Author: Tom Sanders

Empowered By Relationships

Many of us have relationships with people around us.  These relationships take on many  forms, and many degrees of sharing and levels of intimacy.  There are things we only share with our wives that we don’t share with our co-workers for instance.  And lately I have been thinking about relationships and what they offer to us.  I don’t know about you but I have been one who spent little time  working on relationships, and a lot of time on my to-do list.

Most of us men at least seem to be task motivated.  At least the ones I have met and talked with.  And some women are as well.  Others seem to focus their lives on the relationships they are building as they go about their tasks.  This is something women seem to do naturally.  At least more naturally then men.  But we all need to have relationships.  God said “It is not good for man to be alone.” in Genesis in the bible.  And it applies to women as well.  Loneliness is a burden that is extremely difficult to carry, and one that drives many to suicide.

We need each other.  We need each other to grow.  We need each other to develop our character.  We need each other to change.  We need each other to lighten the load we all carry each day.  We were all built for relationship.  It is the reason we were created.  God designed  us  for relationship.  If we avoid them we do so to our own detriment.  I know I have in the past.  Life can hit us pretty hard at times, and if those hits are coming mostly from people we should be able to trust we can tend to have a bleak view of relationships in general.  But it is something we can overcome.  I know I am growing further away from it each day.  But I have surrounded myself with people who genuinely care about me, and have no need whatsoever to change me.  It is how I came to be who I am today.

We are empowered by the relationships we have.  As long as they are healthy that is.  Because relationships can destroy as well.  But with good relationships we become more that we could ever be on our own.  We can stand taller, and climb to greater heights  and see broader vistas than we can ever hope to alone.  Having people behind us who can encourage us through the difficulties, and challenge us to not accept the status quo in our lives, and speak into the blind spots in our lives and character enables and empowers us to go beyond ourselves.  There is a saying ‘Behind every great man is a great woman.’  And it is true.  I’m not saying I am a great man, but I married a great woman who is supporting and challenging  me.  And as I continue to develop and grow personally, I know it will only be with her support and wisdom, and the other relationships I have around me, the most important one being with Jesus, I will become, to borrow a slogan, ‘All I can be.’

A faith worth believing

I have been confronted recently with the question What do I believe.

To be honest, I have had some difficulty putting into words what I believe.  I have never given it much thought before.  When in discussions with people, or listening to someone speak I could put what was being talked about into a framework of what I believed, and determine if what was being shared matched or not, but I have never sat down to think about what I actually believe.

I think this is common for most Christians.  We don’t know what we actually believe.  We say we believe the truth,  and at times are able to tell people what we don’t believe, but we have difficulty with knowing, and greater difficulty with sharing what we believe.  We cannot put it into a logical thought pattern to understand ourselves, let alone share it with anyone else.  This creates a rather large problem, because our main mandate is to go into the world and share with others what we believe.  It is kind of impossible when we don’t know.

I was reading a book and the author shared he was trying to share his faith with people, telling them they needed a relationship with God.  This was until a lady asked him “what is a relationship with God?”, and he couldn’t answer her.  This is what sent me on my quest to discover what I believed.  I wasn’t sure I could answer that question either, and I wanted to be sure.

As I thought long and hard about this, I realized I had another issue.  Not only do we not know what we really believe, we don’t know why we believe what we do believe.  We have accepted teachings and what people we have trusted have shared as truth, but we have never chased it on  our own.  We spout all kinds of messages because that is what others have shared, and we think it is the way it is done.  But when we get cornered by someone, like the lady asking what a relationship with God is, we get stumped and are unable to answer.  We really don’t know why we believe what we say we believe.

This leads us to the great tragedy in the churches we go to, where by statistics only about 5% of Christians in North America will ever lead anyone else to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.  We cannot continue to simply accept as truth what others tell us.  Christianity was never meant to be a blind faith.  Christianity is meant to be accepted by faith, and because God’s thoughts go so far beyond ours that we cannot ever hope to understand Him, we have to take some things simply because God said it was so.  But Christianity was meant to be a thinking mans faith.  Jesus said we need to “count the cost” before following Him.  We need to evaluate what we are willing to give up to be a disciple of Jesus.  We are supposed to think through our faith.

Paul said in Acts 17:11 “And the people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, and they listened eagerly to Paul’s message. They searched the Scriptures day after day to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth.” They didn’t take what Paul said solely because Paul said it.  They searched the scriptures in depth to see if what was being shared actually was in the bible.   To much of what we have accepted as truth is simply been hearsay and has been blindly accepted.  And as a result it cannot stand any of the storms in life.

If we as Christians are to actually stand tall and strong we need to know what it is we believe and why.  Otherwise we are just simply spreading around hearsay and conjecture without really evaluating what has been said.  And as a result we have built our lives on a foundation that cannot hold us up.  We end up building on sand instead of solid rock.  Only when we begin to evaluate what we believe, and then find out why we believe it and own it for ourselves can we truly stand as God intends for us to stand and be the light that we are called to be.

I welcome you to join me on the journey of discovering what we believe and why.  We cannot become who we were meant to be unless we are willing to.

why change?

There are only two responses most people have when you start to talk about change. And they are complete opposites. Some people really hate change. In fact they will do almost anything they can to avoid it. And when it is thrust upon them by circumstances and life, it really throws them for a loop. Stress levels top out and emotions run high. You may know someone like this.

The other type is those who like change. These are the types of people that the change haters dislike. It is like the saying goes “There are those who like to get up early, and those who hate those who like to get up early.” People who like change can go to extremes of just changing anything and everything because things haven’t changed in at least an hour. And it can be a simple need to change something once a year. But these people need change.

And these two types of people often frustrate and argue with one another. Myself I am a change lover. I have to have things change because I get bored easily, and start looking for something new. My wife is a change hater. She is most at rest when things stay the same.

Now neither personality type is bad. We are the way God wired us. And we need each other deeply. If it wasn’t for my wife holding me down at times, I would run and change anything I could. And if it wasn’t for me, my wife would never change a thing. We need each other to succeed.

In life change is necessary. We cannot live without it. Everything in life that is healthy grows. If it isn’t growing, it isn’t healthy. You don’t have to tell your garden or your kids to grow. If they are healthy, they simply grow. And growth requires change. No change means no growth.

We tend to settle into what we are comfortable with. Which is why most dislike change. It requires them to move their comfort zone. Even those of us who like change dislike moving our comfort zone. We all desire comfort. But is your comfort holding you back from growth? It is one of the dangers.

A person who stops growing doesn’t just stand still. In life there are only two choices. Growth and decline. If your not growing, then your declining. There is no park in life. Just forward and reverse.

So are we growing, or settling for the status quo? Funny thing is status quo is Latin for ‘the mess we are in’. Are we settling for the mess because it is what we know? If we desire to grow as people then we can never stop growing. And growing requires change. To borrow the slogan from milk “Always Grow, Grow Always”. So here is to change.