Clean Straight Lines

Lately, I’ve been hearing myself explain to more and more people that I often leave a conversation exhausted because the entire time I have been “defending my honor.” The topic seems to be irrelevant, I just want to be right. Being wrong is frustrating and it puts another little chink in my armor that clearly attests to the fact that I am indeed not the smartest, or most clever person in the world. It is pride that has welled up and says, “keep up the fight, if you do, the other party will give up any moment and you’ll leave the victor, having defended your honor, demonstrating your prowess and great skill, many people will turn to you and trust you because you’ve taken the day.”

Turns out I’m just making people sad and frustrated. My pride continues to get in the way of friendships and relationships. My pride needs to be killed. It needs to go away and hide in a dark hole and I need to understand what deferring means, I need to approach others in humility and remember one very important truth that seems to reign above so many others right now:

I’m wrong…A LOT.

“If the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence…maybe it’s time to start cultivating your own lawn.”

Who knows how it was really stated, but I recently heard someone use some form of this phrase. It was immediate conviction for me. One of the things that I think we all struggle with at one point or another is looking towards the “greener grass” that is “over there,” and we miss the beauty in the journey of cultivating our own lives right where we are, but this seems especially true of my life.

Before Kristen and I moved to Auburn, we always seemed to be going somewhere. I’m pretty sure that we can attribute this to my issue of always changing our context when I wanted to see something new or got uncomfortable or the situation we were in was getting messy or if I just got lazy. Now there’s nothing wrong with adventure, but when you’re using it as an excuse to not invest right where you are, then I think we’re missing something deeper about the process and people God uses to shape us over the longer journey.

When we arrived in Auburn, I told a friend of mine that had been discipling me for some years, “This time, when I get ready for change, I’m going to change me in this context as opposed to changing my context.” The past four years have been nothing but me changing, growing and adjusting in one context and it has done so much more in me as we’ve developed deeper relationships with people than the previous three to five years did in much shallower relationships.

With Cash now in our family, this idea has been more and more living in my heart as I look at Kristen and my son and understand that I’m being pressed more into investing in this moment into these two and into our local body of believers. God is calling me to stop running away and start/continue running deeper into, to stop thinking the grass is greener and start cultivating growth in my own life.

This morning, I had one of those, “How about that, I don’t know how I’ve missed that” moments.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been studying Ephesians and really trying to immerse myself in the book. In the past, I’ve always been in a race with myself to read as much as possible in the Scripture, but then I realized I was not retaining much or seeing much fruit from that. So my new strategy is read a lot and spend time immersing myself in one book. Ephesians came up first. Not coincidentally, I’m sure, as our college pastor, Lee Cadden, began teaching through the book at the same time I began studying it. You can see his series here.

So, I’ve read this phrase in chapter one, literally, at least a hundred times over the past month to month and half:

I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know him better.

As I passed over it this morning, the verse finally clicked into place for me. Immediately I heard the Spirit say to me, “This is the prayer you need to be praying for yourself, for your wife, for your family, for your church, for your city, for the world.”

There is nothing massively spectacular about my moment this morning, or even the verse. It is a simple truth of, “Just pray this so that you may know him better.” We’ll never fully grasp him, but pray this, so that you may know him better. And when you begin to know him better, keep praying it, so that you may know him better.

The travel part of this trip is finally over. That may have been one of the longest trips I can remember taking. But there is something about traveling together as a team that seems to bond everyone together…though that may have more to do with not taking a bath in many hours and the ensuing smells associated with that as opposed to anything else.

I have a great sense of expectation as we head in to this week with our friends at Buloba Community Church and the exciting part is that I really don’t have much of an idea about what we’ll be doing other than playing with little kids and playing soccer…err, football.

I’m thankful that God has opened this door for us to be in a partnership with Buloba and for the eight other guys who have committed to make this journey. We believe that he has great things in store.

until tomorrow…