that want to beat them have to work harder and do things even better to compete with them. Pushing companies to provide the best product at the best price is not hurting us, it hurts companies that are doing a bad job. The thing about America is we try to vote for the one that is going to help us the most. Our votes made big businesses big, not bullying. If we are mad at anyone, we should be mad at ourselves. It’s our votes that got them elected as our business leaders. 

Immeasurable is God's Love

Immeasurable is the Greatness of Our God’s Love

One day I decided to find a way to measure just how much is God’s love

I knew that God’s love was great, it would be a challenge that I was sure of

Starting with something easy, I started with something I thought was surely small

“It should be simple to find God’s love for just me, then multiply if for all”

It took ten fingers and ten toes twice, a calculator, both ears, and the tip of my nose,

But when I got done counting, there was still more than all the digits calculator shows

Scratching my head I realized that God’s love could not be measured in numbers,

Of course not, God can’t be calculated with equations, that’s much too cumbersome

I was excited that God’s love was greater than all the numbers I could add

But I was not ready to quit just yet, there were some other ways to measure I still had

So, I took out a ruler to measure God’s love, every little bit down to the final inch

Before staring, I thought to myself “this is much better this is sure to be a cinch”  

With my ruler I started measuring every little bit of God’s love that I could see

I measured high and low far and near, then I realized God’s love was all around me

Discouraged I wondered aloud, “why does God leave so much love just lying around”

“Honestly, it seems to me, that there is not a single place God’s love is not found”

Thinking fast, I found another way, it would take some time but was sure to be a success

I would take a measuring cup, and find the volume of love--of my ideas this was the best

After but a minute of measuring, I realized this task was going to get the best of me,

I needed something much bigger than what I use to measure out my favorite recipe

I thought to find something bigger, it came to me “maybe ballrooms would be big enough”

I tried to find a way to measure with the biggest ballroom, but I found the task too tough

It was only then that I understood, that God’s love can’t be measured in any amount

No matter what measure you use, God’s love is way too great to ever count

I sat down to write it in words, but after but a sentence, I realized it was impossible

God’s love is greater, big beyond all understanding and is always unsurpassable  

Let's Disagree

A little politics—how about it?

The term fundamentalist is often used in a derogatory way towards people who believe assuredly and stick to it. Either the word is simply used to criticize Christians who take God seriously at His word, or it is tacked in front of another word—the ugliest of all words—conservative. To about half the people, combing the words conservative and fundamentalist forms a phrase that summarizes all that is wrong in the world today. To those who stand opposite in thought to those dubbed fundamentalist conservatives, the phrase represents the ignorant religious political standpoint that prevents the advancement of society. It is a rampart that barricades the further movement and natural progression of the intelligent and civilized cultured population from fixing the world. One of the big problems is that they are innately stubborn. It seems the fundamentalist conservative is steadfast, rooted deep within a conviction that is simply unearthable. There is no way to convert a conservative fundamentalist; for the most part they are a cancer that must be cut out and destroyed—else the greater and functioning body will suffer.

But there is an exact opposite to that perspective. There are those who believe in a set of fundamental truths that guarantee, if followed, a calm and peaceful society of prosperity and general well-being. They are not being stubborn, but faithful to the ideals that America was founded on, and even more importantly, faithful to God (at least they convince themselves they are), which is the most important of all life-walks. After all, why save a life only to see in perish in the dust of time a few years or decades later while the soul left untended withers, wilts, and is lost forever. For those who believe in the eternal, earthly life is really just the deep breath in preparation before diving into eternity.

These generalizations I have made are nothing more than a shameful attempt to summarize the myriad socialscape of two large and complicated ideologies. I do recognize that this summery is probably offensive to most people that fit into the two categories. The one thing that seems to unite both sides of the disagreement is that they hate being categorized. People seem drawn to the false conclusion they are unique and special enough to deserve their own category. No, sorry, that is just a joke no one laughs at because they think it’s true. We are all different, but not necessarily unique.

As much as both groups hate each other, try to imagine what it would be like to have only one unified mindset. It would be a balance with one side. It would be an elevator that only goes one way. The simple fact of the matter is, a train needs both sides of the track in order to move anywhere. Right now, it seems that the train is going in circles, but at least it’s moving. Working out our differences is slow and difficult work, but worth the effort. It’s likely that both the extreme far left and right are wrong. In order to drive a car straight down a road, we inevitably steer both directions. Without opposition, there would be no movement in any direction. It is simply a fact that there needs to be friction for anything to work.

So as much as I may cling to one of the perspectives I mentioned above, and as much as I may think the other side is ignorant, and as much as I may want to get rid of it, we need each other to motivate each other to push for change.