New Life'n

Family Man

"This is not what I was headed for when I began...this is much better than..."

(Andrew Peterson.  Thanks BTW.)

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Give me hunger, pain and want,

Shut me out with shame and failure

From your doors of gold and fame,

Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

 

But leave me a little love,

A voice to speak to me in the day end,

A hand to touch me in the dark room

Breaking the long loneliness.

    --Carl Sandburg, from "At the Window"

They would not listen, they did not know how

Do you know this man?  I didn't realize we had photos of him.  We should, though; he grew up while Lincoln was President and there were photos then -- I always thought he lived way before that.  

They called him "the redheaded madman."  After he died, they started calling him a genius.  He tried to love people, but few loved him back.  If you get famous, people start saying you were misunderstood, but maybe people at the time perfectly understood and you were just a hard person to love.

He wanted to be a minister, but flunked.  He only did the work he's famous for for 10 years -- and most of his fame came from what he did in the last two years of his life.  He was only 37 when he killed himself. 

You know how you hold your digital camera out and take your own picture?   He did the same thing...

Credibility

He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen -- Acts 10:41

This is the biggest thing that's ever happened!  A man is dead and comes back to life!  Why wouldn't he let everyone see him?  Wouldn't that convince more people?  Wouldn't there be more people to spread the news?  Wouldn't that finally prove something to all those doubters and to the ones who killed him?  Why choose only certain ones?

For many days he appeared to those who came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, the very ones who are now his witnesses to the people -- Acts 13:31

These are the ones who had been with him the most, the longest.  No one knew him better.  They knew him alive.  They saw him killed.  They knew he was dead.  And now they knew he was alive again. 

No one was going to be able to say they had been fooled.  They could be accused of lying (all saying the same lie! and later willing to die for it!).  But they could not be accused of being mistaken.

It's like he's saying, "Look, if you're not going to believe these guys, you're not going to believe anyone.  And even if he appeared to YOU, you'd wonder if it was really him, and even if you did believe it, someone would come up to you and talk you out of it."

Moving things is hard

I follow Texas Longhorns football -- online, thru blogs,and on Sportsline during games.  And Indiana University basketball.  The Panthers, too, only I can see them on TV.  I have to stop myself from being too interested. 

It's easy to think about sports.  There's no resistance,  I don't have to move anything.

That probably means it's not very important.  Because moving important, valuable things is a challenge.  There's resistance -- it could be people or circumstances or my own limitations, or spiritual (yes, the Devil).  It takes effort and work to overcome inertia and the temptation to sit still, go easy, be comfortable.  It takes perseverance and prayer and faith to not give up.

The temptation is to avoid this.  You can work hard and long, and yet still be lazy.  Lazy in not committing to be involved with God in valuable movements. 

It takes work to move furniture into an empty room -- to create a room that wasn't there before the work.  It takes work to move furniture around in a room -- to change what was there before the work.

It's a lot easier to work when you don't have a choice -- when you have to because if you don't, the consequences will be worse than the work.

But what do you do when you have a choice?  Or THINK you have a choice?  If you feel like God wants you to do something, but you're not sure, does that mean you have a choice?