God

Where is God on Monday morning? These are my posts where I examine that question, trying to find God in the every day.

Perfectly imperfect for each other…

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For those of us on the single side of married, marriage is kind of a weirdly pieced together picture. Each segment of the picture is kind of hidden, and looks like a blank slate. It’s tempting to look at marriage and fill in those blank segments with all kinds of different things. You get it in mind how much time you’ll spend together, what your spouse will do for you, what the kids will be like, and everything else. Each piece is, in many ways, it’s own ideal picture that come together to make your perfect marriage.

There’s just one problem.

No marriage is perfect.

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Baptized by tears…

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Baptism

I had an incredibly interesting weekend last weekend. And I suppose this post is a part of my processing it.

The weekend began on Saturday morning, where I was busy running around getting the little things taken care of for a seminar for the worship team at my church. After the seminar, my fiancé and I went for a fairly long walk where we talked about what felt like everything. We came back to my house and planned out the rest of our weekend. I was going to need to rehearse my sermon while she was going to continue her job search. That was, until I got a message that said I needed to be at the nearby (45 minutes away) hospital right away.

Something terrible had happened. I knew someone young had passed away, but the details were lost on me. Everything in between leaving my house and walking in the room with the family was a blur, because of what I walked into, in the room.

There in the most private, intimate room the ER could spare, was a parent mourning the loss of their seven-week old child. It was a moment that I was admittedly unprepared for. I can’t tell you what my immediate thoughts were, primarily because it’s uncouth of a preacher to use that kind of language. Suffice it to say, I was at a loss.

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Succeeding enough to know I’m failing…

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failure2-michael-jordan

When I was really into running, and training for a marathon, I learned the power of the ‘little things’. You might have never known you had a bad stride, or a weak core, or poor hydration because you never ran enough to find those things out. But as you improve in your running, those little things begin to matter more and more. As you grow as a runner, you’ll begin to see those areas of weakness you were blind too before. Success has a tendency of exposing failings.

The church I pastor has grown steadily over the last few months, which is great. Numbers aren’t the end goal, but “more people in worship” means that we can look forward to doing bigger, more impactful things in the community, and more lives can encounter God, which are the real goals.

This growth has also exposed me to two of my biggest weaknesses as a leader. And I hate it.

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Putting the puzzle together…

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Life is a lot like trying to solve multiple puzzles at once. You’ve got your ‘family’ puzzle, where you sort out your relationships with parents and siblings. You’ve got your ‘school’ puzzle where you learn how to be responsible. And you’ve got a puzzle of your ‘dreams’ you’re trying to put together. Then as life goes on, your ‘school’ puzzle turns into ‘work/career’. Your ‘family’ puzzle gets a little bit bigger when you get married.

Now we all like to think that we can keep these puzzles together, in their respective boxes. But we’re kidding ourselves if we truly expect that to happen, because life happens. We move to college and it messes up our ‘school’ and ‘family’ boxes. We get fired from a job and it ruins our ‘job/career’ and ‘family’ puzzles. Eventually, we wind up with all of our puzzles just in one box; just a giant pile of pieces to a bunch of different puzzles. It’s super complicated and super messy.

And that’s not counting anyone else’s puzzles. Where is your spouse supposed to put their puzzles? You’ve already made a mess with yours?

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Testing a theory…

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Daniel made up his mind to eat and drink only what God had approved for his people to eat. And he asked the king’s chief official for permission not to eat the food and wine served in the royal palace. God had made the official friendly and kind to Daniel.  But the man still told him, “The king has decided what you must eat and drink. And I am afraid he will kill me, if you eat something else and end up looking worse than the other young men.”

The king’s official had put a guard in charge of Daniel and his three friends. So Daniel said to the guard, “For the next ten days, let us have only vegetables and water at mealtime. When the ten days are up, compare how we look with the other young men, and decide what to do with us.” The guard agreed to do what Daniel had asked.

 Ten days later, Daniel and his friends looked healthier and better than the young men who had been served food from the royal palace. After this, the guard let them eat vegetables instead of the rich food and wine.

God made the four young men smart and wise. They read a lot of books and became well educated. Daniel could also tell the meaning of dreams and visions. [Daniel 1:8-17]

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