Category Archives: 25 D.O.P. (2016)

Groceries (DOP #11 2016)

If you are reading from afar, it has been snowing all day today where I live.  It is actually the first significant snowfall of the year.   I think we are somewhere in the 5-7 inch range as far as accumulation.  I enjoy the snow, and I don’t mind driving in it, as long as there are not a lot of other drivers on the road.  I would probably have stayed home, but I was the audio tech for our church services this morning, and couldn’t just bail on them.

I decided to stop at Wal-Mart on my way home, I have been out of things to eat at home for a while now, and since it was still snowing heavily when I left church, I figured I better at least have something to eat in the house if the worst happens to happen.  I grabbed about $40 worth of random, easily prepared food.  Typically I shop once a month, and just buy stuff that can be frozen indefinitely.  I travel for work a lot, and it is hard to predict when I’ll be gone for weeks at a time, so fresh food is tricky in my situation.

As I checked out, I thought about how this would be the last time for a while I would be shopping for something that needed to be refrigerated.  I’m letting the lease expire on my apartment at the end of the year, and I don’t have a plan that involves a consistent living situation for after that.  I’m not entirely sure what plans I do have at the moment, I just know that I need a change.

I have been in this apartment for 16 months, which in the grand scheme of a life isn’t too long, but I never intended to stay here for even a year.  I had grand dreams of heading overseas, or finding my way to a new adventure somewhere else, so I took the shortest lease I could, and then went month to month after that.

I haven’t found a new situation anywhere, and I think that is perfectly okay.  I mentioned in an earlier post about how I often confuse comfort with peace.  Comfort is the reason I am leaving.  Life is too easy here.  I don’t want to wake up one day 30 years from now and realize that I pursued comfort over all else.  Comfort is easy.  I’ve already found it, there is no pursuit to be made for it.

I think I’ve also mentioned (or at least implied) that peace is something that needs to be pursued, worked on, worked out!  You can’t just expect peace to fall into your lap and stay there.  It has to be chased, run down, hunted!  You have to chase peace with a giant stick and beat it into submission before you can drag it back to your cave!

Many will find comfort in this life, far fewer will find peace.

So I will forsake comfort, at least for a time, as I seek to find a way to not only experience peace for myself, but open the doors for others to find it as well.  There will be risks, but I believe there will also be rewards.

It won’t be comfortable at times, but I’m sick of being comfortable.

I want peace.

19 And a scribe came up and said to him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” 20 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

Enemy (DOP #10 2016)

“We shall be saved from our enemies. ”

Zechariah was prophesying over the birth of Jesus, the beginnings of the Christmas we celebrate even now, 2000+ years later, when he said the above.

You should understand that Israel was an occupied country at this point, it had been taken over by the Romans, and like most occupied nations, they Israelite’s weren’t thrilled about it.   So when Zechariah prophesied that Jesus would save them from their enemies, they had a specific enemy in mind that they wanted to be saved from.   If we fast forward 33 years, we find that Jesus has perished at the hands of the Romans.  Those who believed Jesus was who he said he was had to feel utterly crushed.  The man who was to save them from their enemies, was dead, at the hands of their enemies.

We, with the benefit of 2000 years of hindsight, understand what happened, and realize that God fulfilled Zechariah’s prophecy in a way the people living in that time, experiencing the events first hand couldn’t understand.  They could not have possibly known Jesus would come back from the dead.  Especially since the only person they had ever seen raise someone from the dead, was in fact Jesus!

The Hebrew people thought that the Romans were their enemies, but God had the biggest enemy of all in mind when he inspired Zechariah to speak those words.

I think we expect God to save us from our enemies, to bring peace into our lives in the same way the Hebrew people expected Jesus to do.  We expect God to deal with the very specific enemy that is directly in front of us that we can see, hear, and touch.   I suspect that many times, when we ask God to restore peace to our lives, He acts immediately, but he acts against the real enemy in the situation.  We think God is not answering, but he is really dealing with the larger problem at hand that we are perhaps totally unaware of.

So when I, or you, ask God to bring peace into a situation and you do not see results, ask yourself if maybe you don’t understand who the enemy really is.

Jesus is after all the Prince of Peace.

I suspect he understands exactly how it works.

Luke 1

68 “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
    for he has visited and redeemed his people
69 and has raised up a horn of salvation for us
    in the house of his servant David,
70 as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,
71 that we should be saved from our enemies
    and from the hand of all who hate us;
72 to show the mercy promised to our fathers
    and to remember his holy covenant,
73 the oath that he swore to our father Abraham, to grant us
74     that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies,
might serve him without fear,
75     in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.
76 And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;
    for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
77 to give knowledge of salvation to his people
    in the forgiveness of their sins,
78 because of the tender mercy of our God,
    whereby the sunrise shall visit us[h] from on high
79 to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
    to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Change (DOP #9 2016)

It isn’t always easy to accept our place in the world.

When we seek peace, we often look at the people around us, and focus on changing them.  We tell ourselves if our boss would just learn to do his job better, or if my coworkers would pay attention, or if my significant other would just make some effort, then we would find peace in those relationships.  We tell ourselves that we are frustrated and tired because of the actions of other people in our lives, and we need them to change to find real peace.  At least we think that might help us feel better about our lives.  We are left powerless to experience peace, because the keys to peace are not in our own hands.   We couldn’t find peace if we tried, the people we spend time with have made it impossible.  We are hurt, tired, broken.

When we seek peace, we often look at our circumstances, and focus on changing them.  If we could just pay our bills on time, if we could buy a new car, if we could find our soulmate, then we could have peace.  We recognize that we can’t do anything about the choices of others, so instead we focus on making the best possible decisions for ourselves, and just learn to cope with the consequences of the actions of others.  We are willing to put in the hard work to find peace, if we could just save a little more money, be a little kinder to our families, or just find a few hours to rest.  We put all of our energy into changing ourselves, because it is up to us to find our own peace.   We are exhausted.

For the longest time I thought that I was doing the right thing by focusing on my own actions to bring about a positive change.  I constantly struggled with trying to be good enough on my own to work my way into a peaceful and pleasant life.  I knew that I could’t blame discontent on others, even if they felt like such a part of it.  I did occasionally slip into blaming others for my unhappiness, but I would try to snap myself out of it as soon as possible, as obviously that wasn’t the right thing to do.

What if there was another way?

A friend told me last night in passing about the way she tries to pray.  It was so foreign to me.

My typical attempts to approach prayer involve lots of repetition of phrases like “your will be done” and “You can change this, but only if it is your will”  I know that God is not a cosmic vending machine, so I treat the interactions like I’m giving God the opportunity to act if he wants to, but I don’t really care either way, I mean…”It is your will I’m seeking here God, so you can’t blame me if I ask for something I shouldn’t.”

Not unsurprisingly, my prayer life does not tend to be the most fulfilling part of my relationship with God.

My friend encouraged me to pray differently as I sought peace.  Instead of saying “God please help me figure out how to fix this situation”, she recommended asking God to be present as I experience the situation.  In other words, stopping asking God to change where you are, and start asking to be changed through the experience.  Ask God to be alongside you as you face whatever it is that happens to be disrupting your peace in that moment.

It does make more sense…the Bible doesn’t say “Solutions I give to you,  answers to tricky situations will I give.  When the world gives you trouble, I’ll show you how to outsmart the world, and escape from the pain you’ll find there”.

Instead the Bible does say in John 14, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”

So instead of changing my acquaintances or my circumstances God, I think I would like to welcome you to change me.  I’m not asking you to change me so I can avoid the things that cause me stress, but instead I ask for you to change me to more fully depend on you, your peace, and your provision.

Glenn (DOP #8 2016)

On my way home today, I heard on the radio that John Glenn, Mercury astronaut, senator, and STS astronaut passed away at the age of 95.   Mr. Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth, and while he wasn’t the first person on earth to do so, his mission was an important one for the United States.  I never knew him personally, but I benefit from his work every day.

NASA, and the space program get a bad rap.  They do incredible things, pushing the leading edge of technology and the human spirit, but since doing incredible things tends to cost a bunch of money, people don’t really care for them.  I believe that many don’t really see the benefit of the work NASA does.  However, If we took away all of the technology that we have now as a direct result of the space program, we would all be left lost and wandering.  (I mean literally…like…GPS and a whole bunch of other stuff just wouldn’t work.)

I don’t want to focus too much on Mr. Glenn today, but I do want to take this opportunity to look at where the space program has brought us, and where it might lead us in the future, especially as it relates to peace.

I wasn’t born until 1984, but as I read history books from the era of the Cold War, it feels like it must have been a dark time.  The United States had developed a weapon so powerful it could wipe out entire cities, and the arms race lead to more and more powerful weapons being developed every day.  During the height of the Cold War, there were planes in the air 24/7, constantly ready to unleash a nuclear holocaust in a moments notice.  I’ve seen clips of the films where school children are trained to duck and cover in case of nuclear attack, and all around it seemed like an incredibly tense time.

It was around this time that the space race was heating up as well.  Obviously the governments of East and West were not going to stand idly by while the other side began it’s conquest of space.  Who knew what weapons could be developed, or new resources could be exploited in the vast reaches of space?  It was important for both sides to be the best in space, if only to ensure the other side didn’t have an advantage.

As the Soviet Union and the United States vied for supremacy, they enlisted the help of the best and brightest minds in the world, and poured vast quantities of resources into their respective programs as they pursued victory.  As history is currently written, the United States won the race by reaching the moon first, and the Soviet Union began to fade into the past, until it eventually crumbled under the weight of it’s own empire.

Supermoon
So what does any of this have to do with peace?

At any point, the East or the West could have used the technologies they were creating to attack each other.  At any point, the East and the West could have redirected their massive resources away from space flight, and into funding a war against the other.  At any point, the best minds on the planet could have been focused on how best to kill each other, instead of how to break free from the Earth that holds us, and do something incredible and new!

The space race seems so innocent until you realize that it may have been the exact thing to save us from a full blown nuclear conflict.  Instead of focusing on death and destruction, we taught ourselves to reach higher than we believed possible!  We used our creative energy to actually create, and not to destroy!  We took men, who since the beginning had been born, lived, and died on 1 planet, and sent them to the moon!

We strove to reach a higher height.

030a8915
The space program still fills me with hope for our future.

In 1975, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. shared a handshake between 2 nations in space.  The U.S. visited the Mir space station many many times while it was in operation.  Through our shared endeavors in space, we found common ground.  We brought our resources together, and we shared knowledge with each other.  This gives me hope.  Our best and brightest minds were focused on working together, instead of working to destroy each other.

If we fast forward to now, Russia and the United States have experienced a significant cooling in relations over the last 5 years, and there have been moments where those relations were positively frigid.  Fights over the role of both countries in Syria, Crimea, Ukraine, and Turkey have all been quite tense at times.   I’ve heard talk of a renewed cold war, and renewed conflict between superpowers.   I don’t know what lies ahead for the two nations now that there is a new president-elect, but things have been more than a little touchy recently.

030a8928

Through all of this, the United States and Russia have continued to cooperate on the International Space Station.  In spite of the politics on the ground, some of humanities finest minds continue to work together to learn more about the earth we share, and the space that surrounds us.  They are even creating a new language together.

Peace can be found when we focus on reaching outside of our current boundaries, when we focus not on the distribution of limited resources, but rather the development of new resources and ideas.  Peace can be found, when those who are mindful, take the time to learn and understand another culture as they work towards a shared goal.  Peace can be found as we strive together to break the bonds our birthplace has put upon us, and reach for the stars.

I often pray for peace on Earth.

I am thankful for peace in space.

Purr (DOP #7 2016)

I typically end up procrastinating for a while before I post each one of these, sometimes because I don’t know what to write, and sometimes because I just need a few minutes after getting home from a long day.

I was skimming the internet tonight, after getting home rather late and wanting to unwind just a bit.  I somehow stumbled across an article about how cats sometimes purr right before their death.

Crazy right?

I’ve always understood a purr to mean a cat is experiencing happiness and contentment.  To purr right before death…that speaks to me.  A purring cat is a cat at peace.

It turns out that purring is a bit more nuanced than just “I’m happy, so I’ll purr.”  so you can’t be totally sure what a cat is experiencing in those moments.  I mean, cats aren’t people, so attributing human thoughts and feelings to them may be doing them a disservice.  Cats may be more complex than a human construct such as language could effectively describe!  Or they could be pretty dumb in the grand scheme of things.  I’d rather not make the assumption that I am the smarter creature.  It would be quite embarrassing to discover I was wrong!

I digress.

I don’t want to be too morbid here, but I hope to face death in peace, happy, content with what I have accomplished and where I have been.  Even if things didn’t exactly go my way, I hope that I can spend my final moments on earth with the knowledge that I am dying in peace.  That my unfinished business is not unfinished because I was a coward, but rather simply because I ran out of time.  Maybe I won’t be dying peacefully, but I hope to be dying at peace with who I was during my time on earth.

In my heart, I hope that when my time comes, I can face death with a purr.