Life Is A Journey, Not A Destination

My ten year anniversary is coming up.  A couple months ago I asked my wife what would make this a great anniversary. (Sit down for this, it is good)  She said “you know trips are great but what I really want is for us to get a motorcycle”.  A what!!!  A motorcycle!!!  Holy wow!  Now from what I have experienced it is usually not the wife that suggests the husband go out and find something he can ride on with no seat belt and little to protect him from losing his head on the pavement.  So as every good husband does, I jumped on it!  But what’s between driving a motorcycle and now?  A lot.  See, I have never owned or drove a motorcycle.  This means way before the destination of ownership, I have a journey of learning. What I think is, it would be great to wake up and see it in the parking lot with a big sticker that says “RIDE ME BOB”.

Definition of:

Journey:  Travel from one place to another;  trip.

Destination:  The place to which someone is going or directed.

 

It seems like most of our lives are focused on “what’s next”.  When are you guys going to get married?  When do you plan on having children?  Do you think you will buy a house soon?  It gets to the point where the majority of our thought process becomes about what will happen tomorrow. 

 

I like gadgets!  I could spend a couple weeks looking over what is going on with the newest cell phones.  Do price checks and read reviews on what people like and don’t like about them.  The problem that I run into is by the time I finally go out a purchase the biggest bad new cell phone they are launching the new line of better cell phones.  Something to keep in mind is as we plan for tomorrow we cannot forget today.

 

One way to enjoy the journey is to focus on today!  What is going on in the lives of your family, friends, and work place that needs your focus today?  A suggestion would be to pick the top three priorities of the day and make sure they get done first.  Often we stretch ourselves so thin that we get nothing done.  “Devoting a little of yourself to everything means committing a great deal of yourself to nothing” quotes John C. Maxwell in his book “Today Matters”.  If you are like me you set out to get some things done at the beginning of the day and by the end a lot gets done, but nothing that is top 3 priorities. 

 

A second way to enjoy the journey is to think selflessly.  You could slam that lunch down at the office in order to use the time to finish a project or you could surprise your kid at school by showing up and eating lunch with them.  Think of one person per week that could use some help with a project or needs some words of encouragement.  A small note in the mail or a five minute phone call to someone is super easy and could mean the world to them.  Ask your spouse how much they are enjoying the marriage they have to you right now.  This could spark some real opportunity to help you think less about yourself, but more about the people around you.

 

Take notice!  Of what?  Take notice of what is going on around you.  A great way to enjoy the journey is to take notice of what is going on in your normal day.  What do you smell or what is happening with the change of seasons?  Who do you notice?  Are their relationships at work that mean a lot to you or do you have friends or family that need repair?  By taking notice of our day we can slow things down and enjoy a lot of what too many people miss.

 

You may not be such a predicament as I am, HEE HEE HEE, but what journey is God trying to get your attention to be a part of right now?  What are you trying to rush?

Don't Miss Her Heart

Shoulders sunk, sulking face, and heavy feet my daughter looked like she just got dealt the worst blow of her life. My six year old daughter came home from church this week with 1st grade drama. No farther than the church door she started unloading a story that was death for her. Absolute devastation. Supposedly her best friend that she spends every waking minute with at school and at church spent time with another girl. My daughter was lost and had no clue why her friend would want to be with anyone else besides her. Story after story. But have no fear; super fix everything dad is here! I was brilliant, pulling out all of the great Masters level education knowledge to solve this petty issue. I should probably take some of my daughters allowance it was so good. But it wasn’t working? How could this be, I am super therapist Bob that she so happens to have as a father.

No problem, I woke up the next day and started attacking the problem again. Once again it wasn’t working; my own stories growing up as a child and having similar issues didn’t make a bit of difference. Sitting in the bank parking lot perplexed as to why nothing is working it dawned on me. Not like a gentle feather, but like a concrete block pounding me on the side of the head. She needed to be heard, not talked to!

Husband, dad, son; spend too much time talking and you will miss a woman’s heart a million times over and over again. In chapter 8 of John and Stasi Eldredge’s book Captivating it talks about offering a man’s strength to our wives. I also imagine we have an opportunity to speak to our daughters in the same way. Check this out, it says “to experience the strength of a man is to have him speak on our behalf. For when men abuse with words, we are pierced”. My opinion is there is many ways to abuse with words.

One of those ways is to tear our wife and daughters down with our critical comments. Every critical comment that you make about their weight, how they dress, what they are acting like is like driving a dagger into their soul. I believe our critical comments have the ability to kill way before our wives experience a physical death. Why do I notice this? This is a tough one for a lot of men. The critical comments are as much about control as they are about noticing something.
Another way we can damage a woman with our words is to be a “fix it”. I love to fix it! If there is a spiritual gift of fixetness I have it. You know what though. I started taking tally of all of the great advice I offer my wife compared to the amount of times she acts on it, and it is not looking to good for me. I would say to every 1000 nuggets of wisdom she acts on 1. Wow! What I do notice is when I listen to her actively, meaning engaging her as she talks, she appears and seems more peaceful.

You guys any good at listening? How long can you hang in there before you start to shut down? In Proverbs 14:23 it says “in all toil there is profit, but mere talk lends to only poverty.” Sometimes our silence can mean as much as our words. When the cement block hit my head I realized that my daughter was hurt. I simply said to her “I bet this really hurt you having your best friend spend time with someone else.” Open up the flood gates dad, she burst with tears immediately! In all of my words and knowledge I completely missed her heart. She was hurt, wounded and scared. She wanted so much to be heard and listened to and I was all about the fixing. Well a couple minutes later the sobbing stopped and she simply said “thanks for helping”. She wanted her dad to pursue her heart, not with words but simply understanding.

4 Killers of Marriage

Only four?  What Dr. John Gottman refers to as the “Four Horseman of the Apolcalypse”, can predict the fate of marriages, based on marital conversation.  Criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling are four different negative ways we communicate with our spouse or significant other in relationships.  You can see all four of surface  in friendship, extended family relationships, marriage, and sometimes business relationships.  So do all four of these negative talk experiences hold the same value and potency in the relationship?

In order for us to get a better understanding of their potential destructiveness lets get a working definition of each.

1.         1. Criticism

a.        A statement that implies there is something wrong with our partner

b.       Sometimes a direct statement towards their character

c.        These statements start with “you always” and “you never”

d.       You can count on these statements causing the other person to become defensive

e.        Complaint and criticism are different

f.         Research indicates women are more likely to use criticism than men

2.        2. Defensiveness

a.        Attempt to defend self from a perceived attack

b.       Takes form of innocent bystander with potential whining

c.        “Why are you picking on me”

d.       Includes denying responsibility for the problem

e.        Defect, divert, attack, defend

3.        3. Contempt

a.        Verbal or nonverbal statement that puts person on higher plane than the partner

b.       Husband may imitate his wife in a mocking tone of voice, responding to her complaint

c.        Universal facial expression of contempt, the dimpler muscle pulls the lip corners to the side and creates a dimple in the cheek, but the dimple is not cute.  (The Marriage Clinic, 1999)

d.       Lonely husbands who marry contempt wives get sick more often

4.        4. Stonewalling

a.        When listener withdraws from interaction

b.       Often one spouse leaves for a period of time

c.        Dance of non verbal behavior between speaker and listener

d.       Look away and down, have stiff neck, don’t vocalize much

e.        85% of stonewallers were men

f.         If a woman is stonewalling it is a huge predictor of divorce

g.       Men stonewall when they have been physiologically over stimulated

In order to get rid of these four deadly strangers we have to repair our relationships and marriages.  What do I mean by repair?  When you ask someone if they are still mad and they refer to it happening so long ago they forgot, that would be a bad repair.  Time does not repair in broken relationships, it only adds to the fire.  Repair means specifically coming to each other and calling out what was happening, owning our mistakes, and seeking forgiveness and restitution where needed.  Which one of these four horseman do you experience or you have seen play out in other peoples relationships.

I don’t know about you guys but for me all four of these come to play in my home occasionally.  Could this be one of our battles we have to fight?  Absolutely!  Giving Satan a foothold in our marriage is one of his biggest attacks taking out as many people in the church as it is in the secular world.  At times the beauty can be more perplexing than a 1000 piece jig saw puzzle of a solid color.  Take notice men, do any of these ideas rear their ugly head in your home?  Repent, ask forgiveness, stand in prayer!  Do whatever you must to get these guys back out of your home.  Don’t remain silent.  As these build strength in your home they will be hard to get rid of.  It will be for the good of your marriage, your wife, and your children.

Gottman, Dr. John.  The Marriage Clinic.  New York:  W.M. Norton and Company, 1999.

We reap what we sow

I've just started reading a book, No Man Left Behind. It's about building a thriving men's ministry in the church. I am only three chapters into it so far. I read a statement that struck a chord with me, "Your system is perfectly designed to reproduce the results you are getting." It's apparently a business term that is equally applicable to ministry in that you can only produce the kind of men you already have sitting in the pews. And maybe it was just expressed in a fresh way because the idea isn't new. If we are effectively discipling men, that is going to produce an effective men's' ministry of discipled men, actively growing in their faith.

Actually my purpose is to take that statement and apply to us in general. Our personal system (apart from living freely from the Spirit and God's leading) is perfectly designed to produce the horrendous results we are reaping every day. A life that is consumed with self preservation, self protection, fighting to maintain control of our own lives - as if we have a better plan than the Father... well, there's no need to explain any further, right? We are all guilty.

Another quote comes to mind from David Jeremiah that goes something like, "We have as much God as we want." For me that's a painfully accurate statement. There are areas in my life that I want to change; that I have cried out to the Father about. Things that still go on year after year. So I have to pause and ask myself... do I REALLY want to change that behavior? Do I REALLY want to give God the control? If so, why do I still struggle with these issues? I struggle with legalism, a critical spirit, and emotionally wounding my children with my words. Why would someone WANT to keep doing those things? I don't do what I should and do what what I don't want to... sound familiar? Paul struggled with it too.

I have to wonder if, in truth, I am still running the same 'system' and expecting a different result. That I'm not truly surrendering my life to Christ. I'm still in the driver's seat. I think, if the APOSTLE Paul struggles like that, how much worse off am I? Of course, that's the Enemy talking. He whispers so convincingly...'Why bother? You're going to fail. Just give up. You're not good enough." Thankfully I'm far enough along in my journey to recognize (most the time anyway) the voice of the deceiver. And that's all he is.... a liar. He'll do whatever it takes to keep us from taking hold of the glory and strength we ALREADY posses within us.

Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be strong. 1 Cor. 16:13
For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power... 2 Timothy 1:7

It's right there within us men. When we accepted Christ, the Holy Spirit entered us with all the strength and courage we will need. Most of us just have a hard time believing it. I'll keep fighting for my heart, and I encourage you to as well. Band together and press on valiant warrior.

Remain In Me

(blog from John Eldredge)

In just a few days our team is heading out to Australia for a Wild at Heart Boot Camp. Last year was a phenomenal event, with tremendous breathrough for men. We felt God leading us to come back for another go. It is the launching of a movement. This year we know we are on the enemy’s radar. The last four nights have been rough, broken sleep, nightmares, having to pray for long periods of time.

One of the things God is teaching me through these front-line missions advancing the Kingdom is how to stay in Christ. “Remain in me,” Jesus says in John 15, the implication being we can not remain in him; we wander off. If God has to implore us to stay in him, then he knows it is quite possible not to. How do we wander off? I think one chief means is speculation.

We let our thoughts run out ahead of us. “What’s this going to be like? How tough will the battle be? How am I going to handle the 14 hour flight?” Stuff like that. Some of it might just be eager anticipation; some of it is apprehension. But whatever the form, speculation is not a good thing. It moves me out of Christ in this very moment. He is not leading my speculations. I am. Or my fear is.

I forget the source of the quote, but I read long ago that a coward faces his battles twice – once in his apprehensions and fears as he anticipates them, the other when he must face the battle itself. It is a very draining thing spiritually. And so I am learning to face my battles once. I’m not going to think about the 14 hour flight, the 6 hour time change, the jet lag, the battles. I am going to stay with God today, and what today is about.