Excellence Now

Growing up in church I got really comfortable with "church speak" or what we would jokingly call Christianeze. You'd hear pastors throw life changing terms around with reckless abandon. 

"Chase after God! "They'd say. "Fulfill your calling" was always popular. And of course, "Change the world!" was a good go-to. 

Did anybody ever stop to think what any of these really mean? Did they ever stop to think the very real implications of what following any of these Christian charges of faith would look like? Any of them. Let alone all of them. I'm not suggesting most of these godly men didn't have my best at heart. But has anyone ever really dissected what any of this looks like? What it really means to truly "chase after God" or to "fulfill your calling?" 

Growing up these were always very dramatic, sensational, emotion-laced commands. These were especially popular messages every summer at the annual Jesus camp. For all the stereotypes you can imagine, these things could actually be somewhat effective and I saw a lot of people really find their stride in God at these things. By the same token, whatever token stereotype of hyper-inflated spirituality you want to tag on these yearly pilgrimages is probably accurate too. But every summer there would be a handful of teenagers or even adults that would come back to the real world with a tangible, marked change in their lives. A few to whom "changing the world" wasn't just a cute form of hyperbole to accessorize their faith with, but a genuine newfound fervor and passion for their Savior. But for many of us, this one week Jesus acid trip was just that, one week of Nirvana on Earth where you could talk big, live right and start or end every sentence with "Amen" and "Praise God." A week where you vowed to give up any and all fleshly pursuits for the higher calling of Christ. Also for many of us, the one-week Jesus honeymoon ended all too soon. Halfway through the year we were reminded of the big changes we promised to make for the Lord and how short we were falling of that. -Where is your fire from this summer? they would ask. 

One of my favorite scenes in The Other Guys is where Mark Wahlberg gives Will Ferrell a very inspired, emotionally-charged speech about being a hero. 

-This is our moment! The city is dying for a hero! And we can be those heroes! 

Will Ferrell's response is excellent. 

-Really? A hero? What about nine million responsible citizens stepping up and doing their part? 

Cracks me up every time! 

But it relates a lot to our faith doesn't it? What does the world really need? A bunch of burnt out Ted Haggards or Benny Hinns? Where the world can't figure out if our faith is for real or if we're a blind, ignorant mob following after these celebrity pastors the way trailer parks across the South chase and profess their faith for WWE wrestlers? What would make more of a difference? Extolling your church's latest monstrosity of an auditorium or quietly living your faith without wavering or defecting? A banner rattling off how many new members you coaxed into the fold or quietly showing love to the man that has his world falling apart? Let me ask you this: which looks more like love? Is it tagging an entire group of people as lazy and stupid when their coping mechanism for this economic environment is demonstrating and picketing? Or is love coming beside them with grace, compassion and love, extending a hand saying -maybe I don't agree with everything you're saying, but I love you as a human. I love you as a child of God. Which is it?

I've been praying a lot lately about what my calling is in this season. What I should really be focused on. Admittedly, I feel as though I could use some re-focusing after this year. If I am completely honest and transparent, I would say I have not been chasing the best God has for me for a little bit now. Yes, I love the Lord, probably more now than I ever have. But the hypocrisy of the church and the bigotry of those professing the faith has definitely soured my view on "fellowship" with those who claim to be the Body. I don't have a lot of that figured out, even now. But I know this. God has the best for me. Now. Not when I'm done grappling with these issues of the faith. Not when I have all the answers. Now. Not when I feel like it. Not when I feel "worthy." Now. 

And this is my calling: to be here. Now. This is my excellence. To walk in faith, to chase after Him in the midst of the wondering and wandering. To trust and walk even when life doesn't make sense. Even when the Body hurts and disappoints. To be the Body to those that may never set foot in a multi-million dollar facility complete with lights, sounds and technology that would rival most concerts today. 

I used to believe that "walking in your faith" a lot of times meant being a Christian with a Bible Man costume buttoned and hidden under your street clothes ready to go at a moment's notice. To preach the faith from the steeples to the mountain tops. To cast out the demons of drinking, partying and overt sexuality from the world around you by casting holy stones and condescending glances at the mention of any of these vices. To be "set apart" meant to let the world know exactly how much holier you were because you didn't participate in these extracurriculars. I'm learning it is the exact opposite. I'm learning that walking in your faith involves a lot more walking and a lot less preaching. In fact, I would venture to say that walking in your faith ought to involve a lot less "set apart" and a lot more doing life together. I was talking to a friend lately that's been burned by the church more times and with more fervor than a heretic in Salem. He said to me -You know, it's sad that the world thinks Christians are full of shit, but it's even more sad that for the most part, they're right. And it resonated with me. That's exactly what the world thinks. That's exactly how they feel. If you're not familiar with Gandhi's quote by now, you should be "I like your Jesus, but your Christians are so unlike him." And sad to say, most of us cannot argue with them. It's like a psychotic relationship the church has with the world it was sent to save. For every example of holy works, feeding the poor, helping widows and disaster relief, there are just as many examples of hate, intolerance and bigotry that nullifies them. Some idiot pastor Tweeting some misogamist message, some church broadcasting and boasting how much good works are coming out of their building, some believer blindly endorsing hateful and racist politics under the banner of 'Christian values.' So yes, the world has plenty of reasons to believe the Body is a limp, useless quadriplegic with only a mouth that moves and unfortunately moves too much and all too often, in the wrong direction. 

So I don't know exactly what I'm doing in this season, if I can be completely transparent. I don't know what the balance is for me between work and life. I struggle with a lot of issues in the church. But I still know this, my Jesus loves me. He loves the world. He wants the best for me and he wants the best for them. And in this season, excellence for me is walking in that, believing that and hopefully having chances to share that with those that have been burned, isolated, ostracized, excommunicated or otherwise forgotten by the church. 

It was in one of those summer camps that I very clearly heard the Holy Spirit tell me this: You are not forgotten. You are not less-than. You are not ignored and you are not alone. I love you and I have the best for you. 

That is my message in this season. I know I'm loved and I'm not forgotten. I know my God is big and my Jesus loves me unconditionally. Unfortunately, there are literally millions of people who have seen or heard someone in the Body show them otherwise. Excellence for me is to be a quiet, understated voice that seeks out an audience and loves unconditionally. A voice that is not boastful, proud, self-seeking or arrogant. I don't have everything figured out personally or spiritually. But I don't have to know everything to know this: I am loved and I am not forgotten. The world Jesus came for is loved and not forgotten. This is excellence for me and maybe in chasing that I can find the best for my life. Maybe in chasing that I can fulfill my calling and maybe in that I can change the world.

You were created to be loved and accepted…

What's amazing about this, is that you already are…the sadness is that few of us grasp this…

Went to see Hillsong this weekend and there was a really powerful moment for me where they stopped to speak for a second and this has stuck with me since. But it’s the idea that when Christ hung on the cross, God took the most vile, most wretched, the dirtiest representation of chastisement, of evil, of sin—the cross, and made it, for all eternity, the one representation of love overcoming sin, love overcoming separation, love overcoming evil, love overcoming all. See, God hanging on the cross was no accident, it was no after-thought. It wasn’t His impulsive correction to our ‘oops’ of sin. The Bible says that He planned this from the beginning. God knew the moment He made man that man would let Him down. That man would separate himself from God and that God would have to fix it. Yet, He still created us. He still breathed into us; He still formed us in His image. Think about that for a second. How many times are we disappointed to find out that the people in our lives aren’t quite as awesome as we wanted them to be? How many times do we ‘cut people’ out of our lives for the sake of avoiding pain? And not that that’s bad; in fact, I’m a huge proponent that it’s healthy to prune your social circle from time to time. But we don’t have the foresight that God has. We don’t have the omniscience to know who will let us down and who will hold true. But God did. God does. Yet, He still chose to form us and more than that, He chose to love us. LOVE. The Creator of the universe, the very same One that holds the universe in the breadth of His hand loves us. He madly, deeply, passionately, insanely loves us. With an intensity and furor that we can’t begin to comprehend. Paul said –I wish you could know how high, how deep, how far and how wide His love is for you… unfathomable. 

So what? What’s gorgeous about the cross is that God took an ephemeral, perceived failure and made it an eternal victory. He did that. He does that. He takes your greatest failures, your biggest hang-ups and your biggest mistakes and makes them the source of your biggest strength. He takes what the enemy put in your life, or many times, what we allowed in our lives and boldly, loudly, vehemently and lovingly declares –you are not a failure! This is not your failing mark! You are not this mistake. Yes, you made a mistake, but you are not a mistake. You may have lost at this, but you are not a loser. I think, unfortunately, many times as Christ-followers we’re really good at accepting forgiveness and accepting the basic tenets of Christianity and we stop there. We think that because God gave us our ticket to heaven we’re set. But no, Jesus came to give us life. Life here, life now. Life beyond abundance. My favorite scripture in Ephesians says that God will take your biggest, baddest, wildest dreams and use that as his starting point for your life. He’ll take what you can’t even begin to imagine and that’s His floor. That’s His starting point. But many times, I think we don’t even to realize how real this love is. This love that saved us, this love that rescued us. He takes the very thing that made us feel like a failure and uses that as a catalyst to make us victors, conquerors, over-comers and all those other cute-sy scriptures we like to quote but never fully understand. 

I think if God would have us understand one thing as His people, it would be this: I love you. I accept you. I love you and I accept you. I know all, I see all, I know where you’ve failed and I know where you’ll fail. Yet I still love you. I still love you and I still accept you. Just how you are. If you never changed anything about you, I would still love you and still accept you…Yes God wants us to grow, yes, He wants us to progress, but if He didn’t love us until we made progress, then it wouldn’t be real love would it? 

I've been thinking a lot about this, and if you can punch a hole in the theory, please do. But I’m starting to believe, that most of our problems, most of our issues stem from our misunderstanding of God’s love for us. And I don’t mean logical understanding, I think a lot of us ‘get’ it. But I mean, intrinsic, deep-rooted, unshakable, understanding of His love for us. It’s a simple theory, but entertain me…if the most powerful, loving, amazing, wonderful Being in all creation—in fact, the Creator of creation, loves us and accepts us, then why do we look for it somewhere else? Because we don’t fully ‘get’ it. But we all do don’t we? We date that girl or that boy for a bit too long because somewhere, on some level we’re waiting for their approval, for their acceptance, their love, when all along our gut is screaming -RUN! She’s crazy! Why do girls have ‘daddy issues’? Because there was a man that was supposed to love and accept them, but failed at it. Why do we, as men, do stupid things to show off our moxie and our bravado in our younger years? Because we want our friends to think we’re cool right? We want to be accepted. I feel like I could write a never-ending list of these things. But it’s true. If we never learn to accept that our God, our Creator, our Redeemer loves us and accepts us, we’ll continue to look for it everywhere else. In our careers, in our cars, in our clothes, in our relationships, in our goals. Can you imagine the power, the freedom, the life we would have if we learned to walk with the understanding that the Father loves us and accepts us? What if you understood this from the beginning? Personally, I can think of a pile of mistakes I would have never chased down if I had. 

I learned that this weekend. I am not my failures. I am not my mistakes. I don’t have to redeem myself, I don’t have to prove myself and I don’t have to barter, plead or beg for love or acceptance. My Father loves me and accepts me for who I am and for what I am. Yeah, maybe it’s a bit campy and maybe even a bit of arrested personal growth. But I’m learning. I’m learning and I’m growing. And for that, I’m grateful. I’m grateful that He loves me and accepts me. I’m grateful I don’t have to seek it out, pursue it, wait for it, ask for it, or otherwise earn it. People won’t always treat you like this, but your Father does. And if you can understand that, it won’t much matter how people treat you. 

2011 is a party…

So how is 2011 panning out so far? Not bad so far. I think I have too much on my heart to really spill all of it here, but I'll try to hit some of the bigger things. Seriously, I have such an expectancy for this year that I'm probably writing on a daily basis, most, I'm obviously not publishing, but God is really pouring some things in my heart here that I'm really excited about.

Integrity. Again. I know I've talked about this a lot over the past six months, but it won't go away. If anything, it's moved itself in and made itself comfortable in my space and invaded just about every nook and cranny it could find. And I love it. I'm not perfect by any stretch of the truth. But this is thankfully one thing God has really been dealing with in my heart. I want to be a man of integrity. I want God to say that I'm a man of integrity. And recently, I've come to a bit of a new understanding of what exactly this is. In 1 Kings 3:6 Solomon says of David …"You showed faithful love to your servant my father, David, because he was honest and true and faithful to you." Honest and true and faithful. David. This dude messed up more times than most other biblical figures, but God still honored him. And loved him. And called him faithful! Why? We've all heard the sermons that David was a man after God's heart etc. etc. Personally, I think the key is in the first two words, honest and true. I'll cut to it. If I can't be honest and true with God, then how can I ever be honest and truthful with anyone else? Not with myself, not with my friends, not anyone I come in contact with. But because David knew God in such a deep, intimate way, he had the allowance to be honest and true with God. If anyone understood God's mercy and grace it was David. If anyone understood God's redemptive power and perfect timing, it was David. I'll never be David; which is probably both good and bad. I never want to steal anyone's wife and then murder the man, but I also will probably never slay a literal giant in front of my countrymen and have the king give me his daughter. But I do want God to say that I have been truthful and honest with him. And for the most part, I am. In fact, that's one of the things that I have absolutely loved about these last six months. It's no secret that at times it's been a bit lonely, a bit disappointing and a bit disheartening. But if there is one thing I learned in the process is to be honest with God. So I am. He's heard my frustrations, he's heard and seen my tears, he's heard my excitement. And I can honestly say that to this point, I've hidden nothing from him. So if David was counted as faithful because he could be honest with God, then honest is what I'll be. Sometimes I tell God how psyched I am about what he's doing in my day-to-day and other days, I just have to be honest and say –God, this sucks! One last thought here, ever notice how Adam, who hid from God, was never described as honest and true? Just a thought.

February is here. And while that is exciting on some level it's also a bit anti-climatic. I've dedicated these last six months to not dating anyone. But I would be lying if I said I didn't want to. More than that though, I want to be a man that can keep his word and can honor a commitment. And not that being single was all that difficult, but it's just one of those things that when you focus on not doing something, all of a sudden it becomes this huge elephant in the room. There were ups and downs at work, with my family, personally; just some good days and bad that I wished I had someone to share them with. But I didn't. And that wasn't horrible; this was just the season God had me in. So what did I learn? A lot, actually. And while I won't pretend like I would not love to have someone to share and do life with, I also don't expect God to magically drop some amazing woman in my life as a reward for some semi-pious endeavor and study into the dynamic of being a single man in his 20s. But none of this changes the fact that God is good to me. All the time. When I feel I deserve it and when I feel like I don't. What did I learn? This might be the biggest thing. Bigger than integrity. Bigger than discipline. Bigger than even the person I marry. I want to look like him. I want to act like him. I want to love like him. I want to hate like him.

I re-discovered what it means to love Jesus on a deep, molecular, root-changing level. I want to be like Jesus. Forgive me if this isn't some Earth-shattering theology or epiphany, but this is what he's spent the last six months engraining in me and maybe just recently allowed me to discover. I want to love like Jesus loved. I want to treat people the way Jesus did. When I try to imagine how Jesus would treat people today, I think of two sets of people that deeply impacted and shaped me to be the man I am today. I want to be as cool as a bartender and as solid as a youth pastor. I think that's how Jesus would do it. For all the years I spent in bars and parties trying to 'find myself' and just being a dumb kid, I always remember the bartenders. Well, sort of remember. But you know what I remember? The bartenders are always the life of the party. They talk to anyone, befriend anyone and serve anyone. And they always want you to have more. The bartender's sole purpose at a bar or party is to make sure you are enjoying yourself. I don't mean to offend anyone's sensibilities about Jesus, but to me, that's how I see him interacting with people. With bad people. With screwed up people. With lost people. He would say things like 'I have life and life abundantly.' 'Drink from this well and you will never be thirsty again.' 'Your faith has healed you.' I don't see a pissed off Jewish guy telling people where they're screwing up, I see a man that loves people and wants the best for people. I want to be that man. Then there were my youth pastors that always believed in me. Even when I gave them no reason to believe in me. They prayed for me, they cared for me and they were there for me every, single, stinking time I dropped the ball and needed an ear or a shoulder. I see Jesus treat people like that too. Who would have the gall nowadays to stand between a woman caught in adultery and her accusers? We're happy with ourselves if we give the homeless guy on the corner our left-overs and make small talk and pretend to remember his name. I want to be like Jesus. I was really good at being a bartender at a lot of parties and I love watching God turn even the most screwed up people-like myself-and give them a purpose, a hope and a life. I want to bring that to people. I want to love like him. I want to love his people—the screw ups, the misfits, the oddballs and even the hypocrites. You know what's crazy? For as much as we like to bash the religious hypocrites, these are the very same people Jesus cried over! How easy it is for me to forget that Jesus loves them too.

I want to hate like him. Yeah, God hates. And I know this is almost taboo to talk about because of all the wackadoos that claim to know who God hates and never focus on what God hates. But I want to hate like him. Read your Bible, there are lists and lists of things God says he hates, injustice, sin, uneven scales, his people not being cared for, hypocrisy. See, God doesn't hate anybody. He does hate things and circumstances. I want to hate the things he hates. I want to hate injustice so much that it moves me to action. I want to hate poverty so much that it brings me to tears. I want to hate sin destroying people's lives so much that it brings me to my knees. I want to bring Jesus to people. The Jesus that loved people and hated sin. Not the bitter, lame, ignorant, handicapped counterfeit so many churches and Christians try to pass off as legit. Not the version of Jesus so many people have seen that it scares them from his church and his presence altogether.

And what about this whole dating sabbatical? I honestly can't tell you how much closer I am to finding my wife now than I was six months ago. All I can do is trust and know that God knows my heart and knows what He's doing. I have to trust and believe his word that he has only the best for me, that he takes my biggest, baddest, wildest imaginations and uses that as a starting point for my life. Who is she and what does she look like? Only he knows. But if the ceiling of my imagination is his starting point, I've given him some pretty good material to start with, but my Jesus has never cheated me and he's never shorted me. So whatever he has in store for me, I know he'll blow my mind. There are some very specific lessons and thoughts I picked up in these last six months that I might jot down later. But for now, I control what I can control and focus on bringing this party to the world. And maybe, somewhere in this big party of the Redeemer gathering his redeemed, I'll find her—sharing her cocktail of love, kindness and cool with this broken world.