Looking For The Long Ride

Sandi and I and Laura did something different with our Easter Sunday this year—we went to a friends house and had breakfast with several other people.

After breakfast, we sang some songs together and then took communion. After that several people around the room shared thier impressions about what the spirit of God was speaking to them.

After a few hours we left, feeling like we had really been in God’s presence and had been to “church”. Even Laura, my 13 year old daughter said that she had a good time—having a friend a day younger that her to hang out with—not to mention a cat, two dogs and a little baby.

A good time was had by all.

We were asked ahead of time to bring our instruments and some food to share. I gathered up my percussion stuff, violin and mandolin thinking that I would fit in with whatever was happening. At the very last minute, I decided to bring my guitar and some sheet music, just in case. I hadn’t planned on “leading” worship but that is what happened.

This is important to me on several different levels. Because of the internal struggles in the church Sandi and I attended for the past 22 years, I had more or less lost my musical voice. I was a member of the praise and worship team but had slowly lost touch of my gifting. Not that I am any great talent mind you—I can keep a beat and tend to pick up stringed instruments rather easily. But for the past several years I had not felt valued and probably should have stepped down from the worship team long before our differences became front page news and I was asked to take a time out.

That is all history now but somehow information that I feel is necessary in order to see the fullness of what happened this morning after breakfast.

I am beginning to get my voice back and this is what the Lord spoke to me this morning through the breaking of bread: It is time to come out of the tomb—the stone has been rolled away and you are free to fully live the life that I died for so that you might have that life and even have it more abundantly than before.

I can really relate. When something bad happens that we have not budgeted for (like leaving a church you have been a part of for 2 decades) the tendancy is to hide away, crawl into the tomb and wait for something extra-ordinary to happen in order to intice us to come out into the light.

I don’t think that many of us came to Christianity with a fantastic past filled with lots of love, appreciation and encouragement. If you did, that’s great, but many of the people I know had lives filled with parental divorce, unhappiness and broken relationships.

When I was born again I remember feeling that for the first time in my life I had finally found a place of love and acceptance that went beyond what I had ever experienced heretofore. I knew that my wife really loved me, but the love I felt that evening when I gave my life to Christ in a friends living room was something that felt like the fullfillment of all that I had ever hoped for. If you have been there, you know what I am talking about.

That was sometime in 1979—it is now early spring 2007—nearly 28 years later and I am still on the scent of the plate of food that was set before me on that evening so long ago. I will have to admit I have eaten more than my share of food that really didn’t make me healthy but somehow seemed to fill me up for the moment.

After this morning, I am more than ever looking forward to a place at the banquet table that is even now being prepared for me. Until that time Huevos Rancheros with friends on Easter morning will serve to fill my stomach and give me hope that we will all find our place in the greater scheme of things.

Enjoy your ride today…the stone has been rolled away.

Scripture tells me that of the writing of books there is no end. The implication is that there is only so much we can ever know about our journey here on earth or our final destination. There is also an implication in scripture that things will continue in this vein until the end of time—that we will continue to do our jobs, get married have kids and all that until the final hour is recorded.

What we generally try to understand is all the stuff that happens to us in between birth and death and with our world continually changing, it is sometimes hard to keep up with what is happening.

So we pick areas of interest. Some of us focus on family, some of us on jobs and avoca-tions and some of us on church and what it means to be a Christian.

I will have to admit that I never saw it coming—where I am today in relation to what I think about all these things. Of course we always thought that life was/is a journey but I do believe that many of us felt that we would at some point arrive somewhere in time and space to a place of serenity and peace.

Some of this is true. Sandi and live in a house that has been our home for over 22 years and like an old fuzzy childhood bear it is a little worn and faded in places. A few buttons have fallen off and the bow around the neck is frayed but it is still full of warm memories and has a lot of life left in it.

Why just the other day one of my three daughters was married in a small ceremony that took place in a garden space just outside our back doorway. There were about thirty people in attendance and though is was a little windy and unseasonably chilly, she and her fiance were married in just a few minutes and we then moved inside for the food and cake.

She was the first of two children born while we lived in this house to tie the knot and in some cosmic way I guess it is only appropriate that she would recite her vows here. Even for a small ceremony it took more than a weeks worth of preparation to make it happen and then all of a sudden, after one or two hours, it was over and the house was back almost back to normal. The extra chairs were back in the basement, the dishes were in the washer and my wife and I were sitting in our chairs with a glass of red wine to finish off the day.

It was a success. We will have a bigger celebration in August when the weather is bet-ter, but for them it was time and that’s alright. Lots of couples are doing things differently these days. And not to mention that my wife and I were married on a hill behind a house we had just rented, almost 29 years ago, with only four people in attendance. It was our time and we were never into big weddings so we took the plunge and did it spur of the moment like. So, it is not about how you do it but rather why you do it that really counts.

I am at that point in life where all I want to do is figure it out and at the same time want to be released from having to know it all. I know that I will not be able to come to terms with everything that I have questions about, but am beginning to see the areas in my life where I can say no and not feel guilty because I didn’t live up to something that some-one expected of me. Not the type of thing I would have seen a 50 plus year old dealing with but what the heck, I am moving forward and not backwards and that can’t be all bad.

Life is about the journey, of this we can be sure. But taking time off to rest and enjoy the stations that the train brings us to is also something that is important. If no one stopped to smell the roses would they really have any fragrance.

Enjoy the journey and the ride.

Listening to Don Potter sing on the way to the airport this morning was one of those times to reflect and let my mind flow. Only so much flow of course as I had to keep the car on the road in between the white lines.

The cd in mention is an old Morningstar re-lease called “In The Spirit” and as was recorded live during a seminar or church service.
It is an encouraging list of songs that are featured and listening to him this morning made the two hour drive seem short.
I guess I like Don because of his ability to help me track my feelings about being a Christian and what that means to me on an everyday basis.
In other words he gives me a musical vocabulary to ponder my relationship to the Lord.

Speaking of vocabulary, recent trips to several websites have more than added to my dictionary like mind and helped to to put into words feelings that I have had for some-time in relation to church and how we structure it on a weekly basis.

One website blog authored by Bill Kinnon, had an article by Bill from “The People For-mally Known As The Congregation”. More than tongue in cheek, Bill’s blog about this group of people looking for a new way to practically live out their relationship with Christ, is a must read for people who have or are having questions about the standard Sunday service type of Christian expression and the way we do church in America.

What I found as I followed a few links to other web-site blogs is that there is a large community of believers who, on a daily basis, are working out some the the same things I am in the process of dealing with in my own life since leaving the church I attended faithfully for over 22 years.
Reading their posts has given me a new vocabulary with which to begin to better explain the thoughts and feelings I have been having these past few years.
It is like reading a book and finding that the author has so perfectly described your day, week or year—or has gone through the same things and has actually taken the time to work them through thought-wise (I guess that is what writers do).

A friend of mine sent me a link the other day to the blog written by Kinnon called achievable ends. It is located at:
http://www.kinnon.tv/2007/03/the_people_form.html

Bill is an excellent writer and I am not saying that I agree fully with everything he says but it, and this whole internet stream of thought is, just a part of the larger community of believers that gather to discuss and debate their journey.

These people are not anarchists which means “…a state of society without government or law”, but rather are people who are looking for an expression of Christianity that more closely resembles what many of us thought it looked like when we first read the book of acts. They are a community of believers who feel disenfranchised…or left out of the process of how church is expressed on a daily or weekly basis.

As I write this I am reminded of the many talks I have had with friends about the poten-tial that resides within each of us as Christians—and conversely about how the lack of miracles seems all the more apparent as we press toward what we feel is the high call-ing of God.

The verse “…all creation groans and travails waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God”, comes to mind (Romans 8:9).
In all of this, I feel something like that person in the Bob Dylan song when he says, “There’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you mister Jones?”

Yet I am beginning to wake up and see that all around me there is a body being built that I am a part of. It is a ride I didn’t see coming and one that I surely thought would look a lot different, but one that I am on and excited to see where it takes me.

Enjoy your ride today.

Imagine for a moment feeling like you have an itch, but you don’t know where to scratch.

It is like having a feeling that something is not quite right but you really can’t put your finger on what it could be. You wake up with that feeling, live with it all day and go to bed at night with it still there.

We all know what it feels like to have a place on our back that we can’t reach that needs to be scratched. That’s right, we tell our wife or husband, it’s just between the shoulder blades. No…not quite there…just a little to the right…up a little higher and then Ahhh! Things feel better al ready.

Imagine if you will having an itch for several years—knowing that it would feel better if someone could scratch it—but for the life of you—you can’t really tell them where it is at. It is like an undefined longing—having benn told that the top of the mountain or our destination is just around the corner but never ever arriving. Always moving towards something that we have assumed is just around the corner but by the time we get there fwe find that the block has been turned into an office complex, another hospital or a car dealership.

For several years I attended a church where I was told from the pulpit every week what it looked like to be a good Christian person. I knew I was one because I remember the evening that I was born again and had my sins forgiven. It is kind of like a Mount Rushmore moment—you know that you have been there. It is not like somebody pulled the wool over my eyes—I became a Christian that very evening.

But in church, I was told that you had the read the bible every day (the longer the better), pray a lot and take your wife out on a date night every week. I was told that there were certain conditions that applied to me and to get to where I was headed I would have to meet these conditions and move on to the next level. It was a little bit of grace mixed with a little bit of performance mxed with a little bit of who knows what—and a lot of guilt when we didn’t live up to the high standards that were always being set for us.

So we kind of “flew under the radar” to coin a phrase. When asked how you were doing, you knew what to say and you knew the right words to use as well. We learned to talk “christianeese”. Don’t let them see you sweat turned into don’t really let them know what is really going on because if you do then there will be a price to pay.

Every week it was a new “message” even though I hadn’t even had the time to put into practice the one from the week before. I collected literally tons of journals filled with notes I took each week that I never looked at after I filled them up.

I rencetly went through several boxes of these notebooks I had saved and threw them out. It’s not like they weren’t any good—they were—filled with scripture and thoughts about life at the time. But I knew that after 10 years of storing them they would never see the light of day again.

Don’t get me wrong—I am not bitter about those years spent in a box. That is not why I am writing this. I just don’t want to spend any more years there.

I am closer than ever before to being able to locate the itch—to see a path through the forest—to move beyond the point of being stuck somewhere I really don’t what to be.

My life is beginning to have a new soundtrack put to it and I am anxious to hear it as it gets recorded.

It’s the ride I am on.

To err is human, to forgive divine

All people commit sins and make mistakes. God forgives them, and people are acting in a godlike (divine) way when they forgive. This saying is from “An Essay on Criticism,” by Alexander Pope.

I think as a man, one of the hardest things to do is to admit it when I am wrong. I guess I (we) think that to admit I am wrong is to admit failure and to admit failure is not an option that any of us feel comfortable with.

As least that is what I think I was taught growing up—the goal in life is to be right. Yet knowing that, I always felt uncomfortable with that position. Bob Dylan said in a song that…”You are right from your side and I am right from mine—we are both just one to many mornings and a thousand miles behind.” As I have matured I have come to the conclusion that communication coupled with understanding is really a miracle.

I remember reading a Jaimie Buckingham book about the Holy Spirit and communication that seems to fit this thought train. It is after all the Holy Spirit that convicts us of our sin, etc. When we do something to hurt any person’s feelings, it is the quickening of the Holy Spirit that lets us know that we need to repent and ask forgiveness.

This was true during the early years of my marriage to Sandi. I would do something stupid, and at first it would take a day to admit I was wrong and apologize. As I grew in the spirit, that process only took a half a day—then a couple of hours and then within the hour. I will have to admit that I have probably lost some ground in this area.

But life is cyclical isn’t it. We do get to go through some of the same things a couple of times if we didn’t really get it the first time around.

To the point: It is hard for me in this blog or in my private journal to admit that I have made mistakes in my life and am sometimes (even now) a whiner. I don’t like whiners—or should I say I don’t like whiney behaviour. Poor old me and all of that—having what the southerners call a “pity party”.

But I am human and embody all that that implies.

Somehow I think all of what we needlessly seem to go through in life and in turn try to figure out is us living out of or under our shame. What I seemed to see in a flash this morning as I lisetened to Jonathon Helser sing in Wilkesboro was that ever since Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we have been living with the knowledge that we are sinners and impure vessels prone to bad thoughts, bad deeds and all the rest. We are always, at some level, aware of the shame we were born into.

Shame to me means living in the awareness or consciousness of our pitiful state—with all of our bad thougths, ambitions and motives in front of us on a hourly basis. This sense of shame keeps us from really accepting the love that God has for us—that He loved us so much He sent His Son to die for us—for our life to be lived in abundant thankfullness because of this.

The Israelites made sacrifice for sin but could never do away with the remembrance of it. Christ sacrificed His life so that we would not have to live in that state—kind of dirty, kind of clean. All of this is discussed in Hebrews 10.

So the question is this: if God doesn’t remember my sins, why do I? If I am accpeted in the beloved, why do I have such a hard time accepting myself—and ergo admiting when I am wrong and moving on with life.

This whole thing may be tied into another thought I had this morning as well: when did I stop serving Jesus and start serving the church—a man made interpretation of what the body of Christ is supposed to look like.

This is me in process—I think somewhere in the 5th inning—trying to get into a better place with who I am without the thought of serving someone else’s vision of what that should look like. Today is a good day—one of clarity and clouds. The earth is beinning to warm after a long winter and the time of planting seeds is almost upon us.

Enjoy your ride today.

Tonight I am thinking that it would be very easy to close this chapter on my life—the part where I care enough to put my thoughts on paper. Or on the internet or whatever.

It’s a valley season and I feel like I am am stuck in some sort of goo that won’t let me go. It’s that part of life where you have to dig real deep even to get out of bed in the morning in order to go to work. And like an accident, it probably could have been avoided had I read the road signs along the way.

But that is assuming that I even had my eyes on the road—that I wasn’t thinking about something or adjusting my CD player or talking with someone on the phone.

Life really is a effort sometimes and the tension between doing what you know is best and the path of least resistance is sometimes not even a part of the plan. Do I go swim at lunch time or order Huevous Rancheros at the local Mexican restaurant with my buddies. Do I go biking after work or go home and open a bottle of wine and let the evening roll smoothly off my palette.

I strive for a balance but either one or the other extremes generally wins out. When it’s the bike or the pool I feel more like life is under control—when it’s the wine or tv or mexican or chinese food I feel the slippery slope inching into my life. It is only a matter of time until I can almost hear the voices reminding me that I am getting older and really don’t have it all that much together. Not that those same voices are totally absent when I do the other. Nurture vs. Nature and all that stuff.

Be transformed by the renewing of your mind…comes to mind. Is that a road sign I almost missed. Could it really be that easy? Read the word and begin to believe that better things are just around the corner. Or am I sitting on top of those better times and don’t even realize it.

Yes…I have passed this way before and I am not really all that happy to be journeying here again. Much less use what precious time I have even discussing it.

Yesterday everything seemed so simple. Just do your best at work, give yourself to your family and church and enjoy the spring time in the mountains.

Life is a process of discovery. I like being upbeat and optimistic—but there is a part of me that can be negative and somewhat unforgiving towards myself.

The boat on the water analogy is somewhat appropriate it seems. When a storm comes along and knocks the boat off its familiar moorings it can be very disconcerting. Yet at the same time the storm might also get the boat out of the harbor and into the open sea where it can explore the rest of what’s out there to be explored.

Now I know in my life this dock was once the church or what I thought the church was supposed to be—the familiar dock or mooring. Sure, it needed a few repairs but I was more than up to the challenge—or so I thought.

In reality, the church doesn’t need repair so much as we need to find what it really was meant to look like in the first place—not what we have made it over the years. It’s sort of like that Matt Redman song that says:

I’m coming back to the heart of worship

And it’s all about You

All about You, Jesus

I’m sorry, Lord, for the things I’ve made it

When it’s all about You

All about You, Jesus

When I first heard that song several years ago I thought it really was that simple and it probably still is. Just get back to the main thing. What we don’t budget for is the fact that our enemy really doesn’t want us to leave the harbor and see the rest of the world. In a strange way he is really happy when we just hang around the old dock and occasionally put a new coat of paint on what we have built. We can take a couple of day trips occasionally but never lose sight of the familiar.

Most of the time I really do see that the boat is strong enough to take what the sea will throw at it and then some. Most of the time I feel secure in where the winds have taken me.

Right now I am going to find a scripture and head back to bed. Maybe today’s ride will be a better one.

Having lived in the mountains of North Carolina for almost 30 years, I mostly forget that we are loosely in what is known as the “bible belt”. That is until you find yourself in a Wal-Mart parking lot on an above-average-temperature-for-late-March Saturday morning. Every truck in the county where I live and maybe portions of Tennessee were parked in their parking lot. (I will leave it to you to figure out what relationship exists between trucks and living in the bible belt—it made sense to me at the time I thunk it)

It was hard to find a car anywhere because trucks are a lot taller and would naturally obscure a persons view from most anyplace in the lot. I drove a car and I remember seeing a few more here and there, but by and large it was trucks, trucks and more trucks.

I am not saying that this is bad at all: what man, at some level, doesn’t want a truck. I have had  two: a 1971 chevy long bed pick-up and when that died, I bought a 1949 chevy with the cool rounded fenders froma friend of mine.

It was on blocks, the bed was almost shot and the brakes didn’t work but it was love at first sight. After I fixed it up I drove it for a couple of years until I needed a van for our crafts business and that was the end of it. I sold it to a friend who turned it around in a couple of days and made several hundred off the sale. I got enough money for the van and some new tires and so I was happy.

The van lasted for a couple of years until I sold it to some guy for a $150 dollars. I think he gave me $100 and said that he would have the other $50 in a week and I never saw the rest of it. A year or so later I saw the guy in town but he didn’t recognize me so I didn’t mention the subject to him. We live and learn.

And that was my last truck. The place where I work has one and when I need to haul a load of something to the landfill, I borrow it when available. That way it only costs a few bucks for gas and I don’t have to make room for another vehicle in the driveway.

Anyway, as I was walking with my wife the other evening, I was, in between conversation with her, thinking about topics that could be considered “blog worthy”.

This past weekend was an example of a thought that could be expanded upon. It was beautiful. Upper 60’s to mid-seventies and a slight breeze. Friday was great—I took a day off my job—did lots of stuff and over the course of the weekend took two bike rides and did a lot of gardening. My thought about all of this was: If you gave a 100 people the assignment of creating a perfect weekend—it would have looked pretty much like we got it. Talk about Carolina blue skies and a few puffy clouds.

Weekends are a time to catch up and get some much needed R & R. I would even go so far as to say weekends are ordained by God. Not that you can’t cut your grass on Sunday or go out to eat—but the principle of taking a day of rest out of a workweek is still a wise thing to do.

I read something about young athletes that seems relevant to my point. The writer was proposing the hypothesis that the younger a person started playing at a professional level, the more likely they were to have injuries and not have as long a career as those who waited until later to start the professional grind. If you started professional playing at 15 you might last til you were 22. But if you waited a few years, you might make it to 35, Andre Agassi’s age at retirement.

Anyway—as Woody Guthrie so properly put it, “Take it easy…but take it!”

Enjoy your ride.

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I talked with my friend Josh Moose yesterday. I was out in the garden getting dirty and had just walked in the house to wash my hands when I heard my cell phone ringing. You might be asking yourself what the big deal is: we talk on the phone with our friends everyday. And you would be correct—except for the fact that Josh in Tanzania, Africa and I am in Boone, North Carolina, nearly a 24 hour plane trip apart.

He was using a software program called SKYPE which is a computer program that allows him to talk and his voice is then transferred to my phone over the internet. And other than a time or two when his voice seemed to fade, it was like he was in the same room.

It was 3:30 in the afternoon here and 10:30 pm there. He said the girls were having a night out on the town and he was making some calls and catching up with some friends. Several years ago, when I was in Africa myself, that same 30 minute call would have cost thirty or forty dollars to make. Technology is something else.

As we talked, and he told me of his plans, I was reminded once again about how long term goals are important to all of us—not just the missionary types like Josh and his wife Renee.

I was also struck by the idea that being a missionary is not really about getting people into a Sunday church service—but about introducing them to a living God—Jesus Christ. The desire a missionary has to bring Christ to a people group, is the fuel in their tanks—so to speak. It is what motivates them and helps them to get out of bed in the morning. It is this desire that allows them to sell everything they own for the sole purpose of reaching this people group for the Lord.

But really, what does that look like. First of all you have to be a part of something bigger than yourself. Then you have to have a place to live and trasportation to get to where you will be serving. You will have to know the language of the people group you hope to reach. All of this takes time—sometimes years of preparation.

I guess the thought is that the minute we start to exercise—we begin to lose weight—and I guess in a sense this is true. But the reality seems to be that it is only after we keep at something that we see the fruit of our endeavour.

In other words, what I was seeing as I talked with Josh was this: if the goal is to love people with the love of Christ, that process is well within our grasp today. Yes, we continue with our plans to learn the language and obtain transporation, etc. but we begin to sow the seeds of the gospel within each person we meet by loving them and bringing value to their lives, wherever we happen to be in our process at the moment.

Ultimately, the goal of a missionary is to bring Christ to a people within whatever culture they abide in. Christ is the hope of the world. And what better way to do that than to allow God to speak through us in the process of loving people.

I told Josh that if he continued in just being who he is, a person who likes to be friends and visit people where they live, after a few months, he will have reached a lot of people with the love that Christ has birthed in him and his wife for the people of Tanzania. Yes, those same people will someday have to make a decision to accept the Lord, and fellowship with other believers and go to church. But in the meantime, what they will remember most about their interaction with Josh and his wife, is that when they were yet sinners, they were loved and accepted.

Josh and his wife have chosen a life-style that is very focused and in the fast lane. But whether we find ourselves in Boone, North Carolina, or Tanzania, East Africa, the goal is the same—love as we have been loved and in so doing fulfill the law of Christ (Gal. 6:2).

Enjoy your day Josh and Renee!

To visit Josh and Renee’s website click here

As units of measurement go, a day is just about as simple as it gets. Once inch—one day—one dollar—it’s really very elementary math.

I started thinking about this as I was stepping out of the shower after a very successful day off from my job. I thought, “Here it is only 4 pm and I have already done almost a weekend’s worth of stuff in the garden, bought bird seed and coffee, picked up some seeds and fertilizer and taken a bike ride: all this before picking up my daughter and her friends from school at 3.”

Since I have worked at my job for almost 11 years, I get several weeks vacation at this point. It’s a “use it or lose it” policy and this year I tend to get most of what they have set aside for me. Now, when you like your job and there is always something to do, it is very hard to take all of the time you have coming to you. Deadlines are always looming and there are always projects that need attention. But time off pays dividends in big ways.

Today, I slept in until almost 8 o’clock. That’s because my wife Sandi took the kids to school. Then I made coffee, read a few pages in the bible (that Jonah was a real character, wasn’t he), played my guitar, cooked some eggs and all this before 9:30. Then I was out in the garden taking care of cleaning up stuff I should have done in the fall. Last night, knowing I would be home today, I burned the old corn stalks, raspberry canes and other trash from the garden I had piled up two weeks ago.

So today the plan was to get some new garden space tilled and clean up some planting beds and then plant some cilantro and spinach since my wife says it is a good planting day.

But back to the unit thing: we think in terms of days. What can I get done today—how was your day—and all the rest of the euphemisms we use to describe this passage of time. Today I took a day off from my job to get caught up on all the little things that seem to pile up…the things we couldn’t get done during one of those many days we have had up til now.

Having a day off is really a sacred thing: ordained by a Father who understands what we need even better than we do. And when you combine a day off with a little reading, a little gardening and a being in nature bike ride…that’s pretty cool to me.

And I still have the rest of the evening left. Enjoy your ride.

Yesterday was a good day—a “real” Sunday. Winter does not want to let go in the mountains and the temperature was just cold enough to make it not an outside work day. So I stayed inside and made that second pot of coffee and began to clean the basement.

And then 5 o’clock church. One of my jobs is to make the coffee and I had several cups during the service. A guy from Serbia spoke and we had a real good time.

But it is now 3:30 am and I’m wide awake—well not really wide awake in the sense that I am not tired—just awake enough that I can’t lie in bed and toss and turn any longer.

I made great progress in simplifying my life yesterday—finding and taking to the dumpster several boxes of stuff that I determined were no longer worth keeping. The place I cleaned is still somewhat of a mess—just enough so that I won’t be able to leave it alone to long. So you know what I will be doing after dinner on Monday—finishing the job I began on Sunday.

A guy from a sister church saw a picture during our praise and worship time which he shared with us during the end of the service. He was a forestry major in college and what he saw was a big forest fire. He said, and I have no reason not to believe him, that a big fire sounds very much like a storm at the beach. As the fire burns quckly through a conifer woods, it makes a noise like a mighty wind.

One of the interesting parts of what he said was the fact that fire is actually a useful thing and is used to clean up and open up a forest that has become stagnant. I remember reading about that process many years ago but had never seen the spiritual componant to it until yesterday.

It seems that in conifer forests, the seeds for rebirth are in the cone that drops to the ground and that until a fire hits it, the cone stays tightly closed and rots instead of reproducing. However, because of development and so forth, we have hindered nature in it’s normal course of action. Instead of letting fires do their thing, we stop them or keep them from happening and then the undergrowth builds up and when they do happen, there is too much fuel and the heat of the fire actually destroys what it was meant to just open up. In other words, when the undergrowth is thin, the fire burns quickly through the forest and the trees are just scortched—not really burned badly. Then the forest is opened up and the seeds in the ground can get the sun they need to reproduce and in time will replenish the forest.

In a spiritual sense, trials and tribulations in our lives are the fire, that when understood, can do their work and get rid of the stuff that keeps us from reproducing. In a strange way, fires bring simplicity into our lives. All this stuff that we surround ourselves with is really not as important as what is going on inside of us. I am not going to get all eastern and mystical and say that stuff is an illusion, but I am beginning to understand that concept in a different way.

Many teachings I have listened to lately have stressed the fact that the unseen realm is really more real than what we can see with our natural eyes. In 1 Timothy 6:6 Paul tells us that “…godliness with contentment is great gain.”

He doesn’t imply that simply owning stuff will bring us happiness. We need stuff, don’t get me wrong. A chef needs good tools in order to prepare a great meal. But what I am beginning to see after these many years is this: growing in God and allowing him to develop our character is really what life is all about—not the acquistion of wealth and stuff. It puts new meaning into the verse about seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all the rest of what we need will be added unto us. He knows our needs even before we ask.

So—as I enter my work-week, I am going to be thankful for what I have and for the fires that have passed through my life in recent months. Today can really be a time of re-birth and spiritual growth like never before. Once winter unleashes its’ grip, spring will bring the fresh rains and warmth that we need in order to plant our gardens and watch them grow.

Enjoy the day.