Fighting fair...

If you know me, you've seen me in a conflict. I get pretty jazzed. I dig it. Conflict is where we grow, where we lay down our life for others in small ways, and where we receive sight where we were blind...

But so many of us are "taken to a bad place" by even the smallest hint of conflict! Fear, pain, shame, past abuses, pockets of disbelief in Gods love... it all gets stirred up by our conflicts in daily life.

But dont shout. Dont lash out. Get quiet and get interested in what is happening under the surface. Spend time praying about (and for) people who drive you crazy. Look for the sweet spot where you lay down your own preferences to serve, bearing with the weakness and need of others... always forgiving any missing the mark in others. 

Dont abuse. Listen. Ask questions to learn about the other's perspective. Get into their shoes. See through their eyes. Maybe they're crazy. Maybe they're hurting. Maybe you are. But you'll both be healed and strengthened when you come together over a conflict.

So fight fair. Share hearts. Take time. Come back and try again and again. Dont be afraid to disagree over a long period of time. No one needs to change their mind RiGHT NOW.

Be aware that your intention in conflict is often to get the other to affirm you. Get your affirmation from God, and your conflicts will be turned productive...

Some thoughts from my mobile as i considered ephesians "...speak the truth in love..." and "be angry and do not sin..."

Well again...

I get sick in winter time a lot, so its nice to just throw up a post while ive been somewhat healthy... thanks to God on any day i'm not in a dentist chair or sick in bed...

New beginning?

I'm yanking my old blogs and importing their content to fresh addresses with clean profiles... it is my hope to keep an account of this now 6 year journey, and get a fresh handle on how it's all disseminated. 

...

posts like that last one are the reason I don't blog much anymore... putting out that kind of mentality into a public forum... I am considering making this blog private... but...

...I'm not sure a private blog works right now.

I'm sensitive to the fact that a lot of basic christian stuff is really overwhelming to folks on a different direction in life...

I beg the forbearance of the readers who tend toward offense at such beliefs, and hope that this blog may be a way for them to encounter the christian confession in all of it's difficulty and apparent insanity. My hope is that Jesus, like him or not, will be more clear to you today than ever before.

James 4

This Sunday, Mr. Weiss really laid it down, calling us to actually practice the word found in James 4:

...James 4:13ff ("ff" means "...and following")
James 4:13ff
"Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit"; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that."
But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil"

man, james is a hard man.

Seriously? Seriously?

Is there a time limit? lIke, can I say "Next week I'm going to such and such a place..."? "Next Month...?" "...year..."? Oh. year.
No. you see all the "seriously" and "time limit" stuff is the flesh rebelling and looking for yet another answer to that age-old question, "What is the least that I can do and still get by..."

James is attacking, nay, Jesus is attacking our very hearts here... but with a knife of LOVE, in the prison yard of LIFE...

...wait.
...cancel that last analogy.
...too much Prison Break.

Jesus isn't attacking us.
Not with a knife of Love
although some might offer the Prison Yard as a proper image of earthly life.
Maybe we can use the Prison Yard image somewhere else...

What IS going on here in James, and what Mr. Weiss challenged us to practise, is an implementation of the word in Proverbs 3:5ff (remember "ff"? it means "...and the following verses".)
I'm talking about v.6 in Proverbs 3 (Prov. 3:6), where it says, "In all your ways acknowledge Him..." and there is a promise attached to it, not just the prison shiv that James is attacking us with... oh yeah. we dropped the shank-imagery. God's not trying to shank you... drop YOUR shank...
shank you very much...

(My gosh it's like Michael Scott from the Office here in my head. This is 445 am and a press-pot teaching you from the word, here. Completely un-publish-able. Thanks be for the blogosphere!)

But what IS going on here is that WE are called to actually employ our MOUTHS in physically, verbally SAYING, out loud in this WORLD, what we believe about our situation... As believers it is a good, proper, right, and helpful thing to yourself, and to your hearers, to acknowledge that you really aren't sure that you'll be in this world next year, but if you are, cool, I'll meet you on the Eiffel Tower and we'll have crepes on the Champs-Elysees. You dig?

now I know you may find this challenging, and cumbersome, expressing faith in a generation without time or taste for such morbid flourishes of speech, but it is GOOD FOR YOU, and it is GOOD FOR THEM, TOO!

Do you know that proberb that says, "The power of life and of death are in the tongue..."?
do you know the other half of it?
It says, "the one who loves it will eat it's fruit."

Eat the fruit of your tongue? Eew, first of all. That just sounds weird. Well, welcome to Hebrew Poetry 101. These dudes spoke from the guts of life. But do you sense the PROMISE in this? Not just a warning against speaking wrong, but a promise that speaking truly will lead to life and life and life... like maybe by our choices to speak from the Truth (who is a person living in and with you. His name is... Jesus!)

...like maybe our choices to actually process it through and make it into words will help us out! And help others out.

Think of the effects of the most stumbling and bumbling attempt to say this! Think of what the hearer is hearing: a proclamation of our earthly lives' brevity.

When I'm talking skateboarding stuff with someone in my business, I always end up spilling this stuff out and saying some, "dude, if God lets me live and keeps me unhurt enough, I'll totally do 540's when I'm fifty..." type of phrase. Does that fit my skateboarding community life? Does that affirm the status quo of my listener? Does that get received well?

Well first off, most people are kind of stoked to meet a God-lover whose head isn't fully inserted in some wack money-church trip. And second, Yeah. People are really interested in thoughts like these. I'm just pointing out the elephant in the room in a way that is totally weird and yet, not "hellfire and brimstoney". Yet in that moment of "Dude, I'm a wicked believer and I totally don't even know if God's gonna have me on EARTH next year, let alone doing business over there..." is a gentle, but sure proclamation of the Matthew 10 call to fear...

Think of the gentleness of this "If the Lord wills..." type of proclamation of the "bad news" that we all die. It's an acknowledgement of that difficult reality in regard to nobody but myself! Imagine how it would be if James were telling us to make sure other people knew that THEY WERE GOING TO DIE.

Imagine James 4:13 reading like, "...and make sure to say to anyone who seems arrogant, 'Hey, you're gonna die, man. Don't get a big head'..." Because that's what a lot of Christian religion DOES, instead of living from and speaking from a confession of truth. man, we're not pointing fingers at unbelievers, but we are confessing that we aren't going to be here long, especially in the service of the Murdered Man, unkillable evermore!

This is super-sober stuff. Chew on it. There aren't bones here, though. This is mother's milk for us. Let's get it straight, because disciples Do and Say what the Master has trained... For those who've been holding this stuff down for years and live the peculiar life--rock it hard and keep tender! For those not in christ who read here and wonder what the hell has got hold of us, We're just believers, man. We won't say that the water's fine, but the tide is rising. A hard rain's gonna fall and the times they are a changing and on and on, man. I'd take dark waters on this side in swap for the fires of the next... and if that just ticks you off, deal with it brah. those are the breaks when you're created by the only One who wasn't.

So rock this verse in your daily kit and keep it close to heart that we are hidden up with Christ (colossians 3) and that we're going to be revealed one day (romans 8, 1 john 3) and that we'll be changed in a twinkle (1 Cor. 15), so we should look up (Mt. 24) and look to what's coming, as we handle what's passing away (1 cor. 7:29-31).

You may or may not be used to hearing this stuff, but this is the way it's put down, and put down in my heart... chew it.

Awakenings: What We've Been Hearing

Psalm 90--a song of Moses
Isaiah 40--pay attention to the grass image
Ecclesiastes 12--we're all gonna die, but not till we get real crusty, some of us...
James 4--eschew arrogance

In Meeting this week, I asked Mr. Weiss if he considered himself "Lucky" to have reached 80+ years. Dude, you guys should pay attention to the look on his face. "No", he replied. Did you see the sincerity? The loneliness? The frustration at losing his strength, focus, memory, life-partner and friend?

Honestly, I don't know why we are so obsessed with living so long and so well. It's this whole "american dream" thing, I guess.

Think about it, How few of Earth's inhabitants get as Rich, Healthy, strong and Knowledgeable as the descendants of Those Dutch and Scots who got this America thing started? Granted, we're evening the score with a diet made up of almost entirely fat, grease, oil sugar and meats, which spawns a curve-leveling rate of diabetes, gout, heart disease and general malaise...

But seriously, how many of earth's inhabitants are offered the opportunity that even the poorest of us Americans is afforded? Check out Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia... Now scoot on through the USSR or Russia or whatever that great mass of splintered nations and cultures (Gog? Magog?) is gonna be called on the new maps this year... and check out Greece, Macedonia, and France and Italy...
Dude, a kid in Italy? the mafia so has things held down there. get serious. You can't get anything done in Italy. In america, you can start your own skateboard company and give it to your friend and he can make something of it with God's help. In Italy, it sucks.
Now check out England? They had the world taken over. Blew it.
Foget about Africa? Forget about south America? forget about that "world as a village" book that shows us that we are KINGS in the history of the earth, if we have a cup of coffee to read this by?

So as Christians among an amazingly affluent society, we are so often decieved, like a frog in an ever-heating pot doesn't know he's about to boil, into a quest for immortality that is a direct affront to the ways of God!
We neglect those parts of the Message that pertain to the fragility of our lives, the sureness of our decline and demise in this world, and the eternality and thoroughness of God's Judgment at the end of it all.

here in Isaiah, Psalm 90, and Ecclesiastes 12, we have solemn reminder to hold loosely the things of earth, though they are entrusted to our stewardship for the moments strung together that we call "Our lives". Consider that it is the breath of God that withers the strength and achievements of mankind, not some aberration...

Consider Romans 8, which speaks of God, who is love, subjecting the world to frustration in hope of it being liberated...
Consider the smallness of our perspective and the greatness of His, described in Isaiah 55 "...my thoughts...my ways...your thoughts...your ways..."

Think about the liberation that humility before Him brings, and consider the fear that is due Him. Consider that fear, that very terror as resolved and transformed by the Murder of our Lord on that day... He has proven that He loves you more than His very own life!!! And embrace that fear, letting it do the work in your heart...
Consider Matthew 10, where Jesus calls it as he sees it, once again, saying something like, "...don't be afraid of those who can only kill your bodies, but be afraid of the one who, after killing your body can throw both body and soul into HELL."

I can't imagine how ridiculous all of the vampire/witchcraft lore of this world is to God. This "ooh, the witchdoctor stole your soul! ooh the satanists are going to steal your soul in some out of body warfare..." have you ever encountered those beliefs? Maybe something like Buffy the Vampire slayer or something. Man that's wack!

...and I can't imagine how ridiculous all of the christian-esque religion of our land's churches is, either! Because you won't get drilled with these scriptures in a month of sundays, lambs! I'm serious. These are the Scrips that make wise and make faithful, and they get relegated to some "fire and brimstone" label and softer fare is offered...

and the fire is gone from our pulpits, and the churches have become pawns of so much that they were meant to shine light on.
and they have grown fat with numbers of people who don't actually believe in the Jesus who is described faithfully in Scripture...

so it would be great to be up this morning pressing out a fresh, sweet encouragement to all of you, or diving deep into some massive Old Testament shadowing and imagery of Christ... but the Spirit is calling us to a contention for the truth.

The gloves are off. There is a Jesus. he is faithfully and authoritatively described in Scripture. Get Into Him...

Awakenings: community/communion, and the Murder

Many of you know that I can't sleep a lot. Coffee? maybe. but I think it's primarily the THOUGHTS I have while lying awake...

Lately, I've been hit with some strong vibes that I want to put out there for you to consider...

I hardly know where to start, feeling that there's almost no hope of avoiding some perplexity and confusion along the way, but I'm going to start sharing and let's see where we end up...

First off, I'm Lew, and for years and years, I've been part of what we've come to call Just Some Jesus People, a neighborhood church community in Northside, Cincinnati, America. I began my journey with Jesus in the Latest Eighties and early nineties. I got crushed and my mind got opened and I got wicked saved.

After that, I spent mass time trying to cop a high at churches. I just wanted to feel Jesus close to me. It took years and years for me to get it through my head that Jesus is HERE and he is here NOW. Kind of the "zen" of following the master. So I switched my understanding of what it means to be the church. I used to think of the church as a community. now I see that the church is a communion.

check out the difference between those two words and you'll uncover mass evil, hypocrisy, counterfeit and confusing deception foisted on people in the name of Jesus over the 2 thousand plus years since the Murder. (you know, the Murder--the cross)

(have you considered the Murder? and how we live because he willingly laid down his life for us on the cross in that day? Jesus is the best, most humble ever... if you want to be like Him, you'll live in the Murder and rejoice in laying it down... really you will, because He will be living in you, showing the world himself again and again through you...)