In a comment to my post on My Experience or The Bible, Peter wrote something that caught my eye – “But is it really possible to interpret Scripture without any sort of tradition.”

Every day I make decisions about how to live my life based on my beliefs. These decisions (often unknowingly, and simply by routine) can become traditions from the “this is what/how I do” connotation. I find myself routinely praying a blessing for a cheeseburger that I “know” isn’t healthy – for example. I’ve made a tradition of blessing my meals.

It causes me to think – if my current views/beliefs/understandings of scripture affect my actions and what I do; and if my actions, from repetition, become traditions – I have to be careful to ascertain exactly what it is that I’m passing on to the next generation. Am I passing on the action/tradition/experience because it was based on what I believe; or, am I passing on the beliefs in hopes to impact the actions/traditions/experiences of others? When I teach my son through my actions (by praying for every meal) do I make the attempts necessary to communicate the beliefs behind the action or do I merely expect him to follow my action and catch the belief on his own?

I wonder what the Church Fathers would have us take away from their lives – the actions/repetitions/traditions of “this is how/what I do” or rather “this is the belief I have, how will you respond to it?”  Does the same belief always warrant the same action in response? Likewise, does a similar action or repeated tradition imply that a common belief is held?

If I ever want to feel good about myself, all I have to do is log in to Facebook.  Once I’m in, a quick glance to the left and whatever temporal insecurities I may have been facing or whatever loneliness I may have been feeling vanish immediately… After all, I have nearly 700 friends.  Who can be down on themselves with those kind of stats!

Seriously? 700? Friends? What gives?  Either I’m just that popular or somewhere along the lines someone has changed my definition of “friend.”  Although my ego would rather me believe I’m that popular, the reality is my Facebook definition of a friend is a little off kilter to what real friends are, or at least what I want them to be.

At the risk of possibly offending one of the 693 people… er, uh… friends that I have linked to on Facebook, I’d like you to consider some alternate definitions for the many varied relationships that you have in your life.  You’d be surprised how many “friends” you might not have.

My Distinctions

Fans – people who are proud of what you’re doing

Friends – people who acknowledge what you’re doing

Family – people who labor with you in what you’re doing

The fact is, I don’t have the capacity to continue to build relationships with all of the people that I know.  You might.  I don’t.  Rather than settle for a whole lot of very shallow relationships, I choose to invest into a smaller number of relationships – a family of people that I “do life” with.

Another Distinction

Fans – we know each other

Friends – we show each other

Family – we grow each other

I believe that the purpose of relationship is change – we are meant to grow.  Physically, emotionally, and especially spiritually, we are created to grow.  The relationships that we surround ourselves with provide the environment that encourages our growth.

I have a lot of friends, but I’m always on the look out for family. What about you?

Recently, in a discussion with another Pastor about some of the more difficult areas of the Bible (difficult as in hard to interpret), I heard a phrase that has had me thinking:

“Instead of letting what you haven’t experienced and your current understanding about what the Bible says define what you can experience, there might be times when what you’ve experienced redefines what you understand the Bible to say.  Just because you haven’t experienced that, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen today – especially when the Bible might say it does.”

Now, the “that” of our conversation isn’t important, and although we were productively sharing our interpretations of the Bible’s teachings, I’m not sure that an open comment forum would be the best way to duke it out further.  But for the purposes of thought and communication, I’ll expand.

Have you ever been opposed to God operating in a certain way, or area, or at a certain level in your life because you didn’t believe it was possible or understood the Bible to mean something different?  Do you allow what you currently understand the Bible to say or not say to be the box where within you allow your experiences of a relationship with God to remain?

Situation: I’ve just experienced something new within a worship service at a church I’ve started to attend and I don’t know how to take it.

Response #1 – I don’t think my experience should effect what I previously believed the Bible said about that. I reject that experience as God.

Response #2 – Because I’ve now experienced what I hadn’t before, I should be open to a different understanding of what I thought the Bible said.

I’m asking; what is the mature, appropriate response to experiencing something new in a worship service?

Needless to say, it’s been a crazy few months.  With the addition of my son to our family back in August, our schedules have been completely turned up-side-down.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my new schedule and the numerous opportunities throughout my day to spend playing with my now 12-week old son are precious moments I know I’ll never have back.  But things have been piling up.

Priorities Change All The Time

The down side (if there is one – hahaha) to being ordered and routine in my life is that I don’t always deal well with change.  I love change – it’s just easier when I get to initiate it, that’s all.  But what happens when some things that you intended to stay up on and do frequently keep piling up without your attention?  Do you let yourself feel overwhelmed; allowing procrastination to convince you there will be more time tomorrow?  I’m not.  Sometimes it’s just not possible to catch up.

Time to Delete

The picture above is part of a screen shot from my Google Reader, the RSS Aggregate I use to keep up with the numerous ministry, technology, business and financial blogs and news sources that I follow and read (or well, try to read) every day.  Yup, 601 unread articles.  Yikes.  I’m not sure how long it would take me this evening to read 601 articles, but if I don’t finish, there will be a few more tomorrow for sure.  It’s time to delete what hasn’t been read, deal with the fact that I’m missing some great content, but remind myself that I’ve been productive with what’s really important in my life right now.

How About You?

Are there things in your life that have been piling up?  Did you run out of time to do some of the things you intended? Not everything is as easy as just hitting the delete button and moving on, but I would bet that it’s possible in some.  You have to make time to do the things that are most important – and it will always be at the expense of something else.  Learn to be ok with that.

Tonight, I chose to let go of some back logged reading and learning opportunities so that I could write this post.  Now, if only I had a delete button for my front yard and the foot-tall grass that’s been growing in my absence… geez.

Kathryn at Million Dollar Journey wrote an interesting article comparing the most common types of budgets.  I’ll save you the recap, just make the jump to her link above to see the differences.

What she did write that caught my eye was her comparison of budgeting to diets.  She writes, “Only you know yourself well enough to know what kind of budget will work for you. Remember the same diet doesn’t work for everyone. Even though it comes down to simple math; eat less than you burn and spend less than you make, a budget or a diet plan gives you the tools you need to successfully carry out your goals. You need to find a system that works for you.”

It got me thinking – Do people give up on budgeting the same way they often give up on diets?

Those of you that know me know that I’ve been blessed with a super-fast metabolism and I actually have difficulty gaining weight.  I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t eat as healthy as I should.  I’ve never been on a diet, but I’ve seen many people jump from diet to diet; unable to get the results they desire.  I do, however, consider myself to be a pretty disciplined person, especially with finances; and I’ve seen many people struggle with budgeting their finances the same way.

Do you Budget the way you Diet?

Diets often fail because people don’t stick with them… most fail because people are willing to change how they live as long as they can still have what they want. At some point in a diet (or budget) what you want is crossed by what is best for you.  The question is simple. Will you have the discipline to tell yourself, “No?”

The following image is courtesy of CollegeScholarships.org

Procrastination can be a tough thing to overcome, especially when it comes to our spiritual life.  After all, we have time to fix that, right?  Or better yet, “I’ve got some other things I need to get right before I deal with that.“  What’s worse is that often times when we do start to address those areas in our lives and actually deal with that thing the Lord has put His finger on, it seems that the situation actually gets worse before it gets better.  Frustrated and caught off guard it can be easy to want to quit.  Before you do, I think you should listen to this:

There’s a Snake in the Room

Imagine sitting with me in my living room, completely unaware that there is a snake under my big, leather man-chair (that’s right, I said man-chair).  We could go days without knowing it.  It would likely be docile and not do us any harm because it is content to cohabit, leaving us alone as long as we’ll leave it alone.  Suppose one day that we finally get around to rearranging the furniture.  It’s only when we start to make these major changes that we even realize that there’s a snake in the room.  At first, it will likely move to another area.  We might even be able to change our plans and not rearrange the living room as much as we intended – all to avoid confronting the snake. But we’ll have to live with the knowledge that he’s there.

For some, that’s ok; that’s all they will ever obtain.  For God, it’s not good enough.  The snake is there, it has to be dealt with.  As we try to catch the snake he’ll back into a corner; as he runs out of options, he’ll start to fight back.  Its ugly, a little embarrassing, and dangerous.  “What will life be like without the snake?”  We might even wish we could go back to the way things were before God asked us to rearrange everything and exposed the snake.  “Things were better then.” It’s like things have gotten worse when they were supposed to get better.

Don’t Give Up

Now, more than ever, is not the time to quit.  These steps are helping you corner and kill some of the snakes in your life. By becoming proactive in your spiritual life, the Lord is using those tools (people, pastors, situations, circumstances) to corner the snake and it is starting to fight back.  That’s why you feel like it’s worse now than it used to be before you started to deal with that area in your life.  On one hand its scary because it feels like a battle you didn’t ask for; on the other its exciting because you know the thing needs to die and now you’ve got more of a chance to kill it than ever before.

Hang in there. You’ve been given the victory. All you have to do now is walk it out. Don’t cohabit with the snakes in your life once you know they are there.

Ever heard the phrase, “Picking the lesser of two evils?” This is a little different. I’m sure if I were to ask you to list your various roles and relationships in order of importance or priority each of you could give me some very good answers with little thought. It would likely start to get fuzzy, however, if I were to ask you to list them in the order that you actually lived them.

Sometimes in life we have to look past giving the right answers and focus on giving the real answers. Only then, can we really begin to see change in our lives.

What Matters Most

I really don’t think we often allow the things that don’t matter to creep into our lives and interrupt our most important relationship. “I would spend more time in prayer each day, but I just have so many shows recorded on my DVR;” or “I would read my Bible more, but I have a ton of roll-over minutes on my cell phone plan this month.” You’ve probably never let silly things like that get in the way of spending time with God. If that is so, then why do you and I continually find ourselves missing the mark when it comes to what we should be doing?

I believe the problems lie with the other important things and relationships in our lives that we allow to creep in and before we know it, we’re doing too many important things to be able to do what really matters most – cultivate our relationship with God. I asked a group of my friends what most often kept them from spending time with the Lord; they listed things like work, school, children, housework, family obligations, and on and on. All very important relationships.

A Different Take on an Old Story

I recently came across the story in the Bible of the rich young ruler. In this story, there is a well-to-do young man who approaches Jesus and asks what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. In other words, “Jesus, what do I need to do to be able to have the same kind of relationship with God that you do?” After Jesus replies, the young man explains how he’s kept every commandment in the law since his youth. Jesus tells him to sell everything and follow Him, leaving the young man discouraged and sad because “he was very rich” (Luke 18:23 NASB)

Its after that part that caught my attention.

Beginning at verse 23, “But when he had heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich. 24 And Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for those who are wealthy to enter the kingdom of God! 25 “For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” 26 They who heard it said, “Then who can be saved?” 27 But He said, “The things that are impossible with people are possible with God.” 28 Peter said, “Behold, we have left our own homes and followed You.” 29 And He said to them, “Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, 30 who will not receive many times as much at this time and in the age to come, eternal life.” (emphasis mine)

Is it possible that Jesus was referring to the fact that there will be some very important relationships or priorities that will get in the way of our relationship with God? Jesus’ list: house, wife, brothers, parents, children, looks very similar to the list my friends provided.

Getting It Right

I believe that verse could be read, “…there is no one who has chosen to pursue God’s kingdom before any other important things or relationships, who wasn’t able to have both those things and a relationship with God.”

Establishing the right order among our many priorities and relationships will allow us to make the most of all of our relationships. When you put God first, you’ll make room for none to be lacking. When you put the others before God, you run out of room every time.

What do you think about the various relationships in your life that are all vying for your time? Are you pursuing them in the right order with the right priorities? In what ways have you seen God provide in those areas when you’ve put your relationship with Him first?

Yet again, another thought provoking image from Someone Once Told Me.

This time, it reads, “Never Surrender Your Dreams.”

Then I asked myself, “OK. So why then are you gambling?!?”

It’s Had Me Thinking

In his new book, The Principle of the Path, @andystanley teaches that its your direction, not your intention that determines your destination. In other words, wanting something won’t get you anywhere. What you do determines where you end up in life, not what you intended to do.

Maybe you’re like me and have a lot of ambitions in life. Many goals. Things you’d like to do, places you’d like to go. Money you’d like to save, or even desires to start that retirement or life insurance policy like you know you need to.

What Are You Doing About It?

No, not what are you planning to do about it; what are you actually doing? To me, to have all of those goals and desires and not actively pursue them is like that girl sitting in front of the slot machine; surrendering her money, coin after coin, for the chance that maybe, just maybe she’ll win something. “Never surrender your dreams,” she says.

I can think of no better way to surrender our dreams than to passively sit around and hope, watching our lives pass us by. One day gone by that isn’t in the right direction might have well been a day gone by in the wrong direction.

What dreams are you surrendering by simply sitting idle, allowing your life to pass by?

I love free stuff.  As a matter of fact, the only thing better than free stuff is free, useful stuff.  Don’t you agree?  I recently came across this plethora (Haha, Three Amigos) of resources from CustomGuide.

I’m one of those guys that loves keyboard shortcuts.  It started back in the day when I used to work on computers all the time.  I’d drive from branch to branch collecting broken or outdated hardware, fix them, and so on.  It was almost every other day that I’d be without a mouse or have a PS/2 connector and need USB. Arghh.  Out of pure necessity I learned that there’s a keyboard shortcut for just about everything Microsoft makes.

Though there is pretty much a consistency from product to product, it can be tricky remembering everything.  The guys (and gals, wouldn’t want to assume…) over at CustomGuide have put together Computer Training Quick References and Cheat Sheets for free from their website.  These are perfect if you are trying to learn yourself or you can distribute en masse to those people in your life that are always calling you for help with their computer. Yes, you know who you are; and yes, I’m talking about you – but I still love you

Hop on over and check it out. http://www.customguide.com/quick_references.htm