Immersion

New beginnings. Aren’t they wonderful? Emotions run high, we laugh, smile and do everything with extra energy and enthusiasm. We believe we’ve fully merged with whatever it is that we’ve just started and can’t imagine how life could be different. It’s the new car smell, the crisp clean look of new clothes, the photos taken with a new phone and the smile on your face anytime you look at your latest new things. The problem with new is this: new stuff gets old. The question we seldom seriously ask ourselves at the start of a new journey, “Will I still be enthusiastic about this when it becomes old?” The answer at the start is always yes. Time, however, takes us on our journey to truth. It’s the path of self-discovery.

In the fitness world hundreds and thousands of people sign up each year to be part of a gym. A lot of these people join during January, AKA the month of impulsive well-meaning resolutions. We all want to change some aspect of our body. Literally, all of us. Even though we don’t all want to change the same thing. For a lot of impulsive resolution makers, their journey looks something like this:

Week’s 1 and 2: I can do this, it hurts but I can do this; I just need to push through the pain, it will be okay I will achieve my desired outcome.

Week’s 3 and 4: Man I’m busy, I only made it in a few times and I’m starting to feel tired. Keep going, it will be okay, but that treadmill is starting to look like a ravenously hungry monster.

Week’s 5 and 6: It is a ravenously hungry monster.

Week’s 7 and 8: Was I going to workout this week? I just need to give my body a rest.

Week 9 until end: I tried it a few more times, but this just isn’t me. I can’t do it, but I’ll try again when I feel more motivated.

I recognize this isn’t everyone’s fitness story. Sometimes life happens when we make plans. But this is far too common a story, and that’s a problem. Not just for the people who are seeking change, but for those who support them as well. Often times the difference between bowing out early and achieving our goal is someone standing alongside us. They don’t have to be an expert. They can simply be a friend. Or even a stranger willing to listen. No matter the activity, doing it with someone else, even if they just cheer you on from the sidelines, makes a difference. There’s something powerful about togetherness. Something that makes us stronger. It’s the stuff that holds sports teams together; it’s why we care about home field advantage. That’s what many of us need. Someone to make us feel like we are on our home turf. Many of our January joiners would keep going if they simply had the support of one other person. One. Single. Person.

Think about that for a moment.

Encouraging one person can be the difference between success and failure. One encouraging conversation.

I would simply ask, “What kind of conversation would you like to have?”

While we ponder that question, let me answer what it takes to have a ‘successful’ encouraging conversation? Genuine concern. Genuine empathy. You genuinely need to care.

That’s all.

But beware! It means immersing yourself in someone else’s world. It means completely diving in, for better or for worse, and finding out where a light needs to shine.

What is that light?

Hope.

Is there such a thing? Yes. Yes, there is. True hope comes from immersion. We can’t sprinkle tiny hope droplets around. No. We need to full on dump buckets of ice cold hope on people. Maybe not to that extreme, but you get the picture J There’s a big difference between flicking a few water droplets from your fingers at someone and jumping with them into a pool. True hope dives in. True hope gets wet. True hope makes waves. True hope says yes we can and then jumps in regardless of whatever else is happening. True hope changes lives. We need more true hope in our world today.

There’s a question I see running around the internet. “Is there hope for the Church?” I’ve seen it asked in many ways and I’ve seen many criticisms, but most of what I’ve read doesn’t hope. It simply reads like Week 5 of our January exerciser journal. If all the Church is supposed to be is a few fluffy water flakes then yes, there is no hope. But that’s not the Church. The Church is a community founded on true hope. Hope founded on immersion: Ice bucket smothering, grab your buddy and jump in a pool hope. Hope that one small encouraging conversation can make a world of difference.

The truth is the Church is being separated from what it is supposed to be and what it’s not. This is a good thing. This is a natural thing. It’s the story of the Church for the past several thousand years. The Church will not cease in our lifetime, though it will change. What won’t change, what hasn’t changed, is the togetherness. It’s literally the foundation of the Church.

What is that foundation? That God cares. That he cares enough not to leave us in our hopeless condition. That he cares enough to do something about the state of our world. Consider these words of wisdom from Oswald Chambers, writer of My Utmost for His Highest “It is not so true that ‘prayer changes things’ as prayer changes me and I change things. God has so constituted things that prayer on the basis of Redemption alters the way in which a man looks at things. Prayer is not a question of altering things externally, but of working wonders in a man’s disposition.” The point of Chamber’s words is this, when we place our hope in God and ask Him to change the world, He enables us to change the world by changing us first.

My hope is that God can change me enough to make a difference. I know God can change anyone who calls out to Him, asking Him to change them. So I’m asking, “God, change me and bring more hope to your world.”

Goal Setting

Goals. We’re all told we should have them. We should have a big picture goal of where we want to be and how we’re going to get there. I’ve been fed this message constantly since my first years of high school. “Where are you going to go to college? What are you going to major in? What do you want to be doing in 10 years? What position do you want in the company? How are you going to get there?” While some of this planning is helpful, there’s a fundamental flaw when it comes to long term planning; reality overrides many of our plans. We can have the best laid plans in the world, but when life happens plans change. This isn’t just true in business and academics, it also applies in the fitness world. One of my favorite things about working in the fitness industry is hearing people’s goals and why they want to achieve them. It’s motivating and inspiring when you meet someone who wants to exercise for the right reasons and have the honor of watching them get there one small step at a time. It’s a joy like no other. Yet many of us don’t experience that joy. We get caught in the daily struggle of “Do I have time for this? Is this really important? My goals seem so far away, will I ever get there?” These questions threaten to drag us down and suck the life out of us. While these questions are important, here are a few strategies to get yourself out of these funks.

-Do what you can do

Sometimes we set up monumental goals that can only be achieved through a mountain of work. Eventually something happens that puts us off course. A mental freak out starts. “I only have so much time to achieve this and since I’m already behind I have to work that much harder to get where I want to be.” This leads directly to burnout. We focus so much on what has to be done we forget we are only capable of doing so much each day. By focusing on what we can do each day, and letting each day take care of itself, we make progress to our goal without focusing on how much time it takes to get there. This kind of thinking sets us up for success in the next strategy.

-Challenge yourself against yourself

Find at least one thing each day and focus on it. Do it to the best of your ability. When you know what you are capable of, and you push yourself to meet your capacity, you grow in a healthy way. This kind of growth is sustainable, it looks internally for motivation based off personal experience. It’s not motivated by someone else, it’s motivated by a knowledge of self.

-Celebrate small things

There’s nothing wrong with throwing a big party every once in a while, but everyday needs to have some joy in it. Even on the worst of days, we need to look back, pick something out and say, “I got better at this today,” This keeps us from focusing on the negatives and helps us to see the positives. We grow every day, we don’t always stop to recognize it.

-Listen to your body

The body is a sensitive psycho-mechanical instrument. When the body doesn’t feel good something is out of place. Search for the out of place things, those things that suck the life out of you. Try something different in those spaces. Physically these would be adjustments in form or technique. Mentally they would be adjustments in attitude. Linguistically a change in words. Learning to operate healthfully makes a world of difference. It’s the difference between running with nagging injuries and running pain free. There’s no reason why we should continuously run in pain. Running is supposed to be fun. A few changes here and there just might make it pleasurable again.

Achieving goals is not about suffering. It’s about joy. About making small adjustments. Given time these adjustments create results. It’s not about forcing a result, but allowing your body to change and grow so those results can be achieved on a regular basis.

Goals are good things, but if all we do is spend time focusing on how great the future will be, instead of making little adjustments each day, we will miss out on the greatest joy of life. Setting a goal isn’t the goal, it’s how we enjoy the journey that makes a difference. When we start with our own hearts, we start in the right place. I think this is what Solomon meant went he said “Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails.”

 

To places unknown

A lot has happened in the past few days. It all started with a few simple questions asked by my club manager, “Where do you want to be in fifteen years? What are your goals in life?” The first time someone asked me this question was high school. I didn’t have an answer then. I had a direction, but not an answer. When I went to college I formulated an answer. “I want to be a youth pastor in the state of Washington.” Post college the tension between chasing that answer or choosing to help my family created a small crisis. Should I pursue church vocation? Or should I help those closest to me who need me right now, even though it means walking away from a dream. Four years later I am sitting in my house in Australia while my wife gets ready for work. Obviously I chose to walk away from pastoral ministry and I’ve ended up on the far side of the world. I wouldn’t change the past four years, but that initial choice has haunted me ever since. Should I go back to a church vocation? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that decision. I know I made the right choice, but I have doubted and felt guilty that I should have chosen the church. After thinking about my manager’s questions, and seeking God I can honestly say I will no longer be pursuing church vocation. That doesn’t mean I have given up on ministry. Instead I believe it’s because I have embraced ministry that I feel comfortable closing the church vocation chapter of my life.

Here’s why.

I have met certain men in my journeys who have advanced the gospel without holding a church position. These men have had ordinary jobs, but they have extraordinarily let God into their lives and let him use them, exactly where they are. Instead of looking for some kind of sacred position, they have spent their time working in the fields, and they have powerfully changed lives. I firmly believe when we embrace God’s call on our lives we can do the same, whether that’s answering a call to a church position or answering a call into the rest of the world. The place is not what is important, and neither is the type of work we do, it’s all about serving God through whatever he has given us to do.

I learned this first hand on a South Dallas YMCA basketball court. Basketball is not my best sport, so when I arrived and shortly found myself as the head coach of a boys high school team I wondered what God was doing. I was pretty sure He had picked the wrong guy and then put him on the wrong side of town. God obviously thought otherwise. It was on that court that I came to fully understand the power of the gospel and how it can transform any activity into something holy. I watched players begin to understand how I wanted them to play. I watched a street baller turn into a team player. I watched timid and quiet players turn into ferocious indomitable defensive players, with reputations of being bad guys, even though they were the nicest kids on the team. I watched players with average skills become team leaders. I watched good players push themselves to become great, and it wasn’t because their basic skills improved; it was because their hearts changed. That's not a skill you learn on the court, that's God working in someone's life. None of their achievements would have been possible without God leading the way. I would never have made it to South Dallas if I hadn’t first answered a call in North Dallas. God prepared me for what was to come, only because I was telling him yes in my life, even though I thought He was crazy putting me on a basketball court, let alone making me the head coach of two separate programs. God wasn’t crazy. He had a purpose, even though I didn’t understand it. Looking back I preached more Jesus as a coach than as youth group volunteer. Why? Because preaching has more to do with who we are rather than what we say. More to do with how we act rather than the philosophies we enforce. I fully believe God used me inside the church, and the relationships I built there were not in vain, nor were any of the lessons I learned invalid. I simply believe God used that period of my life to teach me how to go outside the church rather than stay inside of it. Even though I was convinced I was preparing for church ministry, God had other plans.

I think we live in an age where we measure the health of the church by how many people are inside of it, and whether or not we have a special role within it’s walls. The church isn’t a building, it’s a people and when people live together they don’t let walls come between them. Our ministries are not about whose set of walls were in, but rather how we act inside those walls. That is our vocation, that is our calling.

I have many friends who have trained for the ministry, some of which have jobs within the church, others who now work outside of it. For those who didn’t “make it” there is often a sense of guilt and shame, of not being good enough for church ministry, or the ever redundant, “if I just had more faith”. It’s not about measuring faith, it’s about serving God where he tells you to go. To schools, sport fields, factories, phone centers, fitness arenas, etc. Where is not important, serving God is. Allowing him to work through us, that is our ministry.

Following the road

This is a follow up to my last blog. My goal is to outline in detail what practices make a Christian. But first things first, a fitness story.

After my last blog I had a heavy lifting session. We did hang cleans to finding three repetition max, then a workout consisting of deadlifts, push-ups and box jumps. Because of the box jumps I decided to wear shoes. I thought I needed the cushioning. I should know better. The next day while walking to work I had a shooting pain on the inside of my left foot. Probing around my foot I located the tired muscles. They were alongside my inner arch. Basically my foot was rolling in during the workout. I wasn’t aware of it because of the cushioning of the shoes. Had my feet been in contact with the ground I could have corrected my form on the spot. I paid the price for my poor choice as my foot hurt for two days. On top of that I felt the effects run from my arch up through my calf, hip, lower back and shoulder. I could have prevented the pain if I had just taken my own advice and worn my minimalist shoes, but I thought it wouldn’t be a big deal to cheat just once. I was wrong.

This is often how our spiritual lives work. We know what we need to do, but then we fail to do it. We get distracted by life and cheat when it comes to the basics. The most important basic of the Christian walk is grace. Grace to forgive ourselves when screw things up. Grace to give ourselves a second chance, even when we’ve made a mess. Grace to forgive others, as we ourselves have been forgiven. It would be no small exaggeration to say that grace is a cornerstone of the Christian faith. While grace covers our sin, there is more to our walks with God than just accepting and giving grace. We, like any athlete, need to train in God’s ways, seeking to understand them through practice.

What is it that we should be practicing?

For a long time I’ve pondered this question. I know the core answers, and I could point to different parts of the Bible to justify my practices, but I don’t want to. I believe that if the central core answers of the Christian faith are so important, we can not only find them mentioned together in one place, but we could also find them in the Pentateuch: the first five books of the Bible. I’ve spent many years searching for the place where they are all explained or mentioned in one single place. I’ve been reading the Bible for more than twelve years: you think this would be an easy answer, but it’s not. Finding the answer meant exploring unpreachable texts: the areas of the Bible people don’t talk about. Why don’t they talk about these areas? Because they are dry and boring. When I found my answer, in the last chapters of Exodus (36, 37, and 38) it was a passage I remembered reading many years ago. My response all those years ago? “Dear God why is this part of the Bible important? It’s just a list of materials and blue-prints for how they built a place of worship in the Old Testament. I hate reading this, it puts me to sleep.” Yep, that was my response. I was a young teenager at the time. Even then I knew one day that boring list might be important, I just had no idea why. So I read it anyway. And I kept reading it every time it came around, believing one day it might make sense. And while I have zero claims to mastering this part of scripture, I can at least say it has taught me something incredibly valuable, answering my long held belief that the central practices are in the oldest parts of the Bible and are all mentioned together. Let me tell you how I arrived at my current position.

Moses received instruction from God on how to build the tabernacle and all of its surrounding items of worship. God told Moses what to do. God. Told. Moses. When that message finally sunk in I realized that boring blueprint had incredible significance. It was literally a message from God on how to worship Him. In order to make understand what God was saying, I had to take a step back and put my critical thinking hat on. God doesn’t always make his answers clear. What we first see is not always what God is trying to tell us. With this in mind I looked at the list not as a series of objects, but a series of symbols. My head almost exploded. The beautiful thing about Biblical writings is that they are often literal and symbolic. Not just one or the other, but both and the same. Here is what I read, and what I understood based on the order of construction in Exodus.

The Tabernacle: Our personal meeting space

The first thing the Israelites built was the Tabernacle. The tent where God would dwell among them. The place where only a select few could go and meet with God. The first step in our journey of faith is making room for God. Having a place where we go to find Him. A place to talk with Him. There are many places we can go, but the point is to have a personal space in our lives where we can go and meet with God.

The Ark: God in our lives

The Ark is where God dwelled among the Israelites. They knew where God was because He filled the Tabernacle with His presence. He filled the Tabernacle because the Ark was there. It’s not enough to make space for God in our lives, He has to come dwell within us. The Ark is the symbol of God’s presence. Following God means He is present in our lives, and we recognize His presence.

The Table: Communion with God

God calls upon each and every living person to enter into a relationship with him. He calls out to us before we enter into relationship. Once we have made space and he is present we need to respond to this calling and begin a relationship with him.

The Lamp: Reading Scripture and Understand Jesus

The Psalmist wrote, “your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” Jesus is the light of the world. As such we should not worship God in darkness, but learn about who He is by studying his word: meaning both the study of Scripture and the life of Jesus.

The Altar of Incense: Prayer

As we study who God is, we need to talk with Him. Prayer is our communication with God. Our ability to pray grows the better we know Him. If we don’t know Him, our ability to pray is significantly hindered. Studying who He is teaches us how we should pray. Praying to God strengthens our relationship with Him and invites him to take a larger role in our lives. Prayer enables us to move from a personal relationship with God, to an external showing of His grace and presence in our lives.

The Altar of Burnt Offering: Dedication, sacrifice and forgiveness

The Altar of Burnt Offering is where the Israelites sacrificed offerings to God. The first of these offerings, which the altar is named after, is the Burnt Offering. This offering was entirely burned on the altar as an act of dedication. When we have a healthy internal relationship with God it manifests itself outside of our personal lives. We must act publically. As the Altar sat outside of the Tabernacle, so too does our external signs of faith. Faith is more than a private matter. Notice the first external sign of faith is sacrifice, something given before God. This is a sign of being forgiven. We willingly give up what is ours as part of dedication to God.

The Basin for Washing: Identification with God’s people

It’s not enough to have a private relationship with God that sometimes moves us to external acts of faith, we must identify ourselves alongside God’s people. This one off washing is called Baptism. It’s an external sign of being accepting into a Christian community. It’s also a public declaration of faith. This sign not only says we identify with the Christian community, but that we will stand alongside it and support it.

The Courtyard: Fellowship with other Christians

It’s not enough to get baptized and give occasionally to Christian causes. We must spend time with other Christians. We need to be with each other, to encourage one another and to lift each other up. We should also spend time with non-Christians, as the Christian community is not exclusive, but rather inclusive. It takes time to develop in our knowledge and relationship with God. One of the best ways to continue to grow as a Christian is to spend time with Christians in worship to God. It is not enough to be around other Christians as our only support in the faith, we must also read, pray and make individual sacrifices along the way.