How God Sees Me Is Hard To Accept

Perhaps it was my early church teaching that causes me to struggle with the concept that God loves me. I believe He can love others. I believe He loves the homeless person on the street and the struggling inner-city mom trying to hold her family together. But I am less sure that He always loves me. I know me. I know what lies hidden in my heart. I know my reactions. I know my thoughts. God knows all of that too. So in the sad and difficult moments I wonder how He could possibly love me. Perhaps that is your struggle as well. Philip Yancey wrote these thoughts in What’s So Amazing About Grace. “Sociologists have a theory of the looking-glass self: you become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible’s astounding words about God’s love for me, if I looked
Continue reading...

Jesus Will Meet You There

Being in community with others means you share in their joys and their sorrows. Sometimes the sorrows come in tsunami waves and all you can do is care, pray, and be present. Good and decent people deal with financial, emotional, and physical suffering all around us and it is easy to lose heart. The news seems to be only tragedy and heartbreaking sadness. What can be redeemed of all of this suffering? A song called “The Hurt and the Healer” by MercyMe resonated when I first heard it but now that same song touches my heart even more. The lyrics ask the question we all struggle with. Why?The question that is never far awayThe healing doesn’t come from the explainedJesus please don’t let this go in vain I can’t explain why things happen. Sometimes it is sin. Sometimes it is simply life. I have learned in my years of following Jesus that He does not let suffering go in vain. I have seen over
Continue reading...

One Of The Worst Days Ever

There is much written about Good Friday. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross is incomprehensible to my puny human intellect. There is much written about Easter Sunday. Christians around the world rejoice and proclaim that “He is risen!”. But there is not nearly as much written about one of the saddest and most confusing days in history. The Saturday between the Friday horror of Jesus on the Cross and the Sunday mystery of the resurrection. Some churches do observe Holy Saturday but it was never a tradition in my faith upbringing. I have been thinking about what that day must have been like for those who dropped everything to follow Jesus. How crushing those events had to be. I imagine the fear they felt that they would also be killed. And for what? On Saturday they feared they had given their careers and their very souls for a false hope. I think in particular of Peter. I identify
Continue reading...

Surviving the Storms of Life

Real growth in relationships, faith, and maturity usually doesn’t just happen. It is so simple to blame circumstances or others for our mistakes. Rationalizations for wrong behaviors are frighteningly easy.  “Officer, I didn’t mean to speed and break the law. I was just going with the flow of traffic.” Think about that. My defense is that everybody else is breaking the law. Therefore, I am innocent.  Since the Garden if Eden the automatic answer to sin and shortcomings is that it is someone else’s fault. That may be true at times. But that thinking will never result in becoming like Jesus. So I have to be intentional about confronting my own heart. Change is hard. Sharing my need to change with others is even harder.  Several years ago I took the risk to trust three men with everything about me. We call ourselves the Redwood Brothers based on a unique characteristic of California’s redwood trees. A redwood alone in a
Continue reading...

Hope Springs Eternal

For thirty-seven years I spent Baseball’s Opening Day as a television director for Texas Rangers broadcasts. It still seems a bit odd to witness this day from a rocking chair at the old director’s home. I feel like I am just behind Lou Gehrig as the “luckiest man on the face of the earth” to have been able to do that for so many years. No matter what your vantage point might be there is no more special day in sports than Opening Day in baseball. It is an annual rite of Spring to post this article on the magic of Opening Day. The base lines painstakingly and perfectly defined by a grounds crew that is committed to perfection on this day. Red, white, and blue bunting give the ball park a festive World Series look. The players bounce around like little boys. They seem a little extra grateful that they are paid to play a kid’s game. The hot
Continue reading...

Everywhere I Go…

My book Waking Up Slowly is based on a beautiful Psalm of David. Psalm 139 is one of the most inspiring writings in Scripture. We don’t know when David wrote this stirring account of God’s indescribable attributes. Some believe he wrote it as a shepherd while gazing at the stars and the enormity of the heavens. Some feel he wrote it when he became king over Israel. As a more experienced human being myself (that is PC for old) it certainly feels like David had to have lived a little more life in order to write such a majestic dialog with God. But the truth is we just don’t know. David made three observations about the greatness of God. God knows everything about us. God is everywhere we are. God ordains everything about you. I think and do a lot of things that I would prefer to keep in Las Vegas mode. But David is saying the idea of a
Continue reading...

What Are My Priorities?

I have been doing this church thing for a lot of years. I have sung hundreds of songs over the five decades or so that I have been a follower of Jesus. Some songs have great meaning to me. Some lyrics moved me to deep worship of God. Some times I really meant what I was singing. Other times I was singing through the motions while thinking about lunch and when the kick off was going to happen. Sometimes a song would make me really squirm.  One song in that category was recorded by the legendary George Beverly Shea in 1932.  The words were from a poem written by Mrs.Rhea Miller in 1922. Shea recalled the moment. At the age of twenty-three, I was living at home with my parents, continuing to work at Mutual Life Insurance and studying voice. Going to the piano one Sunday morning, I found a poem waiting for me there. I recognized my mother’s handwriting. She
Continue reading...