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Be Seekers of Truth

My friend, Jack Gray of Auckland, NZ turned 90 years a couple of weeks ago. He’s one of the men I spent some time with last year as part of what I’m affectionately calling now my, “Old Coot Tour!” He’s one of those brothers and sisters who’ve spent multiple decades living life inside a relationship with God. When I sent him birthday greetings, he sent me back a link to a video from his birthday party where he took a few moments to address the family and ended with this challenge to his grandchildren:

    Be seekers of the Truth. And when I say the Truth, I mean the ultimate Truth. Not truth you put into a kind of a statement, but the ultimate reality. And what I have discovered in my ninety years, and I’ve probably only discovered the fringes of it is that truth is not in science, or with the philosophers, nor is it in any religious institution or system. The truth is a person. A person who said, “I am the Way the Truth and the Life.” And of him one of his great servants said, “In him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”

    Knowing him, serving him, and being loved by him, that is the center of my life and that is what I would encourage you to do. Seek the truth. And don’t be surprised if end up finding what I have found that truth is not in these other things. Ultimate truth is that person, the Lord Jesus.”

What a legacy and great words for us all to embrace! All the treasures of life and godliness are found in him, and no where else.

If you want to tap into more of his wisdom, you can do so at his website, The Pilgrim Path, or hear him on the two podcasts I did with Jack at TheGodJourney.com: The Path of a Pilgrim Part IThe Life of a Pilgrim Part II

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Another Chapter In Our Kenya Story

Many of you who have followed this blog over the years know we have a wonderful connection with brothers and sisters in Kenya and have been able to help them with food, clothing, education, micro-loans for jobs, and care for widows and orphans. Two years ago we completed an orphanage for 72 children who were living in a slum and since have financed the ongoing expenses to provide food, clothing, medical services, education and care at $3,000.00 per month. Some of you have been a real blessing in helping us share so generously with them.

Our hope all along was that the brothers and sisters in Kenya wouldn’t become dependent upon us or anywhere else in the west for resource, but would grow in their dependence on God and how he would provide for them in an ongoing way given the great need they face. We asked them to keep an eye out for some way to help fund the orphanage locally and over the past two years they have considered a number of business and agricultural opportunities that would be able to do that. The only one that has endured is to open a petrol station not far from the orphanage, on a main road near a large city that was recently named a regional center for local government. They put together a plan that would be able to offer jobs to some of their people and generate profits that would be able to fund the orphanage. While I might have hoped for something greener, this is what Father has put on their hearts and the orphanage will be the owners of the station. It will make them self-supporting once the original costs to develop the land and put in the tanks and pumps.

That will cost $72,000, which is the same and two years worth of ongoing support. This, however, will fund them long into the future. We would like to see if we could quickly raise that money as our gift to the orphans and staff, and as a way to bless the wider community. They need it quickly, so if you would like to be involved in this with us, please send in what you can as soon as you can. I am convinced they have done their due diligence and that this enterprise will benefit the brothers and sisters there in a number of ways. In faith, they have already begun development of the property with volunteer labor as you can see below.

                                                            

                               Work begins on the property.

                                                            

                               Digging for the underground tanks

                                                             

                                The first hole is done.

We need to make a commitment one way or another by the end of the week, and having a sense of those who might be standing with us in this process,

If you feel called to help us support these children with this enterprise, or our monthly support until it is completed, we and they would be grateful. If you want to know more about this project or the AIDs recovery home we also support in South Africa, you can see our Sharing With the World page at Lifestream. You can either donate with a credit card there, or you can mail a check to Lifestream Ministries • 1560 Newbury Rd, Ste 1 #313 • Newbury Park, CA 91320. Or if you prefer, we can take your donation over the phone at (805) 498-7774.

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Learning to Live At Rest

I just got in from Tulsa late yesterday and have a lot of backlog to sort through before I leave for Visalia tomorrow. As I was working in my study, some movement caught my eye just outside my window. It was a red-tail hawk cruising by my second story study. That’s not uncommon here since he lives in the eucalyptus tree at the edge of my neighbor’s property. I watch him all the time. But this time he wasn’t alone. A smaller hawk followed behind him and from the looks of things it appeared to me the older hawk was showing the younger one how to fly. (The copyrighted photo at left was taken by my friend, Kent Burgess and is used with his permission.)

I sat back and watched them for a few minutes as they swept back and forth across my back yard and those two gave me a bit of schooling. The older bird cruised easily in the winds of an approaching storm, riding the currents up and down with ease. The younger bird didn’t have a clue how to do that, so he tried to keep up with the bigger bird by constant flapping his wings while he twisted and turned to keep the other one in sight.

The contrast couldn’t have been more pronounced. The older bird was circling in fluid movements, while the younger looked jerky and hesitant. The older one rarely moved his wings while the other beat his frantically trying to keep up. And while I never saw the feet of the older hawk until just before he landed, the younger one kept extending his every few seconds as if trying to find something to hold on to, even though he was not near a tree or any other perch. I assume he would have been far more comfortable on foot than he was on wing.

They landed in the tree a few moments ago and if I could sneak up there, I think the older one would be sitting comfortably and the younger one huffing and wheezing trying to catch its breath. The older one rode the wind; the younger one was always resisting it. What I love about brothers and sisters who have lived this journey for awhile, is that they live at rest in the wind of the Spirit (See John 3). Instead of resisting what God is doing in the circumstances around them, they have learned to flow with him. They’ve learned not to resist the Spirit to stay in their own comfort zone, and have found a new comfort zone in the movement of the Spirit that helps them soar above the capricious circumstances of this world.

Those who haven’t learned to do so, live such frantic lives, driven by their fears and always seeking to find a foothold they feel like they can control. They have yet to learn that the wind is their friend and rather than resisting it, they can learn to ride it. That’s what I loved about this young bird this morning. He was out there doing it, even though he would have been far more comfortable sitting in a tree. Sure his flight path was erratic and his heart was beating a mile a minute, but he was facing down his fears to learn the joy of being a hawk. Of course it wasn’t fun yet, but it soon will be.

Even the most seasoned saint living at rest in God’s unfolding work today went through that process themselves. No one starts proficient at rest, especially in a Spirit we don’t control. But it is possible to learn how to recognize and ride the wind of God’s Spirit as he courses through our lives.

Ask him to show you, and while he does you just might want to find an old bird to keep an eye on so you can see how they do it.

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Are You a Mystic?

For the first time in four months, I’m going to wake up early in the morning and head for an airport. It has been awesome to be home with Sara for such a long stretch as she recovered from surgery and to have time with friends and family locally. Though I am not looking forward to another fly day, I am looking forward to spending some time with people in Oklahoma and surrounding states who are learning to live in the reality of Father’s affection. And what makes it even more fun, some of them are old friends, way back to my childhood. If you want to join us, you can get all my travel details here.

So I leave you with this. I’ve never liked the word ‘mystic’. Mostly when I talk about people having a real, tangible relationship with God and they ask me if I am a mystic, they are using it dismissively. Like, “Oh you’re one of those…” I’m not always sure what words they finish that with in their own minds, but I think it has something to do with being a whack-job, psycho, or just plain weird. And I think it’s strange that so many Christians are unsettled when someone talks about having a prayer life with God in the conversation. That kind of access is why Jesus died and was resurrected.

But I love what one of my favorite Catholic thinkers, Fr. Richard Rohr, said about it when he was asked, “What is a mystic?” A good friend sent me a link to an interview he did on the subject. Here’s what he said:

 

      When I use the word mystic, I simply mean experiential religion. That’s all. It’s not mystified. It means that I don’t just have a belief system or belong to a belonging system, but I actually know something, calmly, materially. God has shown God’s self to me.

      So you say, well how do you know that? Paul would say in Galatians, by the fruits: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self control. When you see the fruits of the Spirit after someone has said they’ve had a God-experience, then, well, I think it might be an authentic God-experience. When I see the fruit…

      If I don’t, I don’t see the fruit. I see militarism, domination, greed, ambition and avarice, I don’t think you’ve had an authentic God-experience.

   Just define mysticism as experiential knowledge of God. Experiential, not just theoretical. Not just believing things because you read a Scripture, but you know it to be true and then you go back and say, “Wow, that Scripture is true!”

      

I still don’t love the word ‘mystic.’ I think it has a better flavor in the Catholic tradition than it does outside of it. But I love how he defines it: “God has shown God’s self to me.” I would hope every follower of Christ would cultivate that reality. That’s where faith begins, with God’s revelation as we come knocking. Following Jesus was really meant to be following Jesus as he makes himself known to you, not following a set of principles derived from our often-flawed interpretations of Scripture. Would that we are all mystics, by Rohr’s definition.

I also appreciate what he looks for to validate whether someone’s claim of God-experiences is valid: the fruits of the Spirit. No, you don’t have to be perfect, but those who are growing to know God will also be growing in those fruits that bear his mark. And that takes care of those who claim God told them to kill their neighbor, steal from work, or betray their spouse.

But then he was asked about those who do not show the fruits of the Spirit. What does it mean for them?

       Sometimes they’ve just had poor teaching, there are people… who have had God-experiences, authentic God experiences, but they’ve been given lousy theology, and it narrows them down much narrower than their honest experience taught them.

What a great answer! It could be that their God-experience is only in their mind, but it could also be that their experience was genuine, but they didn’t have the equipping to process it. Thus they continue in the narrow space of religious performance and frustration rather than come out in the wider space where God continues to make himself known and their lives begin to fold into his reality.

God is inviting you into a spacious place of him winning you to his reality and his love. It is my hope that the new Engage series that we’ve launched at Lifestream will encourage people cultivate the space where God can show God’s self to them!

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The Way: Jesus

Here are some more thoughts that have touched us from The Way by E. Stanley Jones. If you want some backgound on this book, please see my earlier blog about it.

Here’s something he wrote about God:

If I were to sit down and try to think out the kind of God I would like to see in the universe, I couldn’t come up with anything higher than that He should be like Christ.

Me too! Strange how Jesus still gets a ninety percent favorability rating in the United States and the God that religion presents gets blamed for disasters and bashed for being a bully. And you know what, God is just like Jesus. He loves broken humanity and seeks to rescue men and women from all the places they got lost in the world and draw them back to his house as beloved children. That’s what Jesus showed us in his humility, compassion, truthfulness, and graciousness. Jesus is a far better representation of God than anything religion has produced.

So why don’t people believe? Many say that it is because they have not seen him and want proof that he exists. E. Stanley Jones wrote:

       The person who want this proved to them is like a person who stands with their back to the sunset while I describe its breath-taking beauty. They say, “I don’t believe it. Prove it to me.” I reply, “I can’t prove it to you. But turn around and look at it; it will prove itself to you.” They reply, “No–prove it to me.” Is it fair?”

Then Jones talks about why Jesus spoke with such authority. I love this and wish I’d learned it growing up”

        In other words, when He made all things, He made them to work in a certain way, and that way would be according to Christ. If the Way were written only in the Scriptures, then we might battle over the authority of the Scriptures, their authorship, their authenticity, their worth. But suppose the Way is written in the nature of reality as well as the Scriptures. Then the Way is inescapable for everybody.

        If Jesus is only a moralist imposing a moral code on humanity, then of course we can question that code and His authority. But suppose Jesus it the revealer of reality’s nature. That makes Him different. he not only reveals the nature of God–He reveals the nature of life.

        We have seen that the Way and not-the-way are written in the Bible. But for many people the authority of the Bible has decayed. It doesn’t grip or guide them. As one critic put it, the Christian faith as contained in the Bible is a “set of scruples imposed on the framework of humanity to keep it from functioning naturally and normally.” They therefore turn to the revelation of life through science and experience their guide. I can disregard the injunctions of the Bible if they are imposed from the outside, but I cannot ignore them if they reveal life itself, if the lift up laws written in the nature of things. For if I run away from them as written in the Bible, I still meet them confronting me from everywhere in daily life.

I daresay that most Christians don’t see it this way. They think Scripture is asking us to live in a way that is counter to humanity. When Sara and I recently reread Proverbs we were struck by how much living with integrity, honesty, kindness, and wisdom was not just something God said we should do, but that those who live that way are far more successful in the things that matter in life. Even as it acknowledges that living dishonestly may make you more money as you take advantage of others, such wealth is short-lived and you’re better off with honesty and a little than deceit with a lot. The real treasures are wisdom, honesty, and kindness not material gain or influence built on deception.

The Creator spoke to us about how to live in the Creation, even one defiled by sin. He’s not imposing some moral order from the outside, but inviting us to live in the Creation the way he designed us to, before sin made the unnatural seem natural. Jesus and the Scriptures speak about life itself and that we would want to follow his way not because it would make God mad if we don’t, but because his way puts us in sync with the Godly part of the Creation and offers us the wisdom to cooperate with the way things really are not the way they appear.

That puts a different view on holiness and righteousness that is so desperately needed today.

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Coming to Grips With God’s Love

I love honesty. As I’ve often said, “The truth will set you free, but it will really mess with you first.” Freedom is risky and discovering that God is loving and kind enough for you to let him into the most broken places of your life can look intimidating at the outset, especially if you’ve been good at hiding your scars and fears beneath fig leaves.

I got this email yesterday. It almost reads like a poem, and while the person writing it may be terrified of what’s to come, I see the beginning steps of a beautiful transformation. Letting him in is the hard part, because once he’s in there you’ll find him more loving, kind, tender and patient as any person you’ve ever known, and what’s more he has the power to heal our wounds and to walk us out of any place we got stuck and into his glory taking root in us.

I love this and can’t wait for the email I hope to get six months from now about what happened in the aftermath of opening so wide a door to him. Good things always begin where we surrender to his love, even if we’re not sure we can quite trust him yet. They will soon know that trust is no better placed than it is in him:

    Your proposition about such a loving God scares the heck out of me.

    I have never known this God, even though I have “known” him 30 years this year.

    It scares me to contemplate this God you speak about. As part of the journey will mean revisiting old wounds and ugly scars that I have covered in layers of fig leaves.

    I shrouded my wounds in religion and my shame wore clothes of assumption. I had to assume God to be a certain way to get past my painful past and my personally devastating history.

    Religion told me I couldn’t ask God questions because He owes no explanation and the theology of an angry God made me look for reasons why I could have deserved all that I had grappled so long with.

    I wept tonight tears that I had sealed in a private bag of pain. Now I must let God into these broken areas so that His love can heal me. This profound love you speak so hauntingly of.

We’ve been taught so many things unworthy of God by our religious traditions. This person is about to find out how amazing God is at dealing with our questions and setting us free. And I’m praying for him or her so that they will come to enjoy the outrageous love of a tender Father.

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The Way: Getting Along With Others

Here are some more thoughts that have touched us from The Way by E. Stanley Jones. If you want some backgound on this book, please see my earlier blog about it.

I found this especially applicable to some of the thoughts and conversations I’m having about community these days:

People cannot get along with each other because they cannot get along with themselves, and they cannot get along with themselves because they cannot get along with God.

Every relationship we have gets twisted because we have no idea who Father is and how he’s invited us to engage him. Most of our conformity-based attempts at community fail precisely for this reason. Just to manage people we need an endless set of rules and hierarchies to keep order. All the while the real problem goes unaddressed. Until people learn how to live deeply in God, they will undermine their own attempts at community. And trying to manage people who can’t get along with God will lead to repressive, obligation-based environments that provide only an illusion of community if people cooperate on the same task. But each will be trying to get what they want from the others, and when they are disappointed they will default to manipulating them. To guard against that, “leaders” set up rules to curtail the selfishness of others, freeing them to pursue their own.

That’s why I’m convinced that community is the connection God gives between those who are living loved. Because if Jones’ statement above is true, surely it’s corollary is as well: People who get along with God, will be at peace with themselves, and they will get along with others freely. They won’t need relationships to be managed because they’ll live in the glorious order that comes from loving others and preferring them above themselves. Such people will see guidelines and hierarchies as false substitutes for helping people really come to grips with who God is.

That’s why real community is not a goal we can achieve; it’s the fruit of people who are learning to live loved by the Father.

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On the Road Again

After having four uninterrupted months at home with friends and family, it looks like its time to hit the road again, and perhaps the airport. Sara has recovered well from her surgery and though I’m not going whole-hog into an extensive travel schedule, there are some invitations that I felt led to accept and some personal conversations God wanted me to have as part of my journey at the moment.

So in a couple of weeks, I’ll be heading to Edmond, OK and then on to Tulsa. I’ll be doing a number of meetings in Edmond on Friday and Saturday, March 1 and 2. During the afternoons from 1:30 to 4:30 I’ll be at Conversations in Edmond for some open conversations about living loved. In the evenings from 6:30 to 9:00 I’m going to do a brief seminar about “Awakening to the Father’s Work In Your Life” to help people recognize the way God invites them into fuller expressions of his life. Space is limited, so you need to contact Conversations at their website if you’d like to join us there.

And then I’ll be heading up to Tulsa on Sunday morning and we’ll have an open time of conversation in Broken Arrow on Sunday afternoon from 2:30 – 6:30. If you’d like to be part of that you’ll need to contact Shannan.

You can find the necessary information and contact details on my Travel Page.

After that I’ll head to Australia in mid-April for some time Brisbane, Kingaroy, Toowoomba, Melbourne, and Traralgon. Details are on the travel page as well.

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The Way: Freedom

Sara and I recently started reading a new book together. It isn’t easy for us to find books that we both enjoy. We’re incredibly picky because we want something that’s fresh and new to our journey, but also has depth and challenges the way we already think. But a friend of mine recently sent me a copy of a book he edited that was originally written in 1946 by a missionary in India, E. Stanley Jones. It caught my attention because I had run across the name of this author in conversations with some of my older brothers on this journey. It seems Jones was a real encouragement to many of them.

So, Sara and I started reading The Way written by E. Stanley Jones, a missionary back in India during the middle part of the last century. It is a devotional, so it is broken into smaller, daily readings, but Sara and I have been covering two each day and then reflecting for a few moments on what he’s written. In this book he is contrasting the way that Jesus taught us to live with what is not-the-way, that lures us into sin and frustration. We are enjoying it and gleaning some wonderful insights, all the more because it’s written by someone who lived many years before us.

So I’m going to share some occasional excerpts in future blogs because I think you’ll find them helpful, too, and because I find a lot of his insights so fresh and compelling. Like this one about freedom:

              Apparently we are free to choose, but we are not free to choose the results of our choosing.

Let that sink in. What a great statement on freedom! Though God has given us the freedom to make choices, he has not given us the ability to control the consequences of those choices. That’s what many people miss. In the name of freedom in Christ they are still making choices that cause incredible destruction in them and disruption in people around them. Though God designed the creation so we can do pretty much anything we want, we cannot escape the consequences of those choices. Our own independence and selfishness came not only come back to haunt us in ways we’d never imagine, but also can do great damage to the people around us even if that’s not what we intended. True freedom isn’t doing whatever we want; it’s the freedom to choose his way above the moral chaos of this broken world.

To do that we have to abandon the mistaken idea that righteousness is the onerous burden God has placed on us to keep an offended deity at bay. His desire for us to be holy is not to obligate us to do things the way he wants, but to invite us live in harmony with God’s reality in the universe. That’s why Jesus told his disciples that he wanted “his joy to be in them so that they joy might be full.”

Jones continues:

          (Jesus) is not imposing on us a foreign joy, trying to make us happy about something we dislike. He is giving a joy which, when we take it, is our very own… We must get hold of this until it becomes an axiom: My will and God’s will are not adversaries. The idea that God’s will always lies along the lines of the disagreeable is false. The will of God is always our highest interest. It could not be otherwise and God be God. I am fulfilled when I make Him my center. I am frustrated when I make myself the center.

That’s not because God has an ego so large that he has to be the center of everything. It’s just our growing awareness that he actually is the center of everything and true life is found in our coming to love, trust and rest in him.

And we even need his help to do that, because we are so easily swayed to do what we think best. Only when his love working in us is more real to us than what we think we can do by our own efforts, can we taste of the freedom that really is freedom!

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