Water Flying Everywhere!

One of the minor inconveniences of traveling is figuring out the nuances of every new shower that you encounter. It seems like showers are like snowflakes: God has never made the same one twice. The infinite combination of water pressure, fittings, shower heads, stalls, tubs, curtains, doors, foot traction, etc. makes cuing the cascade of cleanliness more akin to a very wet game of roulette than the relaxing and rejuvenating experience it is intended to be.

My wife and I just returned from a fantastic trip to Boston for a family wedding. The trip went smoothly, the happy couple got hitched successfully, and we even did some sightseeing. One wonderful part of the trip was that Sara's aunt and uncle generously opened up their home for us to stay in during the week leading up to the wedding as base camp for our expeditions into Boston.

Even if we are family, we were still guests in their house so everyone walked the tight rope of appreciative deference vs. overlooking the inconveniences that allows for safe passage between "Hello" and "Goodbye."

The first morning I went to get in the shower, and began my shower showdown. Scene: claw-foot tub, free-standing shower head, circular curtain rod, shower curtain hung on hooks (not rings). An important piece of information not previously mentioned: This is a house of Sara's aunt and uncle and their four grown and (mostly) moved out daughters. The evidence of elevated estrogen is still present throughout the house, nowhere more so than in the shower. Half of the real estate inside of the floor of this claw-foot is being tenanted by orphaned and abandoned shampoo and conditioner bottles (why can't everyone get along and use the same S&C?).

Anyway, I get the water successfully streaming and steaming to a safe and satisfactory status and gingerly step into the tub. The traction in the bottom of a strange tub is impossible to gauge, but I negotiated it successfully. My success ended there however. In an effort to keep my "good house guest" status at an appropriately high level, I reached up and quickly pulled the shower curtain closed before the water started bouncing off of me and outside the narrow confines of the taloned tub.

With that pull, a bunch of the hooks came jumping off of the rod, a leaving me holding half a shower curtain, attempting to keep it from ending up in the bottom of the tub. While trying to hang the curtain back up, the water glancing off me in precisely the way I was trying to avoid, and I am trapped where I am standing because of all of the hair care bottles that I mentioned before. As the steadily splashing stream soaks the previously spotless floor, I am cursing the manufacturer of any and all shower hooks, and then I admit berating Sara's aunt for buying something so ineffective. Why would someone rely on something so insecure to protect their floors from flash flooding?

It wasn't until after I had re-positioned the curtain and actually taken my shower that I sensed that nudge in the side of my brain that said, "Jon, don't miss what just happened."
"God, what are you talking about? I took a shower?"
"What happened though?"
"I got upset by the unsecured curtain hangers."
"Exactly. Go with that."

The more I thought about it, I figured out that we live our lives this same way. We hang our happiness, sense of purpose, and identities on so many things that are insecure: ideas, opinions, and perceptions that are different from year to year, region to region, person to person. "The way I dress shows everyone who I am." "How I eat is proof of how much more I care." "Voting this way is the only acceptable option." Everything is a moving target, and we move so much from position to position that our grip becomes so loose it slips at the slightest jerk (in all its forms, yes).

What if we chose to live different? What if we chose a secure option. I wish Carolyn had for her shower curtain, but even more I wish that she, and everyone else, would choose a better option on which to secure their lives. What if instead of looking to the people (physically or digitally) we have access to for who we are, what if we looked to the person that created all of that.

The God of this world has a very explicit and radical opinion of who you are, and has never changed it. In fact, there was never a minute that he was more crazy about you than during the moment where you chose to do whatever it is that is the biggest regret of your life. The ironic thing is, that exact moment is the same moment that so many other people that have told you who you are abandoned you, or you traded them for another set.

It's time to change your hardware. You need a set of secure hangers for your identity, ones that won't work their way loose. In my experience, they come in a set of three:

1. Begin studying the words of Jesus.
Don't start in Genesis. Don't start with reading the Bible in a year. I recommend starting in Mark. Do a little bit at a time, less than a chapter, so you can focus more on what you are reading and less on getting it read. Most Bible versions have sections in each chapter. Read just one of those "subchapters."

2. Journal what you have read.
Not a huge thing. Not a "dear diary." Write/type the verse out that you read that stands out the most to you. Then write out what it is that stood out about that verse to you.

3. Get a friend that is a (only a little) further down this road than you.
If you skip this step you will burn out and end up right back where you started. This person ideally would become the center of a group of friends that you share your life with (spiritual, home, work, financial, mental, social). You will keep each other securely connected.


It is time to change your hardware. Don't be afraid to make a bit of a mess.

Sucking Life Through a Straw

"I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of." -John 10:10

I went running yesterday. For anyone that knows me, this is not a big deal. Not only is this not a surprise, it is expected. The surprising part would be that for the five days prior to that, I had not been running. Last Monday, I got very sick. Not “go to the hospital bad,” but “bronchial tubes so inflamed it is not fun to breath” bad.

Why bother bringing up such a mundane activity from my life? Because it may have been a bit premature for me to be back out on the road. I knew that before I started, but I had to get out. I am running a marathon in three weeks, and this is supposed to be the two weeks of my maximum training load, not the time to take almost a full week off of running altogether.

Back at it, I felt strong, especially for not running for a while. As the run went on it got harder to breathe because my inflamed air passages could not take in enough air to keep going at the pace I wanted. I had to slow down to finish, and did so without any problems. It felt like trying to run while breathing through a drinking straw.

It occurred to me that is the way that I live my life as well. God has created this marvelous life for me to experience with him. He has so many ways that he wants me to get to know him and experience him, but I limit myself to just a tiny stream of access to him. It is like he has all this air with which he wants me to fill my lungs and I choose to keep sucking through this tiny tube.

The thing that bothers me is that I don't even realize that I am living a drinking straw existence. I think that I am getting all there is to get out of my life. In some ways, that is true. Based on all that I am capable of doing, I am getting all that there is to get out of my life. I am sucking life through that straw at maximum psi.

We don't need God to help us live our lives and our experience with him better than we are. We need him to remove our drinking straw limitations and open our lungs to all he wants to give us. We are clueless what our lives could be because we are clinging to the control over what we have. We are obsessed with the idea that God is going to take something away from us, when all God ever does is give us more. He does not take control, options, fun, money, and time. He gives life development, enduring happiness, unexpected resources, and freedom.

The sad and wonderful thing is, until you have been there you will not understand what I mean. Until you trade experiencing a life in which there is never enough air at the end of the effort for whatever God has, you can't understand me. I wish you could, but you can't; you are still sucking life through a straw. Once you trust God to take control of your straw, then he will trade it out for amazing, complete lungfuls of life. Those of you who have been there, you know exactly what I mean.

Are you ready to breathe?

Wrapping Gifts

Last night for our small group night, we got together for a "wrapping party" instead of our normal conversation and discussion "format." What a gift this was for my wife and I! We both commented on our way home, the trunk of our sleigh full of now-wrapped gifts, that we didn't know when we would have carved out the time to wrap the rest of the week. It took just one more thing to try to manage off of our plate before Christmas this weekend.

If you and the people that you exchange gifts with are anything like my family, you never know what is going to be under that wrapping paper. The box that you uncover when that colorful, painstakingly applied paper is torn away in mere seconds could be the packaging of some brand new, it's-just-what-I-wanted Christmas joy. However, it is just as likely, if not more so, to be the tattered remains of what used to be a cardboard box that has slogged its way through one Christmas and birthday after another, its size to convenient and unconventional in the world of packaging to risk throwing it away. And so this "box" is yet another feature of concealment, more functional than the initial layer, but a layer of concealment all the same. Only after breaching this second concealment that the true identity of the gift is revealed.

Isn't this the nature of who we are as people as well? Inside each of us is a gift to give to the world, to a community, a friend, a lover. This gift is not something that is just laying around, commonplace. You may even have multiple gifts. What we do is package them. All too often it is the mistakes that I have made in the past or that you are making right now that we see as too hard to let go of that we use as the packaging. So we take our gift, our life, and we thrust it inside that past and then close it up.

Now, we all know that we can't go around showing off this mess of a box. Who would want to have anything to do with that? So we look around our lives, our world, for something eye-catching and acceptable, preferably something that hints at the personality of what we have hidden away, just to be more believable. Then we take it and we wrap up our beat-up cardboard box lives and that is the present we display to the people around us. The thing is, this present is not a gift. The gift is buried.

The sad part is, what we want to be known and loved for is what we are hiding. What people know is that wrapping we show them. The great part is that the Jesus that I love knows who you truly are and loves it. He isn't fooled by your wrapping paper or your past. He sees through all of that and loves the real you.

Here's the thing that bothers me. Right now Jesus is experiencing the same thing that we do to ourselves. The people that follow Him have an amazing gift that needs to be shared. But we take him and shove him in a box made of the church building and the cold, inflexible attitudes of so many of the people that inhabit the benches and chairs of church buildings. Then every year at Christmas, and maybe Easter, we wrap that box up with smiling faces and services that make everyone feel fantastic and (relatively) welcome. Then the rest of the year, the box is stripped bare, so that there isn't even an inviting veneer to attract someone to the amazing gift inside of that box.

What would happen to your world if you lived out the gift of who you really are, not who you think people want you to be, or what your past has labeled you? How would you live, choose, and love differently? I dare you to live that way.

And if you are a follower of Jesus, what if you took him out of your church and into your everyday life? What if you erased the barrier between your church life and your home life, your Sunday world and your weekday world? It will only happen when you really open up that gift of Jesus for yourself, everyday. Then, all of the rest of your world will see what has been unwrapped.

Moving Pains

Moving can be such a pain. As a current renter it is one of the things that I dread about beginning the process of eventually buying a house. I have only had to move into two houses in my adult life and the inconvenience and stress of that has not made me eager to experience it all over again. Plus my wife and I own (outright! never debt here, but that is a different topic) two sedans, making the moving process even more of an exercise in relying on other people than it would be otherwise.

Obviously then it is not my moving "pain" that I am referencing. That pain is currently being felt by my friends Nate and Julie and by my best friend Matt. For those interested, this is the same Matt from my post "There's Just Something About a Truck". Nate, Julie, and Matt are all a part of the small group that I am a part of that has shared each other's lives for most of the past decade (cue the "I'm getting old" flashbacks here). Nate and Julie made a fantastic home purchase recently and have made their second move of the last twelve months. Helping them move into what is their very first "our home" has been wonderful.

Matt has a personal motive for helping them move into their home. He is sick of his apartment. I can't blame him. This place is tiny. How tiny? I am pretty sure that Clark Kent has knocked on his door a couple times because he thought someone was squatting in his changing room, that's how tiny. When Matt heard that Nate and Julie were moving out of their (rented and fully furnished) house, he took a liking to the idea of living there, since his lease was up at the end of the next month. Nate took a liking to Matt's liking since it is much easier to tell your landlord that you are breaking your lease when you can take the next sentence to tell him that you found him his next tenant.

So to recap: Nate and Julie bought a house, they must move out by the end of the month, Matt is moving into their old place, Matt must be moved out of his place at the end of the month, but N&J are not fully moved out yet. There are eleven days left before all of this moving has to be complete. Phew! even I was having trouble keeping it all straight.

Now, since they are both up against a deadline, Nate and Matt have become moving buddies. Matt has considerably more free time than Nate, so Nate gave him a key to both houses and said, "Go ahead and move anything that needs to be moved." What an act of trust and sign of reliability that is! Don't you wish you could be a part of a small group that waded through your life in this way?!

Where am I going with all of this? It strikes me that the kind of "do whatever you see fit" instructions that Nate gave to Matt is exactly what we are invited to experience in our friendship with Jesus. Nate has no clue what Matt is going to pack next, whether it belongs with whatever else is in that box, will it get broken, will it end up in the room Julie desires, etc. He is saying, "Matt, because of our experience together, I trust that you have my best interest in mind. I am giving you access to all that I own."

Based on what I have experienced with him, Jesus has my best interests at heart, but I still don't give him access to all that I have. Some days it feels like I give him the garage door code, but the door to the house is locked. Or I say, "Jesus, here is the key to the storage unit. I don't get into that all that often, so you won't negatively effect the way I regularly do things there." I don't want to live that way. I have shown just how royally I can screw up my life through my choices. For me, and for all of you, I want Jesus to have "Nate and Matt" kind of access to my life. I want to get to the point where he has access to everything. "Come in, and whatever you do I will adjust to it."

So, today I am giving my entire set of keys to Jesus. What access do you allow him to have?

Flashbacks, Bubblicious, and Hatred

            Do you ever have situations that you get angry with yourself whenever you remember them? It’s the classic, “Jon, what were you thinking?!” anger. In every one of those situations I experience there are details that are burned into my brain that give me that “what were you thinking?” response every time I remember them. Have you had that same experience? Maybe it’s just me. I’ll show you what I mean; let me tell you about why I don’t eat Bubblicious gum.

          First, let me explain the two types of break-up personalities in the world: breakees and breakers. Breakees have this ridiculous notion of “I know this is going to end soon, but I’ll hold on and let them break up with me so they don’t get hurt as badly and I don’t have to be a jerk.” Breakers are more of the opinion that “if it’s going to end I might as well get it over with so we don’t have to drag this out,” and “I won’t feel so bad if I choose when this ends.”*

It’s seventh grade. She’s one of my first girlfriends. Her name is Melissa. And I can tell where this is headed, and it’s not upward if you get my meaning. I am a breaker personality, and always have been, but when you combine that with being clueless about women, something stupid is almost certainly going to happen. Well it did.  In art class, I pull out a pen and the only paper I happened to have: a Bubblicious (Watermelon wave, if you must know) wrapper.  I take out my BIC pen and on that wrapper I scrawl, ^∆ “It’s over,” and slide it over to her on the table.  We were sitting next to each other! I still wrote this stupid thing! So to this day I cannot eat Bubblicious.  It is ruined for me, because it reminds me of my ridiculous break-up skills.

Jesus talked about these very same types of anger-inducing flashbacks in John 15:18-19.  He says (and I paraphrase), “If you sign up to be my follower, everyone around you is not going to like you.  In fact they are probably going to hate you, because you are going to remind them of me. Even if they don’t even know anything about me, you are still going to remind them that a lot of what they do is wrong.  But don’t worry; they hated me too, because I made them feel the exact same way.”

Jesus doesn’t come right out and say it, but what he is saying also carries the truth that if you are not disliked by the people around you then you don’t remind them at all of Jesus. If your life makes the people you work with aware of the fact that they aren’t the real boss of their lives they will hate you.  If the other students at school see (I didn’t say hear, this requires no “witnessing for Jesus” to happen) by the way you live your life that we are held responsible for the choices they make and the things they do, you will probably not be class president, prom king, homecoming queen, or most popular superlative. ^∞

I know what you’re thinking, because I would be thinking the same thing.  I can see myself being that person standing in the back with their hand up going, “Well what’s the point then?”  To which he would reply, “You have to wait until chapter 16, verses 13 through 15.  I am only halfway through chapter 15 now.”^‡

Jesus does tell us in 16:13-15 that our reward for all of this unpopularity among non-followers will be just two things, but what an amazing two things!  The first is that the Spirit of truth (Holy Spirit) will come to you. That means that one of the three persons of the trinity will come live inside you.  Would I trade Bubblicious-Melissa liking me for THE God to live inside me?  You bet.  Pass me another wrapper and a pen! The second is that because the Spirit is inside us Jesus will take everything that is his (which his Daddy gave him) and he will give it to us! WHAT?! So, the God who made the universe wants to share all he has with me? Let it sink in.

I hear you, being a follower of Jesus is hard.  It’s hard for me to.  I REGULARLY pick anything and everything else over following Jesus.  One small example: the other day I picked watching Criminal Minds over following Jesus.^≠  Are you picking superlatives, staying with your bae (I can’t believe I said it), or your number of likes and retweets over Jesus, who designed the mind that designed Twitter?  He will let you, because he loves you.  But he has something more planned for you, if you will take the chance of being disliked and unfollowed by being like and following Him.

*The best possible scenario is if a breaker and a breakee are dating, because both get what they want. We’ve all seen those relationships when both people cling to what’s not there anymore: they are both breakees.  But when you have to breakers dating, when that relationship ends its time to get out the popcorn because the fireworks show is going to be amazing!

^∆ Try this sometime.  It is almost impossible to write on a Bubblicious wrapper with a ballpoint pen.

^∞ It could get you teacher’s pet, but it’s not a life goal to be popular with people your parent’s age.

^‡ If your conversations with Jesus aren’t this sarcastic, that’s good. Our friendship is different than yours, that’s how it should be.

^≠ Three times, like Peter, only with more psychotic mass murderers involved.

Getting embarassed by your Father

Two weeks ago at Christ Church we had our eleventh annual Christmas Cantata.  This year marks either the fifth or sixth year (I have no idea which) that I have been fortunate enough to be a part of the production.  Of all the years the message of this program resonated with me the most, because I think it had the most application to life in general, and not just Christmas.  The theme was that we only have three gifts that are acceptable to give to God: our lives surrendered, our hearts made tender by His love, and our praise for all that He is and has done.

            However, after two weeks of thinking about it, it is not this theme that has most deeply penetrated my mind and heart.  Instead it was a moment right after the first “show” involving Pastor David Janz.  He was thanking the people who made the production possible, then paused and said, “For this old trombone player, the best part of this cantata and biggest thank you I have is that I got to share it with my daughter, Katie.”  This sentimental moment drew all of the requisite and appropriate ooh’s and ahh’s from the crowd (as well as the glares and embarrassment from the aforementioned daughter). 

That moment of fatherly pride has wedged itself into my brain and stayed there, because it was a model of our heavenly Father.  That night I could feel Him saying, “My greatest enjoyment from this show was the chance to share in it with you, Jonathan Smith, my son.  Thank you for making this Director very happy.”  He wasn’t just saying that to me, He simultaneously said it, by name, to David and Katie Janz, Sam Wagner, and every other member of the choir, orchestra, and audience.  After all, He is God and can talk to as many people simultaneously as He pleases.

Whenever you do something in your life that brings God praise, credit, or awareness from others and/or yourself He does the same thing as Pastor Dave, “I am so proud to share this moment with my child.  I love her (him) more than words can say.  Thank you for making me a part of your life!”

Receiving love and acknowledgment from the Maker or Everything makes me react the same way as Katie: complete, bashful embarrassment at the recognition.  God can even handle the glares.

Merry Christmas!

A Blunder in the Backcountry

On October 2 I had the opportunity to take a walk with God as a part of the fantastic bible study Experiencing God.  I have done the study once before and the walk was probably the single most powerful experience I had during the entire study, so I was very much looking forward to a repeat performance.  How many of you know that God very rarely does repeat performances? At the point in my life when I did the first walk I only heard from God when he would shout into my spiritual ears and I had my hearing aids turned all the way up.  Now, only because the grace of God which is still at work in my life, God has taken to speaking to me in more subtle ways, so in order to find Him I still need to seek him with the same level of effort, which is all my heart. (see Jeremiah 29:13)

With great expectations I stepped out of my car at the Kennerdell Tract of Clear Creek State Forest and prayed, “God anything that happens from now until I return to the car I will attribute to you.”  As I was walking along I kept expecting to see something huge and amazing.  I repeatedly saw interesting and fun things, but not the big thing I wanted.  Eventually, I got to a path I had never seen or heard of before and followed it quite a ways down into the Dennison Run ravine.  When I had gone as far down the trail as I had time to go, something caught my eye on the ground; bending down I picked up two acorns.  I had seen acorns upon acorns on my walk so far, but these were completely different.  First of all, they were incredibly oblong for acorns.  Their shapes more closely resembled, as best I can compare them, to elongated grapes.  Their color patterns were also unique.  The first was all brown, but at one time it had a very large cap on it that prevented the color on almost half of its body from fading, resulting in a great “tan line.”  The second looked like a piece of candy corn.  It had a brown end, a large yellow band around the middle, and a red tip at the other end.  I put them both in my pocket, turned around, and finished my walk still expecting God to show up the way I expected him to.  You already know how this story ends don’t you?  You guessed it! At the end of my walk those two acorns were the grandest thing that I had encountered.

I know what you are thinking: “Jon you told us a story about acorns in the woods.  What’s the point?” You see, I almost missed the point too, until I went back and considered that trail’s name.  I had been walking down, I kid you not, Blunder Trail.  I had given everything to God that hike and He made sure I would only go so far down Blunder Trail, find what I would not have been able to find anywhere else on my hike, then bring me back out of the woods to my small group session where I would share what I had found.  God said that day, “Jon, I love you.  Remember that at one time your entire life was a walk down Blunder Trail. Now I am taking those things you only would have learned at your lowest and furthest points to bring glory to me.”  What is it that God is using from your trip down Blunder Trail to bring about His glory?