Mick's Minute

The subtle art of sucking sand.

Adam Nelson is a great Olympian from the United States. His event is the shot put. As a shot-putter, he made no money, had no fame, and wasn’t even offered Olympic training. When He graduated college he had the opportunity to become an investment banker and the opportunity to possibly play in the NFL.He turned down both.Because of his passion to win Olympic gold for the USA in the shot put he got a regular job and spent his days going to work at 6am, and then training until midnight. He would fly from sporting event to sporting event, hoping to win enough prize money to pay for his trip.He was broke, but he was magnificent.By the time the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens rolled around, he was the favorite to win the gold medal in shot put. The day finally came, and Adam Nelson found himself standing in the shot put ring in the ancient Greek stadium in Olympia, Greece, the very place where the Olympics began about 2,700 years before. Here he was, in the Olympics of Olympics, competing in the only event that would take place in the original olympic stadium from two millennia before, favored to win gold for his country. All those years of training and sacrifice had brought him to that moment. And in that moment, he was spectacular. He spun, hoisted his shot put, and screamed with emotion.And he lost.To be specific, he got second place and a silver medal.Eventually, partly because of injury and partly because it was just time, he retired and settled into the regular life of a man with a regular job who had, once upon a time while his children were too young to remember, stood in the original Olympic stadium and chased a dream.Fast forward nine years from the Athens Olympics. Adam Nelson is traveling on a business trip, and he gets a phone call from the United States Olympic Committee. They tell him that it has been discovered that the man who beat him at the Athens Olympics had used performance enhancing drugs to do so. The man had been stripped of his Olympic Gold Medal, and the Committee was trying to track Adam down so that they could give it to him, the rightful gold medal winner of the Athens Olympics in the shot put. As it turned out Adam Nelson had not trained and sacrificed to live his dream, and lost.His dream had been stolen from him.Nine years after he stood in the ring in Athens, a representative from the Olympic Committee delivered Adam his gold medal in front of a Burger King in the food court of the Atlanta airport. Today, Adam keeps that medal in a junk drawer somewhere at his house.Here is the moral of the story for us non-Olympians; If you need for the world around you to be nice and play fair and just generally give you a smooth path upon which to live out your dreams, you should prepare for disappointment.No matter how hard you work, that's not how life works. Instead, we must find our foundation in something certain. Something that is bigger than us and bigger than life, while at the same time being something that you can trust. A long time ago, God promised the world something like that. A prophecy in the book of Isaiah chapter twenty eight reads,So this is what the Sovereign Lord says: “See, I lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation; the one who trusts will never be dismayed.”-Isaiah 28:16That stone turned out to be Jesus. And when you are ready to be honest about the fact that you need something bigger than you and bigger than life that you can trust, He is your answer.

Once upon a time in Oklahoma we had a neighbor with a strange hobby. She would record this super-boring painting show on her old VCR and then she would follow along, pausing and rewinding and pausing some more, trying to paint the picture that the guy on TV was painting.As a little kid, it was the most excruciatingly boring thing I had ever seen in my life. It was literally like watching paint dry, and then rewinding and watching the same paint dry again.To say the least, I did not get that.The painting show was called “The Joy of Painting,” and it was hosted by an extremely puffy-haired and soft-spoken guy named Bob Ross. Every episode began with Bob standing in front of a blank canvas. Then he would talk and tell stories and paint up some “happy trees” as he called them. By the end of the show he would have created a beautiful nature scene, and the whole time he would talk and smile and tell you that you could do it too.Fast forward thirty years or so to today and I have a bit of an awkward confession… Today, I love that show.It's on Amazon Prime. I turn it on sometimes and just sit back and soak it up. It's like art therapy. It is calm, creative, and cool. At the end of an episode I almost actually believe that if I would just head off to Hobby Lobby and get some supplies, then with a fan brush and a little bit of Phthalo Blue I could paint anything I wanted to.In every episode there is this moment in which the canvas on which Bob Ross is painting transforms as I watch from a project to a painting.Up to that point, it’s just paint on a canvas. After that point, it's just finishing touches. But in that moment, it is as if the painting happens. I love that moment because it is so real. And yet, that moment is an illusion. That painting has been happening since the first brush stroke. In a sense, the painting was happening even before that, with every brush stroke that Bob Ross ever made and with every experience that ever made him. Yet, in that moment, it's like I see the painting happen.I’m telling you all of that today because I want to tell you something about you. Right now, in this moment, you are happening.Maybe your life feels like a classic renaissance painting, like the Mona Lisa, with traditional lines and everything in perfect perspective. Maybe your life is like one of those Salvador Dali paintings where everything is so bent up and out of place that its dysfunction is what makes it beautiful. Maybe your life is so abstract that even if the whole world looks at it almost no one will ever get it, but that's part of what makes it so awesome.In addition to whatever style of art you seem to be, you are also in some stage of the happening. Maybe you feel like a blank canvas that is just starting to be filled in, far from the moment in which you feel like you’ve really become anything yet. Maybe you feel like you're pretty much finished except for a stroke or two. Whatever style you think you are or stage you think you are in, the undoubtable fact is that you are happening.And like every work of art, there is an artist at work in the making of you.We call him God, and for whatever else that you are or wish you were (or weren’t), you are a unique masterpiece of His that is a part of the greatest collection of art that the universe will ever know.But unlike Bob Ross’ canvases, you are neither blank nor passive.You come into life pre-painted to some degree, and you have the ability in life to participate in your own making. On the down side, you have the ability to destroy yourself. In many ways, you already have. Yet God, this Master Artist of the Universe, is not done. He has the ability to make all things new, and He sent His Son Jesus into the world to clear our canvases of every imperfection. Right now in this moment you are still happening because the Artist is still working.Cooperate with the Master Artist in the making of you. You are too important to be left to inferior hands, even your own.

There is a creature in this world called a barnacle goose.If you ever meet one (and if it will let you) you should give it a pat on the head because every living barnacle goose has had at least one very bad day. Barnacle geese are largely from Greenland where there are no trees and arctic foxes quickly raid any next laid upon the ground. Barnacle geese solve that problem by flying up and building their nests on rocky crags a few hundred feet above the ground. That is a great plan, and works brilliantly until exactly three days after their chicks hatch.But that is when things get complicated.Barnacle geese, like all geese, do not feed their babies in the nest. All geese lead their babies to food. That is the reason you sometimes see a goose swimming across a pond with all her goslings bobbing around behind her. So at the ripe old age of three days, every newborn barnacle goose needs to leave the nest to go eat. But they are on rocky ledges about 300 feet off the ground.Here is where the bad day comes in.The mother goose solves this problem by flying gently down to the ground, and honking at her goslings to follow her. Then the baby geese, who cannot fly, waddle over to the edge of the crag and jump in her direction. Then they fall those hundreds of feet. As they fall they smash upon the rocks. And a significant percentage of them die. The rest of them sorely hobble around until they find their mother, and then waddle off behind her to find some grass to eat.In my book, that's a bad day.But for some of those little geese, it gets even worse! When they jump from the nest, many of the baby geese don’t make it all the way down on the first try. They fall part way down, smash into a ledge, and stop. Then they have an even worse decision to make than they had a first. Ten seconds prior when they jumped from the first ledge there were things about life that they did not know. They did not know they couldn’t fly. They did know what gravity was. They did not know pain. But now here they are, only ten seconds older and yet much much wiser, having painfully learned all of these things. And in the fullness of that knowledge… they have to jump again!Have you ever had that kind of bad day?The kind of bad day in which you know what you have to do, you know that it is going to be awful awful, and yet, there is no other way forward. I know you have, because we all have. Its such a common and important experience of life that psychologists have invented a term to describe the experience. They call it delayed gratification.Delayed gratification is the choice to do something hard now because it is going to bring you something better later.Delayed gratification is the reason why people work hard at jobs they don’t particularly like, or practice hard even though today isn’t game day. It is the reason why people go to college, and save up for retirement or vacations. And it is a very important thing. A lot of success in life depends on people’s willingness to choose delayed gratification.The much more tempting approach to life is to choose instant gratification. Instant gratification is the choice to do whatever feels the best or at least the least bad right now. Instant gratification is the reason why people stop going to work even though they have bills to pay, or why people feed their addictions even though they are destroying their lives. It is the reason why people stay up a few extra hours playing video games even though they’re supposed to be up early the next morning. And it is a big problem in life. A lot of life’s failures can be traced back to our patterns of choosing the easiest path in the moment rather than the right path for success.Sometimes in life, bad days are just bad days. But sometimes, bad days are very important moments. Moments in which we choose either to continue on the easier road to the life we don’t want, or we choose to do hard and scary things as we seek out the lives we do want. Sometimes the ground is far away, the rocks are really sharp, and we still need to jump.“For the joy set before him [Jesus] endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”Hebrews 12:2

I am thinking about what makes a place home.At first I thought that the answer to that question would be pretty simple. But it really isn’t. If you look around, there are two very different ways that people answer that question.Many people go by the motto that home is where your heart is. From this perspective, home is typically the place where you are from. Or more specifically, home is the place that identifies who you are. That is usually the place where you grew up, but it might be a place that you never even lived that is still an important part of your personal identity. Like your great-grandparents original homestead, for example.I live in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. Very often here in the Sand Hills people who haven’t lived here in decades will have their bodies sent back here to be buried after they die. That is a function of this belief that home is where your heart is. That idea that home is where the heart is lives deeply inside of many of us.For me, I grew up in the other camp. I grew up believing that home is where you hang your hat. We moved around a lot and my dad’s job was the kind where we weren’t really expected to be around for long in the places we lived. So for us home was simply a matter of temporary location. Wherever we were, that was home. And for many people out there, this is the accepted view. From this perspective, home is nothing more or less than the place where you live.Not surprisingly, people who say that home is where your heart is and people who say that home is where you hang your hat tend to have very different views on what makes a place home.But I suggest that we take that debate to a whole new level. I believe that when we say that home is where your heart is, we are grounding our view of home too much in the past. And I believe that when we say home is where you hang your hat, we are grounding our view of home too much in the present.I think that instead of understanding home as being something from our past or something from our present, we should understand home as being something from our future.To this end, I suggest a new saying about home. Home is where you’re headed.The book of Hebrews chapter 11 is a remarkable section of the Bible. It is about this thing we call faith which is, in a nutshell, the only way throughout history that people have been able to relate to God. Faith means that we trust Him, that we believe Him, that we accept Him. Faith is all of those things wrapped up together. And in this one chapter, we get a fast-forwarded tour of faithful people throughout all of Biblical history.The thing we see about all these people in the midst of all the very different circumstances of their lives is that they find their ultimate hope and identity and their ultimate home not in the past or the present, but in the future.For example, regarding a super-important guy named Abraham from the Old Testament we read, “By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”Hebrews 11:8-10A few sentences later we read, “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had the opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”Hebrews 11:13-16For the faithful people singled out in this powerful chapter of the Bible, home was not a nostalgic idea from the past, or a ho-hum acceptance of the present. For these people, home is where they were headed.Because they found their home in their faith God, they lived their lives neither wishing for the past nor lost in the present, but moving steadily, hopefully, and faithfully toward their guaranteed future. And I promise you, the thing that God built for them and is building for us is greater than anything we could ever build for ourselves.Therefore, regardless if you call home a patch of land where your great-grandparents set fence posts or just some house or apartment where you haven’t even paid your second month's rent yet, my curiosity is grounded neither in where you come from nor where you are.I’m curious about where you are headed.Who are you living for, and where is it taking you? Who is building the house where you are going to spend eternity, and who are you trusting to take you there? If we are going to figure out what makes a place home, we must first figure out what and who we have faith in.My advice? Have faith in Jesus. He has made an eternal home for us and made the only way for us to get there, which is through faith. For me, I have decided not to live as if home is where I hang my hat and I have also decided not to live as if home is where my heart is. For me, home is where I am headed. How about you?

Tubing down a river is a beautiful thing.A tube is a perfect device on which to float down a river because it does two jobs really well. First, it floats. That’s important if you swim like I do. Secondly, because of its shape a tube catches a lot of current. That combination makes a trusty old inner tube the perfect device upon which to float lazily down a river.If you ever try to tube up a river, however, you will discover instantly that your tube isn’t your friend anymore. No matter how hard you try it is pretty much impossible to float upstream on a tube.In life we have a very similar problem.Most of the time, we just float with the current. Wherever life goes, we go with it. But sometimes, we don’t like where our lives are going. But when we try to reverse course and go upstream for a while, everything gets really, really hard, and not only can we not float upstream, we can’t even just stay still.Whenever we challenge the current of life, we discover that our lives are shaped very well for going with the current, and very badly for going against it.One of the things that I love about Jesus is that He is the answer to that problem. When a person gives their life to Him, then Jesus becomes an anchor of safety in our lives. And He also begins to reshape us. Instead of being people who are basically slaves to the current to life, we are redesigned so that we can float towards Him no matter what direction the current is pushing us.If you’re feeling stuck in a bad current of life, He is the answer for that. And many other things.When you’re ready for Him, He’s ready for you.

Every house has a lawn full of grass. Yet I can think of exactly one person that I know who says that they enjoy mowing their yard.For that one guy, mowing his yard is a hobby. And maybe for a few others also. But for the rest of us, we do not mow our yards because we specifically enjoy it or look forward to it. We mow our yards because we like having a nice yard.For most of us, mowing the lawn is not something we particularly want. Having a mowed yard is what we want.We don’t do it because we like it. We do it because it's worth it.In that reality lies a very important challenge. Sometimes in life, the only thing standing between where you are and where you want to be is something that you don’t want to do.Maybe you’re a person who has some bills to pay and you want to be a person whose bills are paid, but standing between where you are and where you want to be is a long week of work at a job you don’t necessarily like.Maybe you’re a person who has a health issue and you want to be a person who doesn’t have a health issue, but standing between where you are and where you want to be are some treatment options that sound pretty unpleasant.Maybe you’re a person whose life is falling apart and you want to be a person whose life is coming back together, but standing between where you are and where you want to be are some really important choices that you need to make and follow through with.In all of those cases and many, many more you are like the person standing in tall grass who wants a nice yard but doesn’t like to mow. Chances are you can probably get to where you want to be. You just have to do something that you don’t want to do to get there.As I ponder that I am encouraged by the fact that once upon a time, Jesus had a very similar problem. It was night time, and He was in such a tight spot that He was literally sweating blood. He was on a hill in a grove of trees, surrounded by a world of people who were hopelessly doomed. Because of their sins, they and every other person that would ever lived were condemned inescapably to Hell.But Jesus was no regular guy. He was and is the Son of God come from Heaven, and the reason He came was to offer rescue and real life forever to these people, and all people.He knew that standing between the doom that all people are born into and the freedom and real life that He wanted for us was something horrible for Him. The hard thing standing between where we were and where He wanted us to be was His own horrible death. If there was going to be any hope for us He had to die as a sacrifice for our sins.So He sat on that hilltop. Under those trees. Waiting for the bad guys to come and take Him to torture Him and murder Him. And he prayed.To His Father in Heaven He said basically, “God, if there is any other way, I don’t want to do this.”It was the only way, just like He knew it was. And He was willing. He did the hard thing of dying as a sacrificial trade. His death so that we could have real life.Jesus died. Then He came back to life, and ascended into Heaven. In the book of Hebrews as people were already going out all over the world to announce the truth of this amazing salvation, we get a glimpse into the mind of Jesus. A glimpse at His motivation as He was choosing to do the hard thing.“For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”-Hebrews 12:2He did the hard thing for the joy of what would come after. And do you know what the “joy” was?Personally, I think His joy was you.As you gaze into your own life and consider where you are, where you want to be, and the hard things that may lie in between, I have two thoughts. First, if the thing you want is the right thing, then the hard things in between are worth it. Second and far more importantly, Jesus has already done the hardest thing that you need the most and could never do for yourself.If you are willing to get honest with God about the hard truth that you are a sinner, and you are willing to choose to believe that Jesus came and died to be your Savior, then you are going to have the privilege of following Him into a new life forever.It is as if Jesus is standing there waiting for your permission to mow the overgrown, tangled up lawn of your soul. And you just get to say yes.What a life.

I have a bit of an odd interest in things that are together, but don’t go together. If that makes sense. A small storm cloud surrounded by blue sky. A run-down house in a nice neighborhood. An Iowa fan in the middle of the Husker student section.Weird and out of place things like that are, for whatever reason, really interesting to me.Once upon a time in Montana there was a meek, soft-spoken, 83-year-old man named Eugene Peterson. He was famous for writing a book that is a super-famous re-telling of the whole Bible, called The Message. Somewhere else in the world right now there is a 60-year-old Irishman named Paul. And he is basically the opposite of Eugene Peterson. He is loud, flashy, and a rock star. For decades, the world has known Him as Bono, the lead singer of the band U2.But as it turns out, Bono the rock star and Eugene Peterson the scholar were friends. Bono started trying to contact Eugene Peterson years ago after he started to read The Message, and they remained friends for the remainder of Eugene Peterson’s life.A few years ago, Bono came to Montana to spend a day with the Petersons at their lake house. A camera crew came, filmed the whole thing, and made a short documentary about it.Eugene Peterson is standing at his front door in a blue button-up shirt and khaki pants, with an olive green coffee maker percolating in the kitchen. And here comes Bono in tinted glasses and tinted hair and two mismatched gold earrings looking like he just got off stage from a fashion show for aging rock stars.When these two guys come into the picture together, It's like watching a middle-aged peacock meet an old turtle. Like seeing a hipster in a brand new BMW and an old truck driver getting snowed in at the same little gas station. Like two different worlds colliding.And yet there is this undertone of connection between them that is spectacular.Very quickly you see that they have two things in common that bridge all the divides between them. The first is that they are both passionate and vocal Christians. The second is that they are both artists. At heart they are both artists who want to know and proclaim and live out the greatness of God in life, even though they do it in totally different ways.As I think about them, and me, and us, I am reminded of a couple things.For the most part, we are not artists. Or at least we don’t think of ourselves that way. We tend to pride ourselves on being straight-forward people who live our lives as best we can with what we’ve got to work with. And There is something valuable and important in that view of ourselves that we should celebrate.But very often as we go about this work of trying to plainly live our lives, we get lost.We fail to see ourselves for what we are, life for what it is, and ultimately God for who He is. And that is where guys like Bono and Eugene Peterson can become tremendously helpful for us.We live in the midst of an indescribable happening. Yet it is so common to us that we usually don’t even see it.Right now in this moment, as we are driving and working, and sitting, and shopping, both the greatest tragedy in history and the greatest rescue in history are unfolding simultaneously. In the tragedy, life is spiraling out of control. We are sick, sad, hateful, hurtful, and hopeless. Yet even in the midst of the worst of all of that, God is working to call us to Him and to make all things new.So often as we seek to live plainly, we live blindly. Unaware of the tragedy that is destroying us and the God who is working to save us.Let's be artists for a while. May we open our eyes to see, and search together for this God who saves.

I’m not much of a joiner, but there is at least one organization in this world that I would like to be a part of. It is an international organization called the Cloud Appreciation Society.The membership process is as follows:1. Sign up.2. Wait for your membership badge to arrive in the mail.3. Go out, find a comfortable place to sit or lay down, and watch the clouds.You watch the clouds. Not for any scientific purpose. Not to predict the weather. If you are a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society, you go out and watch the clouds just because it's fun and majestic and relaxing.I think cloud watching sounds like a great pastime. But I don’t do that. Not because I don’t have a membership badge to some silly organization. I don’t do it for many of the same reasons that you probably don’t do some things that you would like to do. We talk about time and we talk about money and we talk about other obligations, and each of those things are important in their own way. But ultimately, many of us simply choose not to invest in ourselves. It may be the case that you even feel guilty at the thought of doing something that is basically just for you.If you are a self-centered person who demands that other people sacrifice themselves to make your life what you want it to be, this message isn’t really for you. But if you are one of the many people out there who spends your life working and sacrificing and have done that for so long that you actually feel guilty at the thought of doing something just for you, I have some very important theological news for you.You matter.Before you ever do anything or say anything or help anybody or try and be a good person, or whatever, you just matter.Therefore, I have a challenge for you. Treat yourself today like you are important. Do something just because it's good for you, even if it doesn’t work at all well with all of your other obligations. Watch some clouds, go fishing, build something, read a book, go to rehab. Whatever it is, do it. And do it because you matter.Treat other people like they matter, as well. And while you’re at it, remember this— God thinks you matter too. And He did something to prove it. He sent His only Son Jesus to die for our sins, so that we could accept Him and be set free. And one day He’s going to come back for His people—through the clouds, in fact.And who knows, maybe we’ll be out there watching.

Recently I stumbled across an interesting discovery. I walked up to the edge of an embankment out in a pasture and there, at the bottom of the embankment, was an old car.Think about that.Once upon a time, this old car was a tremendous feat of human accomplishment. It was as sleek, powerful, comfortable, and cool as anything that people had ever made. It had been meticulously designed, engineered, produced, and marketed. Someone had handed over a lot of hard-earned money and proudly driven that car home and parked it in their driveway. Imagine their smile as they showed it off to their friends.And yet, the last time a human being paid any attention to that car, they were literally pushing it over a cliff just to get it out of their sight.That's not uncommon. The country around us is littered with old houses and barns and cars and equipment that were once prized and valuable possessions, but are now junk. Isn’t it fascinating that today's treasures are destined to be tomorrow's trash? It's an old problem that people have struggled with for a long time. You work your whole life away to discover that nothing has really changed and your life hasn’t really seemed to matter.The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible is basically one long complaint about this particular oddity of life. In the first chapter, we read;What has been will be again,what has been done will be done again;there is nothing new under the sun.Is there anything of which one can say,“Look! This is something new”?It was here already, long ago;it was here before our time.No one remembers the former generations,and even those yet to comewill not be rememberedby those who follow them.-Ecclesiastes 1:9-11It is sobering to think that right now we are spending today's effort on tomorrow's junk.But as I think about that car at the bottom of the embankment and all that it represents, personally, I am not hopeless. I’m OK with the fact that life is bigger than me. I’m OK with the fact that my own great-great grand-kids probably won’t even know my name. I really am.What I am as I consider that old forgotten worthless car, is mindful. It makes me think. Specifically, it makes me think about what matters in life, and it challenges me to invest my life in those things.And for me, I know what matters. God matters, and people matter. Those are the two things in life that are really worth investing in. And helping people get connected to God? For me, that's the best thing of all.

Imagine with me for a moment that you are spending a little time this Summer thinking about football season. As you are daydreaming, you start to wonder, “What is the very best play to run when it's third down and five and your team is down by two points in the third quarter?”That seems like a tough question. Especially because I do not daydream about football. But no worries. In our imaginary world your buddy has just loaned you a copy of a book called the Ultimate Book of Football, and everyone agrees that it has all the answers. So you open up the Ultimate Book of Football to the page where somebody told you to look to find that particular information.But instead of a simple answer to your question, what you get is a first-person account of the Chicago Bears entire history-making 1985 football season, written by Hall of Fame Head Coach Mike Ditka himself.On the one hand that would be frustrating, because it's not a simple answer to your question. But if you’re paying attention, what you actually got was far more important than what you were even looking for.Back here in the real world, I think that reading the Bible is something like that. The wonderful and frustrating thing about the Bible is that it is far more than we often want it to be. Most of the time what we seem to want the Bible to be is some sort of a basic rule book for life. A simple, well-organized list of rules to tell us what to do when we don’t know what to do. But instead, what the Bible is is the true story of God’s work in the universe all the way from the beginning of Creation to an eternal New Creation at some point in the future. And that story is told in a bunch of separate pieces in the midst of unfolding human history in a way that is directly from God but is also tied to the culture of the time when God spoke and the person through whom God spoke.The Bible is, in a word, amazing. It is a work of divine art through human artists, given for the purpose of helping people to know who God is, who we are, how we can connect with Him, and how we can live the lives that He has planned for us.As a result of all of that, what the Bible has to offer us is typically far more than what we are looking for.If we can humble ourselves and simply allow the Bible to be what it is, then something amazing begins to happen. God's words in the Bible begin to challenge us, and encourage us, and impart wisdom to us, and change us. And rather than just learning a few rules for living, we learn the source and meaning of life itself.

One of my favorite mysteries is an old Sherlock Holmes story about a murdered man and a stolen horse. It's called The Adventure of Silver Blaze. One of the things I love about it is that the clue that Sherlock Holmes recognized that opened up the whole case for him was not something that happened, but rather something that didn’t happen. It's a fun detective story, you should check it out sometime.Even if you don’t, the truth of life is that you will have more than your fair share of mysteries.That is not an entirely bad thing. Mysteries are a sort of double-edged sword in life. Some can be a lot fun. They give us a chance to solve problems or find solutions or invent things, and that is all good stuff of life from where I’m sitting. But other mysteries in our lives aren’t so good. Especially the ones that never get solved. Especially especially the ones where we are left with pain and nagging, unanswered questions.The mysteries of life can break you. But they can also make you.In the true story that is our lives there is a mystery that is so big and so important that every other mystery of life is found somewhere inside of this one. Once upon a time, everything was perfect. Then a horrible thing happened, and things weren’t perfect anymore. In fact, it was kind of awful. So God did the one thing that could be done to make things perfect again. And right now in this moment—as we walk and talk and eat and sleep and laugh and cry and live and die—both the perfect and the awful are happening at the same time. And all of life is moving towards a final event in which that which is awful will be ended forever and perfection will be established for all of eternity.It is certainly a double-edged sword, this mystery in which we live. But it is a glorious mystery in which you can find freedom that you have never known.“This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.”-Ephesians 3:6

Once upon a time wagon trains moved back and forth across the country and adventurers from the East Coast tried their hand at life in the Wild West. During that time it was a common scene in every town big enough to have a saloon to see a group of guys huddled around a table playing poker. And if you would have walked up to one of those poker tables, most likely you would have seen a big buck horn handled knife stuck in the table in front of one of those guys.The players called that knife “the buck,” and they stuck it in the table in front of the dealer so that as the game progressed the buck would travel around the table in front of each player as it was his turn to deal the cards.If ever one of the players did not want to deal the cards when his turn came and the knife was stuck into the table in front of him, he would "pass the buck" by taking the knife and sticking it into the table in front of the guy next to him.A lot has changed since those wild western days. Jet aircraft zip back and forth across the sky high above the old trails of the wagon trains, most of us don’t play much poker, and we hopefully keep sharps objects off the table when we do.But passing the buck? That has been turned into an art form.Once upon a time, passing the buck was a simple symbol that meant that you were passing up your turn to take the responsibility of being the dealer. But these days, passing the buck is more like a way of life. Responsibility is hard sometimes. Nobody likes to be wrong, nobody likes to fail, and passing the buck to the next guy when we do somehow feels better than taking ownership of the fact that sometimes we are wrong and sometimes, we do fail.The reason for that goes back much farther than the days of the Wild West.Long long before that there was a time when everything was literally perfect. The world and the universe were young, God had created everything from nothing, and it was exactly how He wanted it. He had made the first couple, Adam and Eve, He made them a perfect land in which to live, and every day He would come down and take an evening stroll with them. Adam and Eve had a perfect relationship with God, with each other, and with the world in which they lived. They even had a perfect relationship with themselves. No conflict or confusion or doubt or anything of the sort.Then the unthinkable happened. They traded it all away in pursuit of a lie.That evening when God came down to walk with them, they hid from Him. And when He talked with them about what they had done, they did the most fascinating thing... they passed the buck! Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed a snake. In a back-handed kind of way, Adam even blamed God.That's right, folks. At ground zero of the first wrong thing ever done passing the buck was the immediate reaction.Since then, not much has changed. We are all very different people with different skills, abilities and interests. And every one of us is a master of self-justification. But self-justification didn't do a thing to help Adam and Eve, and it's not doing a thing to help us either. Instead it locks us down into life-long patterns of guilt and shame.So that gives me an idea.Lets stop passing the buck.Lets be like President Harry Truman, who had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that said "the buck stops here." Whatever you've got going on today, own it. If you need to do something, do it. If you need to stop something, stop it. And I know you need to be forgiven for something. So go to God and ask for it. Jesus took all of our bucks on Himself when He came and died for our sins. Lets stop passing them around and start accepting the new, free life that only He can give us.

The meadow was beautiful and so was the morning. The sun shined above me, to my left was a small pond created by an ingenious little beaver dam, and directly in front of me was a small, lively stream bubbling its way to a nearby creek. There were birds singing, ducks quacking, and the occasional turkey gobbling in the trees. It was like a little piece of Heaven on earth.And as I sat there in the green grass of the meadow taking it all in, I glanced downwards just in time to see a huge hairy spider come crawling across the grass just inches away from me.Fun fact about me--I love meadows and sunshine and beaver dams and little streams and wildlife. That's why I was there that day. But I hate spiders. With a passion. They scare me half to death. I can truthfully say that I would rather eat a worm than touch a spider. So when that spider showed up, my little taste of heaven on earth came to an immediate halt as I went scrambling backwards towards safety.But after I regained my senses a little bit, something important occurred to me. It occurred to me that this is life.In life, very often the good and the bad and the merry and the scary, they all tend to come right together in a mixed up and unpredictable jumble.I think it's important to be honest about that.So important, in fact, that I didn't even squish that big hairy spider. I just let him go on his hairy merry way. It was worth him wrecking my moment just for the life lesson.Very few of us are strangers to hard times. And yet we always manage to be surprised when they come around, as if they are somehow out of place in the midst of our otherwise perfect lives. But as I think about it, living as if bad things are unexpected and perfection is expected is somewhat absurd.It's like sitting in the wild grass of a spring-time meadow and expecting never to see a spider.I think that if we're going to live our lives wisely (and i am all for that) then we need to learn to not live them as people who claim entitlement to impossible perfection. Instead we need to live them as people who claim something far more realistic, and far more powerful than that. We should live as people who cling to a hope that is bigger than the best and worst that life has to offer. A hope that is, in fact, bigger than life itself.The story of those who expect only good things in life is always the story of disappointment. But the story of those who build their lives on hope in God is something else entirely.No doubt everybody is going to have hard times, and sometimes impossibly hard times. But people who put their hope in God get to experience those hard times differently. It is the difference between living life as a victim of uncontrollable circumstances and living life as a willing soldier in the army of the world's greatest general. There will be hard days. But victory is guaranteed and our cause is worth it.Today you may be basking in the sun or balking at the spiders. In either case, my hope that you have the courage to hope. Specifically, I hope you have the courage to put your hope, your trust, in Jesus, who died for your sins and then came back to life so that He could give you new life.He’s not going to make all the spiders go away. Not, immediately, anyway. But He is going to take care of you, and never let you go. And whatever happens, He’s worth it.And so are you.

Many years ago I spent my summers traveling on a wheat harvest crew. We would take our equipment to exotic places (like Oklahoma) and we would cut wheat like crazy.Except when we didn’t.The name of the game in wheat harvest is hurry up and wait because you always have to be ready for the wheat, but the wheat is very often not ready for you. As a result, almost every morning after rushing to the field and preparing our equipment for the day we would have to wait for the sun to dry up all of the previous nights dew out of the wheat before we could begin harvesting for the day.However, it was in those long and often frustrating moments of waiting that I discovered something that I would have never learned otherwise. As fields of ripe wheat dry down in the morning sun, the wheat very quietly crackles. It sounds something like rice krispies in milk.If you’ve ever had a time-sensitive job to do, then you know the frustration of having to wait to do it. But nonetheless, one of my very favorite memories of those days in my life is of stretching out in the morning sun on top of the cab of my combine, waiting and listening as the wheat very quietly crackled all around me.One of the things that I am learning about life is that it tends to be pretty complex. There always seems to be something going on that we don’t fully understand, and that can be really frustrating. But if we are willing to look for it, there is oftentimes much that is beautiful in the complexity of it all.I think about the simple elegance of a ripe field of golden wheat blowing and crackling in a light morning breeze and I wonder how much of life happening all around us that we never even see. We’ve got stuff to do and places to be, there is no doubt about that. But I wonder about the things that we might be missing as we go. And I wonder what great truths of life we might stumble onto if we took a minute to slow down and look around.In the hurry up and wait experiences of my life, I have often placed great value on the hurrying up and had very little patience for the waiting. But I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’ve got that wrong. I’m starting to wonder if some of the greatest things that life has to offer happen in the waiting.Rather than being an unproductive bother, maybe there is a way of waiting that is the furthest thing from a waste of time. In fact, there has to be.Dozens of times in the Bible people are called to wait on God. One good example is Psalm 130:5-6.I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,and in his word I put my hope.I wait for the Lordmore than watchmen wait for the morning,more than watchmen wait for the morning.Today I’m thinking that maybe sometimes as we chase after life we do too much and we wait too little. But God is the one with the good plan and with the power to make it happen. Let's make a point together of slowing down, listening to the wheat crackle, and waiting on Him to do His thing. If we do that, I am confident that we will not be disappointed.

Big air, old bones, and Jesus.

You know you want to say it…

I have a brother-in-law named Matt. Matt is a good guy as far as brother-in-laws go, but in one pretty important way he has kind of destroyed my life. Here’s how it happened. If you know me, then you know that I like coffee. And it used to be that I liked all coffee. I first started drinking coffee when I was in Middle School and got a job on the clean up crew at our local sale barn. Whatever coffee was left over in the coffee pot from the sale a few days before, that’s what we drank. And from then until very recently, my standards for coffee never really changed. If it was black and preferably warm, I drank it.But then my brother-in-law Matt went and started his very own coffee roasting company. Because he’s good at his job, he imports some of the best coffee in the world from all around the world and fresh roasts it for his customers. And because he’s a good brother-in-law, he sends me lots of coffee, and usually for free! But guess what happened after I started drinking my brother-in-laws coffee? After all that world-class, fresh-roasted coffee, when I would drink other coffee, it started to not taste very good. And then other coffee started to taste— just plain bad. My whole life, coffee was just coffee. But now that I’ve gotten a taste for good stuff, the good stuff is all I want to drink.Here’s why we’re talking about this. In my experience in life and with God, we all tend to settle and settle hard. We get a taste for life that is quite frankly pretty bitter, and we accept it and settle in to it, because we believe that that is what life tastes like. And even when we see a few other people living lives that appear to be much sweeter than our own, still we just keep on in the midst of our own bitterness because one way or another we come to the conclusion that even if the sweet life is out there for somebody, it's not out there for us.As it turns out, God has a little something to say about that. There is this old song in the Bible called Psalm 34. It's about how great God is and how he rescues people. In this song there is a line that says “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”When I think about that line, I smile. That is the line that comes to my mind when I think about my silly experience with coffee and all of our deadly series experiences with life. With coffee, once I got the good stuff, it was hard to go back because I had no idea what I was missing.God's love is like that.It may be the case that you are slogging through a pretty bitter life right now having never had a taste of real life with God. If so, my hope is that you will follow the advice of that song and taste and see that the Lord is good. Further, my hope is that He will destroy your life like my brother-in-law destroyed my coffee drinking. I hope that as you taste and see how great He is, life apart from Him will become more and more bitter and you won’t even want it anymore. You will just want Him. He loves you, He is powerful and amazing, and He is free.You ought to try that.

I was raised in a house that had a complete set of big, blue, encyclopedias. They took up an entire book shelf full of space. But, these particular encyclopedias did not just take up space. I was raised to love knowledge, and we read those encyclopedias. In fact, when I was a child my dad would actually gather us up and read to us not from children's books, but from those big blue encyclopedias.Fast forward a few decades to today and--fun fact about me--I do not own a set of encyclopedias. But it's not because I don’t love knowledge, I do. It's because the world has changed. Throughout most of human history, knowledge was a very difficult thing to come by. Even the very basic research of any given subject required great amounts of time, and expense, and travel. But things are different now. Primarily because of the development of the internet and other forms of information technology, knowledge is now an easy thing to come by. I don’t own a set of encyclopedias because I can access vastly more information than any set of encyclopedias can hold from my computer or even my phone in a matter of seconds. Oh, and when I read to my kids, guess what I read them?? Children’s books! (Come, on dad. I mean seriously…)More to the point, When it comes to knowledge, the world has changed drastically. But, interestingly, it also hasn’t. When the internet was developing, it was commonly predicted that as readily available knowledge swept around the world, the result would be a grand liberalization of thought. The idea was that as people knew more and more about what other people thought and believed, then we would all find common ground and areas of agreement and the world would become a more peaceful and moderate place. At this point, we are going to call that prediction a huge failure because what really happened was the exact opposite of that. Rather than a mass liberalization or moderation, the world has experienced a great polarization. Rarely in human history have people been more divided and distrustful of one another than they are today. The reason for that is a little concept that psychologists like to call confirmation bias.Confirmation bias means that when confronted with a bunch of information, people tend to pick out the stuff that they already agree with and ignore the stuff that challenges what they think.News Flash— people love to be right. Because of that, when we go looking for information we usually don’t look for information that broadens or corrects our views on anything. Mostly we are looking for information that confirms what they already believe. Hence the term confirmation bias. As it turns out, all this time in human history as people have been hating and hurting one another, lack of information has not been the primary problem. Arrogance has been. And if we are ever going to solve this problem, it's not going to be through some new technology. It's going to happen through an old piece of wisdom.Three different times the Bible tells us that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. And I confess that for a long time I never really understood that. Why do you have to fear God to be smart? But I think I’m finally beginning to understand a little bit of why that is true. When people fear God, we begin to understand the universe in its proper order. Namely, we understand that He is big, and powerful, and right, and we aren’t necessarily any of those things. And, therefore, He is exalted and we are humbled. And that, I think, is the key. From that place of humility instead of arrogantly pursuing and defending our own rightness, we can seek out that which is actually true. I think that is how the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and my hope for all of us is that we can start together from that single point of truth and see God and life for what they actually are.

I’m thinking about this day that we call Good Friday, the Friday before Easter.Good Friday is the anniversary of the day that Jesus was executed by being nailed to a big wooden cross and hanging there until he died. This form of execution, called crucifixion, was the ancient world’s most brutal, painful, and humiliating form of the death penalty. And on this day not quite 2,000 years ago, it was done to Jesus.But Jesus was the last person on earth who deserved to die like that.He was amazing. Everything about Him was amazing. He was the Son of God come from Heaven to save us from our sins. He said things that no one had ever said before and performed miracles that defied the laws of nature, physics, and medicine. He was kind and loving and caring to people who nobody else in the world cared about. And He was challenging and even threatening to people who nobody else in the world dared to challenge. In a nutshell, He was perfect.So if this form of execution they called crucifixion was so terrible, and this Savior we call Jesus was so wonderful, why do we call the anniversary of the day that Jesus was crucified “Good” Friday?The short answer to that question is because it was good for us. Good Friday is the anniversary of what is arguably the most important day in human history. On this day, when Jesus died, He died as a sacrifice for our sins. In His death, the punishment that we all deserve for all the ways that we have rejected God and gone our own way, is paid for. Because of Jesus’ death on the cross, all that stuff that separates people from God doesn’t have to be there anymore. It can be forgiven. That is good news! And that is why we call the Friday before Easter Good Friday.Good Friday says some amazing things about Jesus— it says that He has the power and authority to die as a sacrifice for our sins, and the love and compassion and courage to actually do it. And Good Friday also says something about you. It says that at the worst of your worst, in the depth of your sinfulness, when Jesus looks at you He sees someone worth dying for.Isn’t that amazing? We waste so much of our lives trying to invent a way to somehow be good enough for God. But from the beginning that is not how it works. God brings all the goodness to our salvation. All we bring is the need for it. And yet, at the worst of our worst, when Jesus looks at us He sees someone worth dying for.As I think about how great of a gift that is, and how Jesus’ death has the power to bring us new life forever, there is a part of me that wants to wish you a happy Good Friday. But I just can’t do it. For me, Good Friday is far too emotionally complicated of a day to say that. So instead, I wish you a thoughtful Good Friday. I wish you a day in which you have the courage to remember that Jesus gave His life for you, and the humility to respond to that historical fact by choosing to give your life to Him.Good Friday. What a day.

Once upon a time, my spring sport of choice was track and my specific event of choice was the high hurdles. I spent a lot of time training to be in the best shape to run those hurdles with the best form. And in the meantime, I got a lot of bruises, a few pulled muscles, and not very many medals.Fast forward to today, a couple of decades later, and these days I try not to hurdle much of anything if I can help it.So from a certain perspective it would be easy to think that all those days spent training for a race that I was never exceptionally good at were kind of a waste. But they really weren't, because as it turned out in training for that particular event, I learned some very important things about life.For example, I learned that be it on the artificial confines of a quarter mile track or in the midst of day to day life there is something about competition that can bring out the best and worst in people, and that’s a really fascinating thing to see. I think that’s one of the reasons why we don't just play sports, we also watch them. The fact is that we were all designed for greatness, and that fact becomes a little more obvious when we find ourselves surrounded by people who are all striving to be the best.As it turned out, high hurdles weren't good for me because I was the best at it. They were good for me because I was at my best at it. My training changed the way I ate, it changed the way I slept, it changed the things i thought about and talked about. And It woke up something inside of me that craved victory.And all of us, long after the days when we hang up our track spikes, must come to grips with the joy and the terror that comes with the fact that we were built by God for greatness.And it’s a real challenge, because most of us have long ago given up on greatness. We have histories that include too much losing and not enough winning, and no expectation that that is going to change.So as a result of that, we "settle in" to whatever kind of life seems achievable for us, and we take whatever is left of that in-born drive to be something and do something, and we push it away. Sometimes we eject it out of ourselves in bouts of anger and frustration, sometimes we try to bury it in ourselves under mountains of busyness and distraction. But neither approach ever really works. So sometimes we find ourselves feeling lost and listless, sitting in the stands of life, and wishing we had something to run for.Ladies and gentlemen boys and girls guess what? You do.You, right now in this moment, are nothing less than an image bearer of the living God created for a greatness that is beyond anything we can even imagine. You may be broken and dusty and in desperate need of a tune-up, but regardless, that is what you are.In the book of First Corinthians Chapter nine 24 the Bible says:"'Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize."Ladies and Gentlemen, embrace the race today. Not because you will be the best at it, but because you will be at your best at it. Turn your heart to the living God, and experience in this moment the life that He has for you.

I learned the other day that every time one person looks at another person a special part of our brains kick into gear that help us to see the intricate details of each others’ faces.The reason for that is a good one—its so that we can tell each other apart.There are hopefully people in your life who are important to you, and hopefully there are people out there who think of you as important.But the fact is that pretty much everybody you ever meet has the same number of eyes and noses and mouths, and those parts are all located in pretty much the same places on your best friends as they are on your worst enemies.Even though human beings are very different from one another, human faces are not really all that different from one another.But regardless of facial similarity, most of us want to keep the same people in our lives, not just people who pretty much look the same. And while it might make it a lot easier to pick up kids from school if all you had to do was grab the right number of kids who had approximately the right size and shape, I think we can all agree that it’s a really important thing to be able to tell people apart from one another for lots of different reasons.So, in order to make certain that we all know who is who our brains are specially designed to notice the very slight differences between human faces so that we can very accurately tell each other apart.In fact, without that special design, we wouldn’t be able to tell each other apart any more than we can tell apart a herd of identical-looking sheep.However, once in a great while, this particular part of somebody's brain gets broken. When that happens people get a condition called “face blindness,” in which they can literally not see the difference between people's faces, and this condition is so severe that even though the person can see other things perfectly well, they cannot identify the faces of even their closest friends and family.Thankfully, face blindness is a rare condition so not very many people have it.But I mention it today because I’m wondering if maybe you think that God has face blindness for you.We talk about God quite a bit in our culture. His name comes up regularly in conversation and country songs, and He usually sounds and least somewhat special and important.But do you ever feel like, to God, you are not special and important? Like God might be very interested in people, or at least interested in other people, but when God looks at you He just sees another face in the crowd?If you ever feel like that, I have great news for you today.God is not blind to you. In fact, He sees you perfectly.There is an old song in the Bible that is about exactly this subject. Psalm 139 starts out and says:O Lord, you have searched meand you know me.You know when I sit and when I rise;you perceive my thoughts from afar.You discern my going out and my lying down;you are familiar with all my ways.Before a word is on my tongueyou know it completely, O Lord.It goes on like that for a while, and I would encourage you to look it up and read it. Wherever you are, wherever you’re going, whatever you’re thinking, God sees you. There is no blindness in Him. He sees you, and He cares.And for me, that changes everything.

It is a beautiful thing when the supporting details of our lives are shiny and new and in tip top shape. There is nothing quite so grand as a life that is firing on all cylinders with blue skies and clear paths as far as the eye can see. Its a beautiful thing that kind of life, but alas, it is not a permanent thing.To the contrary, it is likely that most of the supporting details of your actual life are squeaking and creaking along and just generally wearing out. The very irritating fact of life is that Everything Breaks down. Everything.Our houses fall apart. Our cars wear out. Our bodies get old and sick. Even the sun is slowly burning itself out. Its not fun, but it is true. Everything in the universe breaks down. And that simple little fact guarantees that at least some of the time our lives are going to be hard.Life is going to let us down big time, and that is going to be a very unpleasant experience. It may be something like your car breaking down and leaving you stranded late at night on a lonely highway. It may be something like your marriage breaking down and leaving you devestated in a lonely life. It may be something like you breaking down and failing a lot of people that you love and care about. The details change from person and person and from year to year, but somewhere, somehow, something is always breaking.And that is pretty terrible news.In the Bible there is a book called Lamentations, and it is about as fun as its name makes it sound. The whole book is basically the very sad song of a guy who watched as God allowed the destruction of a bunch of people because of their sins against Him. It was a terrible time that lasted for a terribly long time. But even in the midst of that particularly awful breakdown, there is this relentless theme of hope. For example,I remember my affliction and my wandering,the bitterness and the gall.I well remember them,and my soul is downcast within me.Yet this I call to mindand therefore I have hope:Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,for his compassions never fail.They are new every morning;great is your faithfulness.I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;therefore I will wait for him.”—Lamentations 3:19-24It is absolutely true that everything in creation breaks down. And because of that you most likely have some fear, or anxiety, or pain in your life today. You have earned it, and life has given you every reason to carry it. But remember that that is not the whole story.It is also true that God is faithful, and that His plan for everybody is good, and that He never breaks down. Other things are going to keep breaking down, but if you are slogging through the breakdowns of life with no hope and nowhere to turn, you don't have to do that anymore. You can trust God to do right and be right, and to care about you every day of your life.

I recently shared this sermon at the Broken Bow Evangelical Free Church in Broken Bow, Nebraska.

We live in a super-complicated world. Relationships are complicated. Health is complicated. Finances are complicated. Work is complicated. We are complicated. From the deepest of the inside of us to the farthest reaches of our lives and beyond, there is so much that has gone on and is going on, and all of that is highly interconnected in ways that we never fully understand.Everybody wishes that we had a firm handle on our lives, like the world's best bull-rider on an enjoayble but mediocre ride, fully in charge, and fully in the know. But instead we are more like feathers in a hurricane, overwhemled and confused, not knowing what in the world is happening right now, and not knowing what is going to happen next.Its no wonder that in the midst of all this complication we very often get lost. And I don't mean lost as in a little bit turned around. I mean lost like a blind man in a blizzard. In the midst of it all we try to get a handle on our lives, but we don't know where we are, we don't know how we got here, and not only do we not know what to do, much of the time we don’t even know who we are. And its a terribe feeling to be lost in the midst of a complicated life that seems to be out of control.So today, as a person who knows what its like to be lost in a complicated life, I’m going to share with you the single most simplifying truth of my life.For me, as I recognize and apply this truth in my life, all of those complicated parts of life that I just mentioned become a lot more clear. I discover at least a basic idea of where I'm at. I discover a whole lot of what I’m supposed to do in most situations. And I discover who I am. And on my good days, because of this truth, even when life is absolutely crazy, I am not. Are you ready for it??Jesus is for real.Thats it. Jesus is for real. It may seem strange, but in that one truth, my whole life comes into focus. Because of that one truth I know that God is real, and that He loves me so much that He would send Jesus for me. I know that I’m important. I know that you are important. I know that God is big enough to take care of us. I know that God has a plan that is bigger than today. And I know that I can trust Him. All of that, and so very many other things, stem from the simple truth that Jesus is for real.No matter how complicated things around me get, the more that I understand and live out of that truth, the more peace I have. Because Jesus is for real, I know who I am, and I get to choose to live out of that every day. I’m still a bit of a mess, don’t get me wrong.But I am also whole. And thats pretty great thing.

I am a pretty laid back guy. But there is this one thing that I experience from time to time that drives. me. crazy! I can deal with a broad range of irritating and frustrating things without getting worked up about it, but when I have a technology problem, it makes me furious.In a moment I transition from being a sane and rational person who capably navigates the challening waters of life into some kind of crazy man.I find myself having to control the volume of my voice and even fight the urge to break things. It is a weird and not very good experience. But as I've thought about this weird little part of being me over the years, I think the reason why I get so angry about this kind of thing is because even though I use technology all the time, I don’t really understand technology. I just see these devices whose entire reason for existing is TO WORK. To just do what they are supposed to do. And when they don’t do that, it drives me crazy. I'm getting angry just thinking about it.I’ll admit that I probably need to work on that a bit, but the reason I wanted to talk about it is because I think that sometimes we start thinking about other people kind of like I think about my technology. In short, we start treating people like objects that only exist to perform certain functions. Maybe its someone really important in your life, or maybe its just person in front of you driving 10 miles an hour even though YOUR ARE IN A HURRY. Either way, when we start treating people like objects and those people don’t perform how we want them to, we get really mad at them. We might even see them as useless obstacles that are taking up space in our important lives.But here’s the thing though. People are not objects. They are people! And as it turns out, thats a really important distinction. In all of existence, there are basically two catagories. There is God, and there is His creation, which we are all a part of. And in God's creation there are again basically two catagories. There are PEOPLE, and there is everything else. Because the thing about people—even the annoying ones—is that we are ALL the only thing in all of creation that is created in the Image of God. Literally the only thing.That means that all people are special and important, no matter who they are, or what they’re doing. That includes everyone who annoys you, and that includes you. So if your computer is driving you crazy today, I’m probably not the best guy to talk to about that, because I have that exact same problem. But if the people around you are driving crazy, consider the possibility that you might feel that way partly because you have stopped thinking about them as people at all.But they ARE people. Whoever they are and whatever they are or aren't doing, they (and you) are PEOPLE. Complicated people created in the image of GOD.If you can remember that, maybe you will see them and yourself differently. And maybe some really good things will come from that.

Greetings, fellow humans. A long time ago, pioneers would travel from the eastern to western United States on a trail just a few miles from my modern day front door. For the most part, those individuals and families traveled in large, spoke-wheeled wagons across all kinds of terrain and in all kinds of weather. And as they did so, the wagons in front made very deep ruts in the trail, and the wagons in the back fell into those ruts and could not get out.And just like that, the phrase "stuck in a rut" was born.And its not such a bad thing, being stuck in a rut, as long as the rut in question is going in the direction that you want to go. But if you want to go a different direction, or even in the same direction but just on your own terms, then first you have to get out of that rut, and that is where things get complicated.The Oregon Trail is just a dusty memory now, but being stuck in a rut is still very much a real (albiet metaphorical) thing. In life, the easiest thing that a person can ever be is whatever they have always been, and the easiest thing that a person can ever do is whatever they’ve always done. That is the rut in which we all live. All of our lives are very well-worn in that we tend to do and feel and think the same things over and over until its pretty hard to do or feel or think anything else.And I suppose that would be fine if all of our lives were already pointed in the right direction in every possible way. But thats not the rut in which any of us live. The fact is that sometimes we all need to go in a different direction than we are used go going, and we all need to grow into life in ways that we haven't grown yet. But it is impossible to go places you’ve never gone or grow into something you’ve never been by doing what you’ve always done and being who you’ve always been. Thats not how life works. And on top of that, even when we hate the ruts of life that have trapped us for years, those old ruts keep calling out to us, and they feel like home. So much so that even if we can escape for a while, very often, we eventually just jump right back in.Its a pretty bleak picture.As a person who has plenty of ruts of his own, I’m very thankful that this very problem is addressed in the Bible in the Book of Romans Chapter 7. God used an amazing guy named Paul to write the book of Romans, but even though Paul was an amazing faithful person, he wrote these words in the Bible about his struggles with the ruts in His own life and the sinful causes of those ruts:“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”Then a few verses later he says, “For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing!”Finally, a few verses later he says, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”And then in the very next sentence we get the answer. “Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”If you’re like me, and you’ve got some deep ruts in your life that you would love to escape, I have good news for you. Because you will never be able to escape those ruts on your own, God sent His Son to rescue you. And if you are ready to be rescued today, Jesus is the ultimate rut-breaker.

You’ve probably noticed by now that there is a lot going on in this world in which we live. There are people and places and cultures that are completely foreign to us, and in which the most basic activities of life seem strange and bizarre. And some days, things aren't much better even right in the middle of our own lives. We are confronted with people we don't know how to deal with, problems we don't know how to solve, and situations that we can barely even comprehend. And all of those things can happen at the same time, even as we are having an otherwise very good day. The bottom line is that for most people, life can be really complicated.Apparently not, though, for a famous American poet named Robert Frost. Robert Frost once wrote “In three words I can sum up for you everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.”Thats it. It goes on.As it turns out, that was a pretty brilliant observation. Robert Frost was a guy whose life was filled with world-stopping tragedy. He lost his father when he way only a young boy, then his mother. He dropped out of college twice, worked a lot of hard jobs that he didn't like, got a farm, and then lost the farm, and experienced several other really hard things in the midst of all of that. But, as he so rightly observed, the world did not stop. On the best and worst days of Robert Frost's life, it just kept on turning.That reminds me of a famous part of the Bible out of the Book of Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 that says “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.” All of us are in different places in our lives today. Some of those places are really good, some of those places are really bad, and most of those places are somewhere in the middle. But wherever you are in your life today, remember: life is going to continue to go on.Somedays that is really frustrating, because some days we don't want life to go on. We want it to stop just right where its at. And other days, we can't wait for life to move on. The sooner the better. But in every day, I would encourage you to turn your life to the things matter.First off, Start with your connection with God. The life that He has for you can only be lived with Him at the very center of it, so there is no better place to start or finish than with Him. Life is happening, and its going to keep happening. It goes on. So wherever your life is going, make certain today that you are going with God.

Greetings and Salutations delightful people one and all, I hope that you are having a wonderful day doing whatever it is that you're finding to do today. One of the cool things about my life is that I am a book nerd, and I get to spend lots of time studying the greatest collection of books that has ever been or will ever be written. I am of course talking about the Bible, which, although we tend to think of it as one book, is actually a collection of sixty six different books written over a period of about 1,500 years. As I say that, lets take a second and be honest about the fact that even if you are also a book nerd of some sort, for many people the idea of spending tons of time reading and studying the bible does not sound like a cool thing.To the contrary, sometimes people have a really hard time with the Bible. On the one hand, its supposed to say lots of important things—and it does—but on the other hand reading the Bible can feel boring and confusing and the farthest thing from exciting and enlightening. So the reality is that a lot of people have given up on the Bible.For some people that means that instead of digging in and getting to know the Bible, they just wait for people like me to do the work and then hand it out in a sermon or a book or a few minutes on the radio. And for other people giving up on the Bible means acting like the Bible doesn't exist, ignoring it completely, and looking for your answers in life elsewhere.If you find yourself in either of those camps this week, don’t give up on the Bible. Its worth the effort, and so are you.When you discover on the first page of the first book of the whole Bible that people are the only thing in the entire universe that is created in the image of God, that changes things. It changes the way you look at the people in your life (even the annoying ones) and it changes the way that you look at yourself. And when you discover on the last page of the last book of the Bible that after Jesus died for the sins of the whole world and then came back to life, He gave us a glimpse of what forever is going to look like, and He promised that He is going to come back and make that happen, that changes things. It changes the things you care about, and it changes the things that you choose to put your trust in.From front to back, The Bible tells the true story of God and people, past, present, and future. That story is still going on right now, and you are a part of it! So don't give up on the Bible, and don't give up on God, because I promise, He has not given up on you.

These days I am just cold. The temperature has been pretty low, the wind chill has been brutal, and sometimes when I go outside I feel like my bones are starting to freeze. On the up side, I have been really thankful for my house. Its warm in there, and I am amazed by the fact that the freezing wind and snow can be blowing against the north wall of my house, and yet, six inches away on the other side of that wall, the temperature can be 60 or 70 degrees warmer. And its a good thing, because if it wasn’t, I would be popsicle right now!The cold winter outside and the warmth of my house inside has got me thinking about the other places of safety and refuge I have in my life. We need those because the truth is that we’ve all got much bigger problems than the weather, and most of those problems can’t be solved by four walls and a heater. But as for me, I have refuge in my life from those things also.In short, I have surrendered myself to God. He has taken me in, and every day He keeps me safe in the midst of the storms of my life. And for me, that has made all the difference. Psalm 91 in the Bible starts off with these words:“Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most Highwill rest in the shadow of the Almighty.I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress,my God, in whom I trust.”It is a beautiful thing to have safety and comfort in good and bad times, and my good news for you is that you can have that too.Maybe you are about as worn out by life as a person can be. If you are, its time to come in out of the cold and the wind. God sent His own Son Jesus to show you the way in, and to hold the door open just for you. God is good, and He wants to be our safe place.

When I was fifteen years old I had a dream. I had a job and a little bit of money, and my dream was to figure out a way to convert that money into my first car.And not just any car, mind you. My dream was to buy a used silver 1988 two-door hatch-back 4-cylinder Dodge Daytona. That very car had been sitting for a few months on the dusty back lot of the used car lot in the town where we lived, and I thought that it was just about the coolest thing on four wheels. I had shown it to my friends, I had shown it to my parents, and even though nobody else seemed all that impressed, I was hooked.Long story short, one day during track practice I had gone running in the direction of the car lot to check on my dream car... and it was gone.That was pretty tough, until I walked out into the parking lot of the school after track practice and there was my mom sitting there in that car!(And Might I say, God bless that woman.)The day that I, with the help of my long-suffering parents, was able to buy that car was one of the great moments of my young life. I loved that car, and drove it for years.But as I look back I realize that that car really wasn't all that great. Even when it was brand new it was just another gutless hatchback, and it was far from new by the time it ended up on that used car lot.The truth is that the memories of that car stick with me not because of what that car was, but because of what that car was to me.In reality, my first car was a used, gutless, uncomfortable, 4-cylinder hatchback that had been sitting on a dusty back car lot for months because nobody else wanted it. But for me, none of that mattered. For me, it was exactly what I wanted—dents, scratches, and all.I take you on that walk down memory lane because I want to offer you some encouragement.In the used car lot of life, most of us don't really feel like a show room quality product. Maybe because of our dents and scratches, maybe because we're pretty sure we were never that great to begin with, or maybe just because nobody ever seems to take a second look at you.But here's the thing that changes everything; Some things in life stick with you not because of what they are, but because of what they are to you.And for God, you are one of those things. You may not look like much to you, but to Him, you are exactly what He wants—dents, scratches, and all.The Bible says that God so loved the world that He sent His one and only Son, so that whoever believes in Him will have real life with Him forever.That includes you, dude.

There was a time when it would take centuries for a culture to undergo any kind of significant change. But that has changed. Now major change can happen in months, or even days. Because of that, we live in a very exciting time. It could be the case that today is the day that somebody somewhere cures cancer, finds a way to drastically reduce poverty in the world, or invents a cheap flying car. That’s exciting stuff.But in the midst of all that excitement, the rapid pace of change in our lives has also created a lot of instability. Many of our jobs could disappear overnight. Many of our values seem to have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Many of our relationships are falling apart because we don’t know how to talk to each other anymore or even what we would talk about.In the midst of the constant changes around us, we often don’t know how to keep up. And that is kind of scary.But If you’re feeling strung out and out of touch, I’ve got good news for you. You don’t have to keep up.Contrary to popular opinion, life is not best lived on the cutting edge of the latest trend. You can try to live life out there, and maybe you do, but sooner or later you will discover that you are exhausted and empty, and that the foundations of your life are always crumbling underneath you.As for me, I love change. I think its fascinating and exciting. But I have found my peace and my joy and my hope in a life that is built around something that never changes.My God is eternal, and always the same. His book, the Bible, is thousands of years old, and it doesn’t change either.Now I admit that I miss out on a few trends every once in I while. But I’m ok with that. I’ve spent some time chasing after latest and greatest thing in search of happiness, and I was always more empty at the end than I was at the beginning.I have discovered that the more I chase after this God and the life that He has for me, the more I am full. And its good.How about you?

Weird confession time. I have a lot of stuff in my garage. My problem is that every time I'm about to throw something away I hear the voice of my father screaming out from my childhood and saying, "now somebody could get some use out of that."And while I admit that it is a great feeling to wade into my garage, step over that old piece of lawn furniture, and grab hold of exactly the thing that I happen to need at the time—usually, that voice turns out not to be right.Usually, I'm just a guy with a meaningless collection of worn out roller blade wheels sitting on a shelf somewhere beside a meaningless collection of orphaned nuts and bolts sitting beside a meaningless collection of something else.Apparently, the gap between the things that a person might get some use out of and the things that a person actually gets some use out of is wide. Like Grand Canyon wide.But regardless, I think that lots of us are tempted to keep piles of things that we don't really care about just in case we might need them some day.Maybe you have a garage that looks like mine, or maybe you have an old pile of shoes in your closet, or an old car sitting out behind your house somewhere. The idea that drives all of those realities is exactly the same.That stuff is not important enough to do anything with, but you hate to get rid of it entirely just in case you ever need it.And when it comes to rusty bolts and old shoes, I think that’s probably OK. But there are some things in life that should never under any circumstances be put on that shelf. And one of those things is our connection with God.If we're being honest, for many of us our connection with God is kind of like those roller blade wheels in my garage. It is something that we picked up along the way somewhere, and now we're just kind of stuck with it. On the one hand, we're pretty sure that it could come in handy sometime, so we hate to throw it away. But on the other hand, we don't really care about it. So it just sits there on a shelf with a bunch of other stuff that we sort of value but don't actually care about—taking up space in our lives.But when it comes to our connection with God, that doesn't really work. And we know that, because people have tried it before, and God has responded.In the book of Revelation chapter 3, Jesus is speaking from Heaven to this church in a middle of nowhere town called Laodacia, and this is what He says to them.“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”Jesus is saying to these people, “Hey, you put me on the shelf, man. And its not working.”As it turns out, handing your life to Jesus is a great plan. But its a terrible back-up plan. Jesus does not play second fiddle to anybody, and He is most certainly not content to sit on a shelf in some dusty back corner of our hearts.So today, if you are in search of some wood from an old piano, you should check out my garage. But if you are in search of real life that matters and changes things and changes you, its time to take Jesus off the shelf.

Starting off a new year is always an interesting kind of experience for me. The promise of a new year is really wrapped up in that word—new. New days, new beginnings, new opportunities, those are the kinds of things that a new year seems to promise. But as the new year begins to take shape, most of the time we come to realize that the word that is most likely to characterize the new year is not new. The word that is most likley to characterize our new year is same—as in, pretty much the same as last year.Same people, same stuff, same bills. And most importantly, same you.And for me, as I settle in to the new year, that same-ness can be a little bit of a let-down sometimes. There is always a part of me that starts off every new year thinking that this is the year that I conquer all my problems and maybe even get a flying car while I'm at it. But it never takes very long to figure out that that is probably not how this year is going to go.While I strongly encourage you to use the new year as an excuse to eject some bad things from your life, remember also that there are a few things about every year of your life that will always be the same. And surprisingly, if you are looking for some real transformation in the new year you might might be most likely to find it by focusing on a few of those things that will never change.Here are two examples.First, God Knows You. Always has, always will.Second, You Are Kind of Awesome. Even if you don't believe it, its still true.Psalm 139 demonstrates how those two facts come together in the Bible. It starts by saying,1 You have searched me, Lord,and you know me.2 You know when I sit and when I rise;you perceive my thoughts from afar.3 You discern my going out and my lying down;you are familiar with all my ways.4 Before a word is on my tongueyou, Lord, know it completely.5 You hem me in behind and before,and you lay your hand upon me.6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,too lofty for me to attain.7 Where can I go from your Spirit?Where can I flee from your presence?8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,if I settle on the far side of the sea,10 even there your hand will guide me,your right hand will hold me fast.11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide meand the light become night around me,”12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;the night will shine like the day,for darkness is as light to you.13 For you created my inmost being;you knit me together in my mother’s womb.14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;It goes on from there, and I suggest you look it up and read it.Here is how these things that will always be the same can change your life;The first unchanging fact is that God Knows You, perfectly and completely. One of the things that means is that you always have an audience, including for those parts of your life that you aren't too proud of. That should be a challenge for all of us. It also means that You Are Never Alone—that in all of those days and all of those times when you may feel like you have nothing and nobody, you actually do have something and somebody. You have God. And He has always been there for you, and will always be there for you. And the fact that His presence in your life will always be the same is a great reason to change our lives by putting our hope and our trust in Him instead of in the kinds of stuff we chose to trust in last year.The second unchanging fact is that you are awesome. That is what the Bible means when it says that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Now don't get me wrong, I suspect that you've got plenty of dents and scratches on your life and in your soul. We all do. If we were all used cars on a lot somewhere, that would be a pretty rough looking place. You might think that you are much better or much worse than other people, but the fact is that you are a sinner. Plain and simple. But still, we are kind of awesome. Still we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and still we are such a big deal to God that He sent Jesus to come into this world to rescue us. And no matter what happens, that is not going to change. So maybe, just maybe, if you want your New Year to be truly new, then the key is to get very honest about the things that will always be the same and then intentionally shape your life around those truths.Trust God because He is always there for you, and be awesome because that is what He built you to be. If you get that, then you new year is going to be new indeed. Even without the flying car.

Once again we find ourselves on the cusp of a brand new year. We have drawn an imaginary line in the solar system, we have all traveled one complete loop around the sun together, and now we cross that line again and start our next loop. It’s interesting to me that, in the cosmic sense, a year just means our planet has traveled in a great big circle. Because in the personal sense, that is the last thing that most of us want to do in a year.

We are all very different people who like to give and receive different kinds of gifts. But though you may be giving and receiving everything from sledge hammers to soup bowls this Christmas, I’ve noticed that there is one thing all our varied gifts tend to share in common—the condition of the gift. Your gift might be anything from a paintball gun to a pasta maker, but the thing that most of us share in common is that we like our gifts to be new, and we like them to work. And that makes perfect sense to me. My guess is that if your Christmas gift is used and broken, you probably won't be super happy about that. And while it’s a pretty straight-forward fact that most of us like our Christmas gifts to be new and we like our Christmas gifts to work, it’s also very interesting to me because, though we are all very much like each other in that regard, we are very different than Jesus.

Birthdays are a funny thing because they are moments that simultaneously connect us with the past, the present, and the future. Follow me here: on somebody's birthday, we celebrate the past tense fact that they were born and the present tense fact that they are where they are in their life. But we also look forward to a future tense hope by wishing them a great upcoming year of life. I'm thinking particularly about that today because Christmas Day is drawing nearer by the day. And though we sometimes forget it, Christmas—at its core—is the celebration of somebody's birthday.

I love quirky, one-of-a-kind type things. If something out there is both hard to find and hard to explain, then chances are, I want it. To that end, I own my very own African spear, my very own piece of the Berlin Wall, and a bunch of other things that might not be worth a nickel to anybody else, but mean a lot to me. But as much as I might treasure each of those little finds, the best deal I ever got was on something that means more to me than my whole life but didn’t cost me a dime.

The way of things, and the why’s that guide our lives.

A complete solar eclipse, a much greater darkness, and the best news in the history of the world.

Peanuts, shells, and life.

A complete solar eclipse, a much greater darkness, and the best news in the history of the world.

What I learned about following Jesus after spending years avoiding a famous man.

Treadmills, goals, and the life that God has for you.

A cold wind, an unknown future, and a known God.

Once upon a time, we had a very friendly cat named Samson. He was fluffy and white with blue eyes and a top speed of about one mile an hour, and people loved him. Anytime he moseyed into a room people would scoop him up and say things like, “What a beautiful cat!” And they were right. For several years, anyway. 

The next time you go to the store, I want you to notice something for me. When you go to check out, it is very likely that you will find yourself standing beside a rack of magazines. Several of those magazines are devoted to one purpose, and that is sharing with you the misery that is taking place in the lives of rich and famous people.   And if you are paying attention, believe it or not, those pitiful magazines can teach you a lesson that can change your life forever.

Things are changing. Drastically, in fact.

Fun fact today for all you bug-lovers out there: every single summer, about 18 TRILLION mayflies all hatch at the same time on the upper Mississippi River, and they create a swarm so huge and disgusting that it can appear on weather radars. Just the dead ones can pile up deep enough to shut down bridges and fill up entire parking lots three feet deep. So, knowing this makes me wonder… if every year brings 18 TRILLION new mayflies to the river, why does ANYBODY live anywhere near the Mississippi River at all??

It occurs to me that almost everybody I know is busy. What’s the deal with that? Why do we all stay so busy? Think of it this way—If someone was to walk up to you right now and ask you, “Why do you do the things that you do?”, what would be the true answer to that question?

Water is a very good thing. We are all made up largely of water, we need to drink lots of it, and everything that we eat needs to drink lots of it, so it is a good thing when good water is easy to come by. But no matter how good the water is, and no matter how much of it we drink, we will always need more. With that in mind, one day a long time ago, Jesus was sitting by a well in the hottest part of a very hot day on the outskirts of a town where people did not like Him very much. And as He was sitting there, a lady that people also did not like very much came out to get some water.