i want…

i want to not worry. i want to not be anxious.

i want to trust. i want to trust that god knows me, loves me and cares for me.

i want to have passion, excitement, challenges and growth.

i want to have fun with my family, enjoy my kids, to enjoy my wife.

i want to read books, watch good movies and travel.

i want my sister and mike to have a baby.

i want to create new things.

i want to have the rock starest bestest, most impactful nonprofit in the world.

i want to work 4 days a week.

i want to make more money.

i want to run more, be outside more, and have a garden.

i want my lost hair to come back.

i want to find another pair of perfect jeans.

i want to teach, or i think i want to teach.

i want to write, or i think i want to write.

i want peace. i want to be known. i want to laugh with my wife, travel with my wife, cry with my wife, be with my wife.

i want to know jesus more.

i want to find a reason to go to church.

i want to get a bush fellowship and live in new york or south africa.

i want to know how to spend my time when i am all alone.

i want to share christ with someone who has never known or experienced him.

i want someone to share christ with me in a new way.

i want so much….

what do you want?

means to an end

the definition of the idiom “means to an end” is as follows:

something that you are not interested in but that you do because it will help you to achieve something else

i could honestly say before this my interest in prayer was slight. i mean i might have said i was interested in prayer, but my behavior for the long past has shown differently. but if i have for 26 days (+/- 4 or 5 days) engaged in something that i wasn’t interested in, what is the ’something else’ it is helping me to achieve?

as phil has so brilliantly wrote lately, “so (?)”

throughout our 4 week journey, I have been consistently asking myself the question, “Why Pray?”. at one point i wrote:

“I guess that’s what I’m hoping for through this month. Not just that prayer would be something I check off my list of things to do, or even to see ‘things happen’, but simply to see if consistent prayer might draw me closer to Jesus in a new way.”

essentially a more intimate life with god is the ’something else’ i am hoping to bring about my doing something i wasn’t really interested in (prayer) before this.

so the question 26 days into this is, am i at the end? has prayer brought about a more close relationship with god?

yes…and no.

sometimes i have felt closer to god and sometimes not.

but what i’m learning is that prayer is good, and prayer is powerful, but it’s not the end. prayer isn’t the end goal. giving 12 minutes of my day to some time in prayer is not the end to which i am striving.

if my end goal is a greater intimacy with god, then prayer has been good, but only as one piece of a larger puzzle.

prayer alone. worship alone. conversation alone. scripture alone. none of these things alone get me to the end.

somehow i have to find a way to integrate many things into my life together to reach the end.

so i’ll keep praying… but hopefully with a commitment to developing some other positive habits into my life that together might help me get closer to this thing i define as ‘closeness’.

2 minutes.

that’s about how much i’ve been averaging this week. i’ve made the effort most days, usually at night, but after about 2 minutes find my mind wandering in all sorts of directions with little focus. then i usually just give up, rather than trying to bring it back. i think part of it is not knowing what to pray for this week. the first few weeks I had some specific things i was praying for, now not so much… i mean i know prayer is more than just ‘asking’ god for things, but i’m struggling with what the ‘other’ point of prayer is.

good night.

leap

I was reading John this morning, really fast, and came to the end quite abruptly. He ends by telling us the reason why he wrote all these things in the first place. You can read it for yourself in John 20, but to me I feel like John writes all these stories about Jesus and then basically asks me to leap.

“Listen, this stuff is real, it’s hard and I believe your life will be more full this way. But you’re going to have to jump, you’re going to have to leap. You have all these other ways you could live, but I’m telling you this is better. Trust me. Leap.”

And the longer I am a Christian, the more I have to leap.

Life gets hard, bad stuff happens, I have lots of questions, is this true or this, or how about this? But what about this God, and this? And those people?

Come on, give me something to hold onto here God!

The problem is that Jesus isn’t inviting us to have all the answers.

I mean look at all the things Jesus gets excited about in John. It’s all these people who have faith! I haven’t seen faith like this he says.

All these people leaped, and He loves it!

I don’t know if what I’m praying for will happen, the big or the small.

I don’t know why some prayers in the world get answered and others don’t.

By praying 12 minutes I don’t have any answers, but I know I am experiencing a different kind of life.

I leaped, in this one area, and I’m taking what Jesus says and believing it’s true and going with it.

And I guess the only thing I do know is that I’ll probably have to leap again soon…

treasure.

So there’s this guy right and he’s been wandering for a few days. He’s been living in this same town for years, but kind of just wanders day by day. He works, but nothing real consistent, mostly odd jobs, working mostly to pay the bills. He has friends, actually he’s got a lot of friends, but would still considers himself a loner. It’s late summer and he’s doing okay. Not too bad, not too good. The weather is great, so he’s just walking thinking about the world, thinking about his life. If he had to describe himself he would say that he is joyful but discontent. Happy but not full.

As he is walking through this field, his foot kicks something hard. He swears out loud. Then laughs. Then looks down to see what he kicked. It’s beautiful. It’s shiny. It grabs him as keeps staring at it. The next thing he knows he’s on his knees digging around this thing, digging and digging. As he uncovers it from its hiding place his spirit fills up with something. He’s not sure what it is. Every part of his body starts tingling.

He’s crying now. He doesn’t even know why.

He picks up what he kicked, sits on his butt.

He looks up to the sky with a mix of crying and laughing and tingling.

Matt 13:44“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

faith

One of the many definitions of faith found in the dictionary is that faith is a belief not based in proof.

In the dictionary, faith and belief are both nouns.

Hebrews 11:1-2 defines faith as the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.

Essentially those two definitions seem similar.

I heard Greg Boyd describe faith as,

“Faith is embracing a mental picture of something you hope for, like a substantial reality and therefore having a conviction that it will be so. We concretely envision something about the future we believe is God’s will and move towards it.”

His description of faith comes alive, it takes action and it now becomes a verb.

Faith asks something of me.

It asks me to see something that is not easily seen, to have conviction in that unseen thing, and then to move towards it.

That is the life that prayer has been taking for me these past two weeks. I have developed a vision, or picture of certain things around me, and am praying towards those becoming reality.

It has been a good way to move out of my apathy and lack of participation in what God wants to do in me and around me.

It’s something. It’s a start.

It’s been moving my faith from being just a noun, just a belief in my head, and making it a verb.

random thoughts

How often does god have my full attention each day? Before this whole thing it was pretty minimal. Now he has at least 12 minutes each day which has been a good start in a new direction.

One of the things i have enjoyed the most of this time has been the process of taking all of the things i think about and feel and worry about and talking to god about them and basically saying, “here, you think about these things too”.

there are things i want to see happen right now in the lives of people i love. it feels different to not just be wishing for and hoping for these things to come about, but to be laboring in prayer for it.

sometimes i wonder if i should be praying about ‘more important things’… which seems weird.. because is there such a thing as ‘more important’, i doubt it.

quick. what are the first 3 words that come to your head when i say the word habit? did they all have a negative connotation? they did for me. i think we tend to think of habits as ‘bad or negative’ things. smoking/drinking/swearing/being messy/ whatever… but can’t habits be good? like praying 12 minutes each day? that has been a good habit. and they say it takes 28 days to break an old habit or start a new one. i’ll let you know what happens after 21 more days of this…

shut up.

this past week of praying for 12 minutes each day (all but one!), has been refreshing. I’ve enjoyed the discipline and been surprised by my ability to follow through.

Today I began wrestling with how much ‘talking’ to do in my 12 minutes and how much ‘listening’. So far I’ve been focused on the ‘talking’, and I think this week I’ll try to balance talking and listening a bit more…

“When I am praying the most eloquently, I am getting the least accomplished in my prayer life. But when I stop getting eloquent and give God less theology and shut up and just gaze upward and wait for God to speak to my heart He speaks with such power that I have to grab a pencil and a notebook and take notes on what God is saying to my heart.” – A.W. Tozer

me too.

i think two of the most powerful words you can hear is, “me too”.

when you’re sharing a struggle, or going through something, or just have questions about something and you hear from a friend or family or a stranger, “me too”.

as i’ve been sharing a bit here and there about this 12 minute journey, i feel like i’ve heard those two words a lot and they have made me feel better. made me feel like i am not alone in some of the things i think i am alone in.

ps. i didn’t take 12 minutes out of the day to pray yesterday. i think around midday i had decided i wasn’t going to take the time out. strange. i plan to try again today.

peace

as i took my 12 minutes today the overwhelming feeling i had was that of peace. i stepped into the basement after a tiring afternoon of daddy day care with ezra and ebba and talked to god for 12 minutes. my prayers were a jumble of different things. some things serious, some not so much. but the thing that i left with was peace. there is something about taking all the things i’m thinking about and wondering about, the things that i am anxious for and angry with and including god into the dialogue.