Tag: faith

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.

Securely Anchored

anchorAnchors have been around as long as we have had boats on water.  They are a means of securing a boat to keep it from drifting away.  On larger vessels capable of ocean voyages they also secure the ship against the storms that come.  Oil drilling rigs are often stationed in some of the worst areas in our oceans for storms and they are anchored securely and even the worst of the storms the crew can remain secure in the fact that the anchors have been designed to keep them secure and in place.  They won’t drift or blow away.

In our lives anchors are important as well.  We live in a world that is going crazier every day.  With new bombings happening in Belgium, and Turkey, and terrorist attacks on the rise all around the world our lives are become more and more unstable.  People are beginning to question much of what they had counted on for securing.  With global instability rising, and markets crashing even the finances we had set aside and based some security in for our future is disappearing.  Overnight people are waking up to realities where the moneys they had worked so hard to set aside and plan for had disappeared.  Many lost thousands as the market values crashed and world currencies devalued.  Security has become an illusion for many people.  With home invasions on the rise, and gun violence all around us many have become disillusioned with what we had at one time considered security.

In all of this there is an opportunity to have real hope.  An all-encompassing sense of security inside, even when the world is going crazy outside.  There is an ability to have a confident peace that is secure and quietly allows you to weather all that life may send your way.  It isn’t an absence of things going wrong, but a confidence and hope that fills us regardless of things going wrong.

1 Peter 1:3 talks about this hope that is available to us.  “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” NIV Jesus is alive.  He was dead, and was raised to life again, and because of this we can have a deep-seated hope and confidence that is not dependent on our circumstances.  A hope which anchors us securely through all that life sends our way.  “This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls.” Hebrews 6:19 NLT

As we enter the season where we as Christians reflect on what Jesus did for us, and offers to us because of His death and resurrection we need to refocus our lives at times.  We can get distracted and allow ourselves to let go of our anchor and tie ourselves to many other things which will never be able to hold us true and steady.  In this season we need to ask ourselves what are we anchored to, and will it hold no matter what comes?

Connected pt 2

cowboy-sunset Togetherness.  It is something that goes against the grain at least here in North America.  We have an ideological concept of ourselves steeped in rugged individualism, where we ride in, become the great hero and ride off into the sunset again.  We see little need for others and usually people are the reason we feel the need to be alone.  People can be extremely cruel and harsh  and all of us have been on the receiving end of some form of ridicule and abuse which just seems to reinforce the stereotype.
Add to that all the busy bodies and gossips who seem to feel it is their God given mission to know all that is going on in your life and share it with everyone they know as well as their opinions of what you are doing and it is no wonder people don’t want to invest heavily in relationship.  Even the source of basic foundational relationships we were all born into has broken down into a deep source of pain for many.  Family isn’t even something you can count on any more.
Enter the church and the people who are supposed to be ones you can begin to turn to and count on as Jesus demonstrated and we have a group of people obsessed with what is wrong with you instead of helping bring out what is right.  There is a lot wrong with our world today and it just reinforces our desire to stand alone.
Unfortunately we were not created to be alone but to be in relationship.  And our level of connection to God is dependent on our level of connection with others around us.  One always will lead to the other.  When we come to know relationship with God through Jesus we are restored to a life-giving relationship with God and He instantly begins to network us to others around us.  And if we resist building relationship with others, our relationship with God begins to die as well.  We cannot have one without the other.  We need to change our view of relationships with others to become who we were meant to be.  Our growth personally and in our relationship with God is dependent on it.
“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.” –  Martin Luther King, Jr –
Paul wrote in Ephesians 4 that Christ gave gifts to the body of Christ so that we would become mature and complete measuring up completely to Christ who is our head.  And because of that maturity we would stand firm in our faith and we would …“Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. 16 He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.”  Ephesians 4:15-16 NLT   What I found interesting the first time I read this and I began to understand our need for one another wconnectedas that we grow together.  There is no alone in Christianity.  No room for individualism.  “He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.”   
We can never become who God wants us to be by spending time with God alone.  We also need to be in ever-deepening relationship with the people God begins to place around us.  One whole complete body of Christ around the world together becoming who God wants us to be.  “We must depart from a self-centered view of our life in Christ. We cannot independently remain apart from others. We are formed by the Spirit to be joined into community with others, forming a body indwelled by Christ.’  Ralph. W. Neighbour Jr.. Christ’s Basic Bodies