Category: Christian Life

Seeing the sights

one thingInside each and every one of us is a wonderful person the world is desperately wanting to know.  Every day all around us are people that have incredible talents and gifts that often go completely unseen and unknown, and the world is worse off for it.  So much potential that goes unused and unnoticed.

The world doesn’t need more carbon copies of others.  It doesn’t matter if they were the greatest person around.  What the world needs is people who are willing to be authentic, and allow their potential to be lived fully.  This comes by knowing yourself, your limitations, your talents and giftings and being secure enough in who you are that there is no need to “fit another mold”.  We were created unique and special.  Every person born is important and has a wonderful potential.   There has been and never will be another you, and if your life goes unlived because you were trying your best to fit in or measure up the world will have lost a great treasure.

Coming to know yourself is a journey.  It isn’t something that happens overnight.  In fact because we are developing and growing it is a journey that is continually ongoing.  Everyone of us needs to be going on that journey.  This is done with a lot of soul-searching, and thought spent deciding why we do things, what we love to do, what we are passionate about.  It involves analyzing motives to understand the reasons for behaviors we have.  Many of our behaviors are a result of our childhood, and often they are self-protection mechanisms that have completely outlived their usefulness and are now just keeping us from become ourselves.

This journey isn’t easy at times.  In fact it can be painful as we come to understand things about ourselves that we won’t necessarily like.  But the rewards for going on the journey exponentially exceed any discomfort we may go through.  The world around us needs people who know who they are.  There are a lot of people compensating, calculating and even being like a chameleon and changing themselves to fit the expectations of those they relate to.  Very few people are truly self-aware and confident in who they are and what they are gifted to do.

So it is an important journey for all of us.  The big thing is that we need to enjoy the journey.  Every journey we take in life has its ups and downs.  The car breaks down, tires go flat, engines overheat, flights are delayed or cancelled, traffic jams cause us to be late.  Everywhere we turn there will always be joyous highs and heart breaking lows.  Unfortunately it is a facIMAG0157t of life.

But even with the lows and high the journey can be worth while and very memorable.  I recently traveled to Turkey and Armenia, and there were difficulties and frustrations.  There were highs and lows, but the memories will stay with me for a life time.  It is the same when we journey to knowing ourselves.  The journey was meant to be enjoyed.  It will be hard at times, definitely life changing, and an incredible release of burdens we hang on to, and passions we have bottled up.  We are all worth knowing.  That is the way God created us.  But to be known we have to know.  I need to know myself so I can share myself with the world I live in.  If you haven’t started your journey, it is never ever to late.  Every journey begins with a single step.  Just enjoy the journey and see where it takes you. journey enjoy

Mapping the journey

journalingJournaling is something that I used to hate doing.  It was always something that others mentioned that would help me in my life and encouraged me to do.  But every time I tried I struggled to make it worth while.  It always seemed like a diary to me and I had absolutely no use for a log of my daily events.

Recently I came to understand journaling in a whole new light.  It was never supposed to be a diary.  There was no need at all the log events that happened in my life at all.  Unless that is something that you want to do.  Journaling was meant to be a way to sort out your thoughts and feelings.  Sometimes this is linked to an event, but doesn’t need to be.  If we want to truly know ourselves then this is something that is necessary to the process.

Dawson Trotman said “Thoughts disentangle themselves when they pass through the lips and fingertips.”  As we put our thoughts down on paper, or computer screen, we can process what is happening in us.  Without doing this we will miss out completely on knowing who we are, and who we are becoming.  Life simply passes and we struggle to get by.  Journaling allows us to place markers along the journey.  Things we have learned about ourselves and the way we see the world.  Discoveries we have made about life, and the struggles it brings.  As we process what is happening to us and within us, we grow.

You wouldmemory map never plan a trip without deciding first where you wanted to go.  A destination is very important in every journey.  But just as important is knowing where you are now.  You can plan a trip from London to Sydney, and have everything lined up for the journey and it will do you absolutely no good when you are currently in Toronto.  Journaling is a way for us to see first where we are at personally.

It allows us to look within and see things about ourselves we would have never noticed otherwise.  It allows us to be honest with ourselves because there is no one to impress.  It is simply us looking in a mirror and writing what we see.  Just as important is the writing where we want to go.  Without a destination to work towards the place we are in now can be painful and not have any purpose or hope.  A destination makes the start worth while.

When we journal we simply are mapping our journey of self-discovery and becoming.  As we journey we mark memorable and life altering moments and discoveries, and allow ourselves to process what is we are discovering and clearly understand who we are becoming.  This allows us to not simply exist, but to really live life and achieve our potential.

By Chance Moments

chance encounterIt is truly amazing how many people we all interact with every day without thinking about it.  The amount of people we could be impacting is astronomical, depending on the type of job you have, the way you travel to and from work, and the size of the place you live in.    If you life in a large city like New York or Tokyo and you ride the subways you will probably interact with a very large number of people every day.  But if you stay at home, the numbers will be fewer. 
Regardless of the way we live our lives, unless you live on a deserted island, we all intact at some level with a lot of people.  How many of those are you able to influence, or make their lives better somehow?  We all have the opportunities.  The question is do we make use of them?  For the most part we are probably focused completely on what we need to be doing and not at all on the people we meet, unless they get in our way.
Just like the story of the good Samaritan found in Luke 10 we have opportunities to enrich the lives of those we meet.  In the story a man gets severely beaten and robbed, and 4 people meet him on the road.  Two were religious leaders, something like our pastors and priests today.  Men who were supposed to be interested in the welfare of others.  And like us they had a schedule to keep, and were not interested in stopping.  The third man was a lawyer, and the fourth was the Samaritan.  From the story we can all learn to do several things which we can use to open the doors to seeing God do things in our lives and through our lives each and every day.
Like the good Samaritan we need to
1. Pay attention.
We are too often pre-occupied with all that we need to get done and sometimes the unintended result is that we don’t notice the person or the need right in front of us. We go through our day, thinking about what we are doing, how far behind we are, or how difficult our life is right now and we miss out completely on opportunities to impact people.  I am always impressed with how Jesus paid attention and noticed people. And when he was with them, he wasn’t distracted. He was fully present.
So, this week ask God to help you notice people and needs. And, work at paying attention. Look people in the eye. Listen more carefully.  Pay a little more attention to the people around each of us.  You will be amazed at what you may see.
2. Slow down.
If I am going to do a better job of noticing, I must learn to slow down. I can’t always be in a hurry.
 Sometimes this is about my hurried step and sometimes it is about a hurried spirit. It’s just a fact of life that the slower you go the more you can notice.
We all have a schedule that is to full, and life only seems to be getting busier.  But it is a choice we all need to make to be able to push back our time tables and recapture some time in our day so that we aren’t always needing to be pushed to the limits.  A great book on how to do this is “Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives” by

Richard Swenson.  Once we have some margin we can actually breath and see opportunities to reach people
3. Be courageously compassionate.
Slowing down and paying attention is a good start, but it isn’t enough. In the story of the Good Samaritan, the priest noticed the man in need but he didn’t engage his need.  The important thing we need to keep in mind is not whether we noticed the people around us but whether we courageously engage with them with compassion and action.
This is the essence of the Great Commission.  Jesus was instructing His followers to go into their worlds.  And as we go about our daily lives, reach into the lives of those we meet and influence them, and make disciples.  Reach out to the people we meet, and impact them making their lives a little better somehow, and pray for opportunities to share the hope that you have.chance encounters