I love this stuff. A wonderful group of my friends are getting together in Australia during a long weekend— October 1-5. I’m not going to be able to attend in person, though they are asking if I’ll join in in by Skype. But I would encourage brothers and sisters from Australia who would like to meet others on a similar journey of learning to live inside Father’s love and share it with others. It’s called “A Gathering In the Spring” and you can find out more by clicking this link.

These kinds of gatherings are the best way to meet and connect with fellow-travelers on this journey. I know some are reticent to set aside the time or money needed to go to things like this, especially if they don’t know anyone. However, the vast majority of people find afterwords that connecting with others and finding new-found friendships with which to share their journey made it all more than worth it.

Last night Sara and I went out to watch a flyby of the International Space Station. It is making a series of passes just after nightfall here in Southern California, which means the sun is shinning on the space craft and it easily visible as it streaks across the night sky. Last night we watched the bright white spot for five minutes as it arched from west to east.

Last night we went out to watch it again. Standing in the quiet darkness of our back lawn we scanned the skies until we saw not one bright light streaking across the sky, but two. The space shuttle had already detached from ISS and was flying ahead of it by a few seconds. As they silently traversed the darkness, their orbit took them just beneath the half moon in the southwest sky. It was a moment.

But then the moment got even better. As Sara and I watched the space station and shuttle two brilliant shooting stars came over our heads from behind and joined the dance going on in the sky above us. It was one of those magnificent moments that take your breath away. As the space station and shuttle went out of sight and the shooting stars faded away, we stood looking at the night sky in wonder. There is stuff going on out there in the universe, even beyond our little planet that we hardly ever think about.

It reminded me of Paul’s encouragement,

Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. Col. 3:1-2

Tension and frustration builds in our lives when we live in our circumstances without the awareness that he is in them with us as well. We are not alone. He is doing things that we may not even see or be aware of, that if we knew it our hearts wouldn’t be so torn apart by the trials of this life and the schemes of dishonest people. We live in fear and make our worst choices when we think we are all alone having to fix what is broken in us or things around us. Instead Paul invites us to behold him, setting our hearts on what’s above—his presence and his working in us.

Let’s not live with your eyes only looking at what’s going in the physical world we see. Ask him to teach you how to focus the eyes of your heart on the fact that you are not alone, that he is with you working out all things in conformity with his will and purpose.

That’s what I learned last night as I stood with Sara in our darkened back yard, watching a dance across the heavens. Of course, Paul wasn’t talking about space shuttles and space stations, but if you want to see the space station tonight, it will be going across the west coast from 8:00 to 8:05 tonight.

Well I’m back from the Colorado/Michigan trip and finally digging out a bit from the email avalanche that welcomed me home. Still got a bunch more to do, but I thought you’d enjoy this.

I got an actual letter in the mail a couple of weeks ago. Those are pretty rare these days. It was from a prisoner in an Arizona jail who has been deeply touched by God’s life through some of the books I’ve been a part of. I wanted to share his story with you because if this stuff works in prison, there’s no corner of our lives where Jesus can’t breath the same life and freedom into our worlds. Enjoy!

I am finishing a 5-year sentence in Department of corrections for Grand Theft. I just wanted to take the time to share with you the impact that “The Shack”, “He Loves Me”, “So You Don’t Want to go to Church Anymore” and “Authentic Relationships” has had on my life and how much freedom I have found in just relaxing in my Father’s love.

I am learning to trust and that includes giving up my own way. I am the middle adopted child of dysfunction and chaos. I am 47 years old and I am recovering from the mistaken assumption that life is all about me.

Coming to prison has actually given me time away from the “system of religious obligation” and has freed me to simply know, love and trust my Father. “Living loved” is so simple yet so life changing.
One of the most moving phrases I found in your books was “that people take time to relax and let me be the bother in Christ I really am!” I just really related to that.—real, pure and simple. I loved it. I have really taken to heart the truth of embracing the process of life-even the darker shades- and I find myself less angry, unforgiving and selfish. The veil has been lifted and I am completely loved and accepted!

I received Christ at 30 in the ministry of a group of loveless, joyless people, teaching loveless joyless people how to be loveless and joyless. I really believe now, in looking back, that I had to go under the law for almost 20 years to enable me to relate to and empathize with those still under the yoke of slavery. Now that I have discovered true freedom my heart aches for those being crushed by religion. I understand that I am not called to change or convince anyone, just to simply love and encourage them as Father places them in my path.

The Scripture declares, “Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is obedience – NO. There is church attendance – NO, there is law – NO. It clearly states that where God is- there is freedom. I think real freedom is so fleeting to the body of Christ, that most would not recognize it, even if it bit them on the butt!

I am free to love, to grow and free to fail and free to make mistakes and bad choices! Now that’s freedom. Love really does cast out fear. I was recently reading in my Bible and came across this passage that I believe Father used as the process to raise me from the dead and show me and give me life (Luke 9:22). “The Son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and He must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” Thank you again brother for your hand in helping to raise me to life.

I have found it true your word about “embracing the journey” and even in prison. I am in love with God, people and I want to live again. Talk about a miracle. No such thing as instant gratification in the Kingdom. I get to be a kid again and life is so worth living. Obviously, there is much more to my story- drugs, suicide attempts and other ugly chapters in the “unfolding story “ of my life that do not need to be re-hashed anymore. It is my heart’s desire that Father would see fit to allow our hearts and lives to intersect one day and I could simply allow you to be the brother in Christ that you really are. It is not a stretch to say, even though I‘ve never met you, that I love you dearly and you have uplifted me and help strengthen my weary heart and it is my sincere prayer that this letter may do the same for you.

Dude your rock! Your obvious and sincere love for the family of God is so desperately needed in people who are drowning while standing on dry ground. I see life, relationship, love, mercy and grace in everything I see, read or participate in and somehow people are drawn to the heart of this old, worn-out old fishermen from California. Words alone cannot express how grateful I am to you, Sara and everyone at Lifestream! Listen to my heart, my friend, as I whisper love, grace, and freedom back to your heart. What an awesome Dad we have.

Tomorrow I’m off on an 11 day trip that will take me to Colorado for six days and on to Michigan for five more. Part of it is hanging out with other believers on the journey, part of it a trade show for the Christian retailers, and part of it s working with a project for Calvin College in Grand Rapids. But before I go, I wanted to leave you with this:

Relaxing Into the Reality of Living Loved. I am often asked by people what can they do to live loved. I am becoming increasingly convinced that learning to live loved is not a doctrine to learn, or a discipline to follow, but a reality Jesus wants us to relax into. I shared about that recently at a Because of Jesus convention in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Many who are plagued with trying to do something to figure out this relationship, have told me this analogy has given them a wonderful handle on how Jesus allows us to live in this reality. The audio of that teaching has now been included in our free Audio Library and is available by clicking on the title link above, or going to the Audio Library and clicking on the third entry: “The Reality of Living Loved”.

Brad and I will have more discussion on this way of thinking on our July 17 edition of The God Journey.

Yep, that’s me! Earlier this spring I was invited to a discussion about living loved with people in Anderson, Indiana who had been reading The Shack and some of my own books, He Loves Me, and So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore.

This conversation covers so much of my own journey. my participation in the publication of The Shack, and some of the current challenges in my own life. The organizers of the event, Lives Transforming, video taped the event and have made it available on their website. We are considering making this into a CD so small groups can use it to stimulate their own discussions about their spiritual journey and how these books have touched their lives. We’ll have more on that down the road.

You can view the video on-line here.

I received the following letter yesterday after the author had read So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore. As with many people it seemed to fill in some piecing pieces in his own journey. I’m really touched when I hear from people like this who began with a taste of goodness, got sidetracked into the barren wasteland of religious performance, and then come to discover that God’s life has always been there for them.

This is the story of James Gray and I reprint it here with his permission and in hopes that it will encourage others who down deep inside wonder if there must be something more to all of this:

(I started out as) a little boy of seven trying to answer the meaning of my existence in Christ (and) the cultural answers left me empty to say the least.

I tried everything to quench the gnawing inside of my being. I spent many years in foreign countries preaching and teaching in villages no knew existed. I was told after working for the cash and then going into these foreign lands for years I needed to start an organization, and let people pay the bill. After that happened the joy of my Christian walk lessened with everyday. So I pioneered a church and it grew. But the more it grew the emptier I became.

I was told to start a ministry. Hungry for the fullness I had experienced, I did that but it only left me more saddened. Soon I found myself surrounded by men with answers but lifestyles that didn’t seem to have an abundance of Christ, to say the least. After all this time I endured many years of exhaustion trying to get back to my beginning. I didn’t have an inkling of where to go or what I had lost. I felt guilty for making mistakes and (because of ) my questions about where is Christ, I was branded by other pastors as a anarchist. Out of guilt I quit what I thought the ministry was and went into what some call the wilderness. That was 1980. I picked up (some) answers along the journey, but when I brought my heart questions up, I was banished from what I thought was the body, which only heaped on more guilt. I really thought over the last 26 years I lived on an island. Many came to the Lord during this time just out of my questions but soon dropped by the way side through time due to what they endured years later.

During my years prior to becoming culturally organized I held mass crusades taught me by the best in Christian circles. It was hard to abandon the new ones. I told so many it was like giving birth and telling them to go to the orphanage of their choice. Because of the numbers of hands raised and televised, when I walked away it was said by my teachers, which used numbers as a thermometer, that I was abandoning the new ones. Some preached that I didn’t care for the lost.

On the contrary how can you give birth to a newborn and leave them in the fields to raise themselves? Or put them in churches that don’t know their names or their wounds? So you see, my brother, this book became a great tool for me to answer questions where others only heaped baggage when I asked them why? Sometimes the why is a God kiss, but so hard to answer. It takes so many years and there are so many pieces to the answer.

I was like I had a puzzle container with the picture of what it was supposed to look like on the front, but so many of the pieces were missing. Thanks for the lost pieces. It means more than you’ll ever know.
There was a great price to pay for my decisions to find Jesus, especially when he is not where you think to look. The price which was great was worth the wait, and the price. My appetite would only be satisfied by him. I read your book several months ago and waited if life would grow. That is one of the keys if it is God it grows after you eat it.

When I was a little boy my father took me to an old kitchen in the south where he worked as a young man. He had me taste the barbecue of an old, black gentleman. It was the best food ever made. That was my standard for barbecue. So for 4 days while on our way home I would see a barbecue restaurant sign and ask my dad if we could stop and have some more of that great food. My dad said, son trust me it’s not the same if we stop we just loose time and leave disappointed. In the beginning I tasted Christ and thought I would stop at the signs and taste only to find it doesn’t taste the same as it did the first time I sampled him. The vast freedom flavor is so sweet, and I don’t stop at every restaurant. I think I know what Christ taste like now as well as what he doesn’t.

Thanks again, my brother, I haven’t found all of the pieces yet, but now since the major parts have been placed in the picture the smaller parts will fall into place organically.

In this landscape of religious activity, how many of us get caught up in doing things for God that don’t ever bear the fruit they promise? Jesus didn’t ask us to do things for God; he let us know that his Father wanted to live life with us. Once you taste of that, nothing will ever satisfy again, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself, or others try to pressure you that what you’re hungering for does not exist. But the heart knows better. It keeps beckoning us on to find him through all the clutter and let him pour into our lives the life that really is life!

You know it’s there. You’ve tasted it before. Don’t let the substitutes convince you that they are good enough. They’re not.

That’s what Jesus promised—all of us!

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The Declaration of Independence is truly one of the most amazing documents ever penned by humankind. To think that 56 men from 13 colonies with all the differences between them could come together and agree to sign their names to a statement that could have most likely resulted in all of them being executed for treason by the British Crown is almost unthinkable in our day.

The words they published are so commonplace now, we forget how much they truly pushed the historic envelope of human dealings and in fact, how much they still do. The defining paradigm of culture prior to 1776 was the divine right of kings. Those who had by money and power vanquished more helpless people divided the world into haves and have-nots—royalty and serfs. Your station in life was mostly determined by birth.

The idea that all of us are created equal on the planet was virtually unknown, and certainly not even believed by the men who signed that Declaration. By “all men”, they only meant those who were white, Anglo-Saxon, male, Protestant landowners. Even in ensuing decades they never considered their ideals to the native Americans they lied to and pillaged, the slaves many of them owned and exploited, or the women they claimed to love.

Yet, our understanding of all of us being created equal in the eyes of God is a close to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the way he treated people as any other summary statement. He offered to everyone without reservation the same love and light be they exposed sinner, Pharisee, king or Roman governor. This gospel was for every person, with no distinction, no favoritism, no lording over another human being. And that reality is still finding its way into human culture even at the beginning of the 21st Century.

At least in government the divine right of royalty is succumbing to the forces of freedom almost all over the world. Except for some figurehead monarchies in Europe and some Middle Eastern and South American dictators, the notion that some people are born to privilege and leadership has largely been discredited in the world. Interestingly enough the only place the royalty/serf distinction still carries any weight is in the clergy/laity disparity in our religious institutions. And in some older (and newer) incarnations the clergy even have the audacity to dress and act like royalty. How sad is that?

Isn’t it interesting that in most significant cultural shifts recognizing the equality of people, the impetus has rarely come from those who most claim to understand Jesus’ message or his example? It shows how little they do. Freedom is an easy term to throw around conceptually, but its real power doesn’t describe a governmental form, but a understanding of people that invites us to treat them differently. Every human being merits the same respect and opportunity as any other. When we lose sight of that, we can excuse our calloused and cold lives toward the needs of others.

So, actually July 4 is one of my favorite holidays not so much for the country it began, but for the revolution of thought it represented. For the first time in human history statesmen recognized what Jesus said in Matthew 23. “You have one Father and you all brothers and sisters.” That’s the way to live. That’s how Jesus shapes us in his reality. It is true of everyone around you. No one deserves to lord over another, and no one deserves to suffer at the hands of those more powerful.

And that is not yet true, even in America. There are a class of Americans—government leaders, the rich, and celebrities in the arts—who consider themselves above the rest of us and above the rules of respect that govern a free society. It has never been more evident than the last few decades where people of privilege and power reassert their control over the culture. How many powerful politicians have been exposed as moral frauds? How quickly did our Congress and presidents crawl into bed with the fortune hunters on Wall Street who were willing to secure their fortunes by looting the trust of common folks.

The economic disaster we’re in was not the result of an economic downturn. It was completely manufactured by dishonest men and women who thought they could benefit at their fellow-citizens’ expense. Our government has done anything to restrain that and simply threw more money at them and loot our grandchildren’s futures as well. This is not freedom. It is the tyranny of the wealthy over the powerless who have no lobby in Washington, no ability to buy the influence they they think they deserve. And instead of calling them on the carpet for betraying the public trust, most people only look to find their ladder to power and influence as well, willing to walk over anyone to get their piece of the pie.

When I see the celebrity adulation in this country, whether it be of American Idol singers, famous authors or even in moments like the death of Michael Jackson, I realize that we still have our own version of royalty in America. No, it’s not the divine right of kings, but the idolatry of fame. When I saw people enraptured in the presence of someone they think famous as they seek to live vicariously through the life of another, it only affirms how sick our culture is. To think someone is a better human being because they sing well, play sports well, or write well flies in the face of the Gospel itself. We have royalty now because we create it ourselves an ungodly heritage of a media and culture fascinated by fame and seeking it themselves, instead of dismantling its illusion at every opportunity.

All men and women are created equal. The words roll of the tongue with ease, but the reality is much more difficult to embrace. We are all the same in Father’s eyes and everyone who crosses our path on a given day is as significant as the next. Each has a story to tell, a life to share, and a hope to encourage.

Lose sight of that and you’ve lost sight of the most blessed truth of the American revolution.

Someone reminded me of this sign today posted on the way of Shishu Bhavan, a children’s home in Calcutta. I quoted it in the front of Authentic Relationships, a book I wrote with my brother, Clay a few years back.

I really needed to hear these words again today. Maybe the will re-inspire some of you as well. Our actions are not about the outcomes we desire. Someone can completely destroy or repudiate a gift of kindness or an attempt to serve. This poem is about living with love and grace in a world filled with self-interest, that can easily treat our love with contempt. Love anyway!

Anyway

People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Be good anyway.

Honesty and frankness will make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People need help but may attack you if you try to help them.
Help them anyway.

In the final analysis, it is between you and God.
It was never between you and them anyway.

Just found out that Charisma’s website ran a column I wrote a few weeks ago. It is called the Fatherless Epidemic. Read more here.

Back from an awesome Oklahoma Trip where I spent two days at a Because of Jesus Conference, and then two more days with the Transformed by Christ bunch in Edmond. In both places I talked about Living Loved and how that frees us from fear, guilt and shame. Up the road, I’m going to post one of the audios that really seems to resonate with people who are trying to sort out the difference between what Jesus does to make this journey work, and what my part is. But that’s another day.

Just thought I’d let you all know that Crosswalk.com just posted a column I wrote for Father’s Day drawn from the Parable of the Incredible Father, which many people call the Prodigal Son. Father’s day isn’t always a blessing for those who have had horrible experiences with abusive or absent fathers, or even are living in troubled relationships with their own kids. So Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers and families out there who are celebrating the joy of that relationship, and my thoughts and prayers are with those for whom this weekend only refreshes some pain. May you know that in spite of the failings of your earthly dad, you have a Heavenly Dad who loves you more than anyone on this planet ever has or ever will! He will be the Father to you no one else could ever be!

And for those who want to improve their parenting skills, this morning I also posted the first of a two-part podcast with Danny and Sheri Silk at The God Journey, about loving our kids on purpose. I blogged about Danny’s book, Loving Our Kids on Purpose, a few months ago and I think this podcast will really encourage people who are wanting to discover how grace and relationship impacts discipline. What we share there not only applies to parent/child relationships, but all relationships, including yours with the Heavenly Dad!