New Life'n

Butterflies, Paul, and 2 things about hope

Thing One: Perfect results are not the proof that God is doing the leading

Today, it’s easy to think of Paul as a formal, perfect apostle who started perfect, formal churches. In reality it was gritty, dangerous, scary, frustrating work that produced some good churches, and some that were a scandal (see 1-2 Corinthians).

It was all led by the Holy Spirit, yet much of it was a train wreck. The Holy Spirit didn’t wreck it, and Paul didn’t wreck it—wrecks are just the reality of a fallen world and fallen people.

Thing Two: The thing you think is the big deal may, in the end, not be the deal at all

Paul spent ten years planting those churches, doing a glorious, exciting work taking the Gospel where it had never been, and leaving something behind that could grow and do good. Then, readying a trip to headquarters in Jerusalem, his friends warned him that all his radical church planting was getting him in trouble and he would be arrested if he returned.

He went anyway.

They were right.

He was arrested and never planted another church. He lived the next ten years mostly in jail or on trial.

You can imagine him sitting in prison or under house arrest reflecting on the glory years of church planting. You can imagine him thinking, “I followed the Lord exactly as I felt he led, and this is what happens? Now I’m stuck just writing letters to friends and to the churches I started?”

The glory years were over, and all Paul could do was write those letters.

Today, all those churches he planted are gone.

The letters he wrote—because that’s all he had left—live, still guiding, instructing, and encouraging millions.

Butterflies morph from caterpillars. Sometimes hope morphs, too

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This is day 10 of 31 Days of Scary Hope: encouragement to go from IS to COULD BE. Start at the beginning HERE.

I hope...

I hope you see hope and good where you are now.

I hope you will not be ruled by how it looks and feels at the moment.

I hope you see that each moment is a step on a journey and part of a bigger and better thing, but that the journey can be scary.

I hope that you accept confusion, questions, crooked lines, fatigue, fog, loneliness, darkness, rejection, and low self-esteem as part of the journey of hope. These things come and go and have nothing to do with hope; they only have to do with how you feel about hope.

I hope you think and dream, but pursue your hope with faith and actions.

I hope you spend more time pursuing than regretting, second-guessing, and woe-is-me’ing.

I hope that even though your hope is in a Teagan 4-Drawer Chest from Crate&Barrel, you recognize and embrace when God designates this broken dresser on the Nester’s blog today as the true fulfillment of that hope. (that’s not a comment about furniture)

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Today is day 9 of 31 Days of Scary Hope: encouragement to go from IS to COULD BE. You can start at the beginning HERE.

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Hope as a road trip

Do you really know where you’re going?

Say you’re in San Diego, and you’re told to get on I-15 and “head to New York City.” Major road trip. You focus on New York, make your plans, and even start praying about New York. You clearly heard the words, “New York.” You’re excited. You envision experiencing the city. You make your reservations for the Empire State Building Observatory. You head out.

Days later, approaching a big cloverleaf intersection on I-80 in Pennsylvania, you’re told to take the exit and head south. Or maybe you hear nothing, you just confront a sign: All Roads To NYC Closed. This freaks you out. What’s the deal with that? You’ve been planning and dreaming and praying New York! You’ve driven for days! Now a change of plans? You’ve told everyone you’re going to New York! What about your hopes and dreams?

And you hear, “I never said we were going to New York. I said ‘head to New York.’”

You didn’t hear wrong. You didn’t mess up. God has not let you down.

You’re not always told the whole story up front. You may not know that until later. If you know the whole story, and it's long and tedious, you won’t plan all the steps needed to get there—you’ll jump ahead.

Sometimes the most important preparations for the ultimate destination are made in preparing for something else.

You may go to New York. You may go but not stay long. You may stay the rest of your life. You may take an exit at the last second, on the edge of the city, with the Empire State Building slowly moving from your windshield to your rear-view mirror.

Take ownership of the trip

Aim at the result; it’s the target, the thing God uses to focus us and keep us on track. But, without a direct promise from God, hold loosely the final destination.

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To receive 31 Days of Hope: encouragement to go from IS to COULD BE in a reader or your inbox, go HERE. You can start at Day 1 HERE.

'They' are right

They’re right about you and your hope. You’re right, too.

If it hasn’t happened by now, you need to face reality.

C’mon—twenty five years! You still believing in this thing?

You talk about reasons, but sounds like excuses to me. Lack of leadership, no money, disagreements over what the thing should look like—excuses.

Yes it’s a big, noble hope, but it’s been sitting there forever with nothing happening, and everyone sees it half-finished. Don’t you notice them pointing and laughing and just wishing it would go away?

You wish it would go away, too, don’t you. You look like a fool.

It’s going to turn out just like this thing—people laughed and pointed here, too. For twenty-five years it stayed just like this. What a bunch of losers to think this could happen.

Big, noble hopes can get stuck. 

Yet in the end it can become the most stately, notable thing around, and no one remembers a time when it wasn’t there.

The Washington Monument sat like this for twenty-five years. A whole generation of Americans supposed this was all it would ever be.

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To start at the beginning of 31 Days of Scary Hope : encouragement to go from IS to COULD BE, click HERE. To subscribe to automatically receive each day, click HERE. Other 31 Day journeys are HERE.

When the end of hope isn't

He had a dream and a vision. He started it, build it, grew it. It was his baby. But something needed to happen for the hopes to be fulfilled.

“I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” -- Steve Jobs

Only after that did we get Macs, iPods, iTunes, iPhones, and iPads.

Finding hope beyond the end of hope

How hopeless can it get, and yet still happen?

David’s hope was to be a king. It was never his idea, but he didn’t shy away from it. It was not wishful thinking. It was a promise—hope anchored in a promise from someone who never breaks promises. Most of the things we hope for are not promises; David's was.

It ain’t happening

The promise of the job and the role came, and then David ran for ten years from Saul, the guy holding the job promised to David. Saul tried to kill David, as if he was guilty of something horrible. He wasn’t guilty at all. In fact, totally innocent, and a better man than Saul.

If you were promised something, and you knew it was a promise, and then you had a chance to remove the thing standing in the way of the promise coming true, would you remove it?

What if your godly friends all told you that God himself had clearly given you the opportunity to remove the obstacle, that this opportunity was a sign God wanted you to do it? Then would you remove the obstacle?

David would not. Several times he had the chance to stop the fellow who was persecuting him. He had a clear chance to take the guy out, to right the wrong of injustice that was preventing the fulfillment of God’s promise.

David would not.

Rewarded with more trouble

David is only human, and like all of us, has his limits, and after he can take it no longer, he finally goes over to the other side, to the side of his enemies. He thinks this is his only escape from the man trying to kill him for no reason, the man standing in the way of the promise of the hope.

But even those enemies don’t trust him. They won’t let him fight with them. They send him away.

He leaves, and arriving discouraged in his home camp, he discovers that all his family members, and the families of his closest friends, have been taken captive by another enemy.

How much worse can it get? 

This is his reward for trusting God?

This is his reward for believing the promise God made ten years ago?

This is his reward for having hope based on a promise from an infallible promise-giver?

It doesn’t get any lower than this. No hope; even your enemies reject you; your family is gone; and your closest friends are grumbling and complaining, and ready to stone you.

Now what?

“But David strengthened himself in the Lord his God.”

In this renewed strength David took the only next step he knew, and led his men to rescue their families. It worked. Everyone was brought back safe.

While they were doing that, off in the distance, Saul, the man in David’s way, was killed in battle.

Everything just changed.

David was king.

Everything changed as soon as it got to the lowest moment. God seems to love that.

Finding strength in the Lord your God is no guarantee your hope will be fulfilled. But it is strength for one more step than you think is possible.

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To receive 31 Days of Hope: encouragement to go from IS to COULD BE in a reader or your inbox, go HERE. You can start at Day 1 HERE.

Right to the edge of hope

Part of the 31 Days of Scary Hope series. We’re looking at stories that encourage us to go from IS to COULD BE.

This story is about shoe sales, decorating on a budget, and fudge without calories.

Psyche! Just kidding! I said that because I know it’s all girls reading and I don’t want you to stop when you find out what it’s really about.

Because this is actually a story with references to war and armies and generals. Ha!

Seriously, it is. You don’t put that in bold, do you?

But it’s not really about any of that.

This story is about how close you can get to losing hope, and how it can so go the other way.

George C. Marshall is not a household name today. Sixty years ago, he was. But, almost not.

Marshall was a career soldier, a great organizer, gifted in identifying and inspiring leaders.

He wanted to be Chief of Staff; top guy in the Army and advisor to the President. Guys can be ambitious like that. When you’re good at something and you’ve done it for thirty-six years, you want to go as far as you can go.

But, Marshall was getting too old.

He needed to be Chief of Staff by his sixtieth birthday. You had to be able to serve four years as Chief before retirement. When the current Chief was leaving, five guys were ahead of Marshall in the seniority line. However, the President could pick whoever he wanted. The candidates campaigned for the job through friends, insiders, and the newspapers.

Daring your hope to come true

Marshall would not campaign. He stopped people who tried to intercede for him. He turned down a high profile speech opportunity because he thought it might look like he was using it to get the job. He said he got where he was by “attending to business” and by letting that speak for him, and he wasn’t going to change.

During one meeting with the President unrelated to the Chief of Staff issue, Marshall was the only one to disagree with the President. At the end of the session, the others consoled him over having blown his chances for advancement.

He’s months from the end of his last chance at fulfilling his hope, and he won’t stop being who he is, even at the risk of losing his hope.

That’s scary.

President Roosevelt picked him.

The rest really is history.

In three years Marshall built the army up from pathetic to the greatest war machine in history. Americans owe him.

The President wouldn’t let him lead the D-Day invasion because he was too valuable in Washington. Eisenhower, serving under Marshall, led it and became President.

In the next eleven years Marshall served as Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was Time magazine’s Man of the Year.

If everybody had known all that, they would have picked him for Chief of Staff sooner. But they didn’t know.

You never know

It was all a few months away from looking very different for him.

From beer to eternity: yes, people change. I did.

31 Days of Scary Hope : encouragement to go from IS to COULD BE.

Yesterday, you heard a bit of my wife’s story. Today, mine. Neither one of us could change. But we did. See, there’s hope.

That guy holding the kid in the picture at the top of the page?

That’s me, holding the Nester. I’d been drinking for maybe two years by then. Out of sight on the left side of the picture is an old garage, and on the dirt floor in that garage are dozens of empty quart beer bottles. In the cellar of the house out of sight on the other side of the picture are maybe a hundred more bottles. I don’t know why I let them collect. Maybe they were my friends, and I hated to let them go.

I drank three quarts of beer a day for 5,187 days.

I know because I know the day I started and the day I quit, and I can add.

Sometimes I drank more than three quarts in a day, sometimes less. In a year I might go one day without drinking.

I never drank at work, never got in trouble for drinking. When I quit after 14 years, I never went through withdrawal. I was not physically addicted, but I was mentally and emotionally consumed with drinking and making sure I always had enough in reserve. I was a functional alcoholic. This was dangerous because nothing was going to happen to make me quit.

I tried to stop. I could go a few hours. Never a whole day, unless circumstances made drinking impossible. After a few years, I realized I was an alcoholic and became resigned to it. This was the way it was going to be, and I would never quit, and I would die early. At the time, I thought ‘early’ meant thirty more years, so there was no sense of urgency. I could pretend it wasn’t real, and the beer was glad to help me pretend.

I hid my drinking and lied to my wife.

This is not good for a marriage. Worse, it was not good for Brenda. What a horrible thing to do to your wife. But beer was a god, and I served that god. It took years after I quit for her to trust me.

Drinking was lots of work. Calculating, hiding, lying, passing out on the floor – it wears on you. One day Brenda confronted me and in a moment of weakness I confessed. She didn’t get mad. Not yelling at me was the worst thing she could have done. If she got mad, I could get mad back. But she didn’t and I was left with nothing to think about but despicable me. All I knew then was I wasn’t going to drink the rest of that day or tomorrow.

That was the end of it.

It was supernatural. I totally stopped. I didn’t try to quit. I just stopped.

You know what was most supernatural? I didn’t know Jesus yet. That was still two years away. But he took it away from me anyway, as if it went right along with a miraculous salvation experience that would have people cheering in church. He can do anything he wants, you know, any way he wants. This was how he wanted it.

Years later, a friend told me, “I can’t imagine you with a beer in your hand.” Which is funny because I once couldn’t imagine myself without a beer in my hand. That’s how much things changed.

Marriage now? I never knew anything this good existed.

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You can read a more thorough version of this journey at From Beer to Eternity: a little story of addiction and beyond.

To start at the beginning of this 31 day series of hope, click HERE.

31 Days of Scary Hope (day 3) : People don’t change? Yes they do

Stories are the track record of hope in time and space. Here come some. To start at the beginning of 31 Days of Scary Hope : encouragement to go from IS to COULD BE, click HERE. To subscribe to automatically receive each day, click HERE. Other 31 Day journeys are HERE.

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“Lord, how long can she go on like this?”

For years I would lay on my back in bed next to my wife, with my arms raised straight up in the air like a dead horse, eyes open, praying through the ceiling. She was asleep and never knew.

Brenda lived an agitated, anxious life. You didn’t usually notice on the surface, but it was always there inside her like a distracting buzz.

At any time we all have several everyday issues we’re living with that are a potential source of anxiety: marriage, finances, children, work, friendships, expectations, health, self-esteem, desires, needs... These issues rotate, may be resolved, disappear for awhile, and return. New issues enter the rotation, and old ones dissipate. It’s part of life.

For Brenda, her soul seemed to say, “I can’t have peace until all that stuff is fixed.” Which is impossible.

Friends misunderstand you? No peace.

Pain or headache that lasts longer than a day? No peace.

Husband within twenty feet of a woman? No peace.

At every moment of every day, for twenty-five years, one or more of these words applied to her: jealous, insecure, argumentative, anxious. All under the surface, not yelling and screaming, but often busting out in ways that confused me, and always mixed with a gentle personality. Gentle and agitated; that was her.

She was a sweetheart and I loved her madly. Her suffering killed me.

One day I came home from work and she was reading a book. She held it out to me, pointed to a page and said, “Is this true?” It was something about the finished work that Jesus Christ accomplished on the cross, not just for heaven, but for here right now.

“Oh, yeah, that’s true.”

That was the moment everything changed

A supernatural peace was born in her. She became a woman of grace, instinctively trusting the sufficiency of Jesus Christ for everyday living. She had been a Christian for twenty-five years, but still believed there was something left undone in her. Then God personally showed her, in a way I don’t understand, that all her un-dones were done on the cross with Jesus; and she believed it.

That was thirteen years ago. Her life has not been the same since, and neither has mine.

The full story is something she’ll have to tell, and maybe she will during this 31 Days.

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The hope: yes, radical change happens

The scary: yes, you can go your whole life “like this.” And sometimes a long, long time of “like this” is a necessary part of the hope.

31 Days of Scary Hope (day 2): the un-scary part

Any other men doing this 31 Days thing? (chirp...chirp...) Fortunately, I have experience being a lonely man in the Fam. To subscribe to automatically receive each day of 31 Days of Scary Hope : encouragement to go from IS to COULD BE, click HERE. We're still just starting...

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Hope is a wonderful word

It’s the little voice inside you chirping, Really? Do you think that could happen? Your big outside voice says, no way, but you want so bad to believe the little voice. However, it’s not a wishy-washy, dreamy thing. Real hope is based on facts, truth, and a vision of real possibilities.

But

We also have a narrator inside our heads, and I think for most of us that narration is usually negative. It sure is for me. Do you naturally, on your own, think positive about yourself, other people, and circumstances? Left on your own, with no one to talk to, can you not get depressed? I think it’s part of our fallen human condition. The Bible tells us to think about good and positive things, and to “set your mind on things that are above.” The Bible has to tell us that because we don’t naturally do it. We need help.

One way to get help is to see what’s truly possible. To see that the little voice is saying things that really CAN happen. Not that it will happen, but it COULD. You need to see that, and know it, and lift your eyes up from the ground of your present circumstance.

This hope is not that God wants to bless you

Of course, you do want that. But, the hope we’re talking about is in a God who acts to bring glory to him and good for people. God does this all the time, but often it’s not recognized or appreciated. People usually ride the Good and Glory Train without giving the Engineer credit, and even take the credit themselves, but that doesn’t stop God from doing it anyway.

He seems to enjoy taking people and circumstances from IS to COULD BE, even when he doesn’t get credit. He’s been doing it for a long time.

He’s doing it with you and me right now, but we can hinder him by not not participating. You participate with your actions, or your attitude, or your faith, or all of that. It’s unique for each person and circumstance. No formulas.

This hope is part of why God made you

31 Days of Scary Hope is a series of everyday scenes and stories of people and circumstances going from IS to COULD BE. I hope it will encourage you to participate with what God might want to do in your life. Together, we’re all on this journey of hope, and we’re going to lift up our faces from the negative, depressed thinking that says we’re stuck and things can’t change. We’ll lift our heads and face the scary.

But don’t misunderstand

When you read a story here about, say, Sylvester Stallone writing Rocky, I’m not saying God worked in him to write it, and that it was God’s idea. I am saying I believe God made people with a drive to create, do good, be fruitful and multiply, have authority over things, and to not be alone. You were not created to live a disconnected, depressed, non-contributing, helpless, static life of a victim.

God did not make Sylvester Stallone write Rocky, but he created a human being with a drive to create, contribute, connect, and leave a mark. Acknowledging that drive, cooperating with it, and giving credit to the drive-giver is up to you and me. I hope these scenes and stories encourage you to do that.

What are you driven to create, to contribute, to connect with, to mark?