Tag: live with hope

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The Struggle is Real

“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Jesus, Matthew 11:29-30

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I was captured by the poetry in motion that was the men’s synchronized diving in the Rio 2016 Olympic games.  My personal aquatic claim to fame is the one time I dove off the 3 meter spring board in high school.  So standing on a platform 33 feet about a pool does not sound like my idea of good Sunday night.

I noticed something even smaller than the splashes made by the aerial acrobats of the pool, but possibly even more important.  The men moved in unison, but only one voice counted them off.  In the silence of the Maria Lenks Aqautic Center, you would hear 1-2-3 or uno-dos-tres or Yī-Èr-Sān.

These men moved in near perfection as if tied together by an invisible cord.  Then as if attached by an unbreakable bond twisted, flipped and vent vertical into the pool below.

Jesus said these words “my yoke is easy”.  Unless you are living in an Amish community you don’t use a yoke on the regular.  It was a farm tool that hooks up to animals such as oxen to employ the power of both animals.  These animals will be linked together until released or the yoke gets broken.  No matter the struggle with bond around the neck of the beast he will be hooked to going where the other animal goes.

All of us are “yoked” in some way.  Our life is linked up to someone or something that is leading us.  Marriages are yoking of two lives.  Friendships are forms of ways we are connected by the ties of love.  But we also get all tangled in the yokes of addictions, complicated relationships, and vices that are leading us to destruction.

So often the biblical context of a yoke (especially in the Old Testament) was one of slavery and bondage.  It was often depicted as Israel greatest struggle.  My mind runs like a movie projector as I read these words.  I see the men and woman of God with a bar around their neck that they are unable to break free from in constant struggle to undo that slavery.  Led by the master into more and more heartbreak.

I have often felt that same emotion in my life.  Yoked to the wrong thing or person.  Fighting and flailing to get free.  Being led wherever that thing or person wants to go despite my fight.  Unable to ever really get free.  Bound in a slavery of poor relationships, personal struggle, and even near depression.  I have fought and fought to get my neck free from he clamp of the yoke, only to get worn out from the struggle.

What I am discovering is that the God who spoke of Israel’s bondage is the same God that wants to set you and me free.
 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt so that you would no longer be slaves to the Egyptians; I broke the bars of your yoke and enabled you to walk with heads held high.

The yoke, the tie, the bond you are struggling with it can be broken in the power of Jesus.  Time after time the Lord spoke of his people his desire to “break the yoke”.  And at that moment you walk out of the bondage with heads held high.

God said through the prophet Isaiah in reference to the breaking of the yoke of slavery:
Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
    and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness[a] will go before you,
    and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
 Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
    you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
When the bar breaks you get your THEN…you get your healing, you have righteousness restored, God will answer you with “here I am.”

Back to the platform in Rio.  What captured my attention was the ease with which the divers moved.  Nothing they did was a struggle.  It was gliding.  Jesus said that his yoke “would be easy and burden light.”  That when we break the yoke of our bondage and take up the yoke of Christ the neck breaking bar that had existed is not there with him.

It is simply as if he says 1-2-3 and we dive in sync with him.

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The Beggar and the Son

 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. James 1:17

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It was the Christmas I was 10.  During an intense game of hide-and-go-seek with my brother, I stumbled upon a panoramic picture of the University of Illinois Memorial Stadium just like the one I had asked Santa for.  Suddenly my 10 year old mind chased.  If the picture is here, then surely there are other gifts here too.  Pretty soon I had discover nearly everything I had asked stashed in all my favorite hiding spots in my parents bedroom.

Lacking legit street smarts, I confessed my discovery to my mom.  My mom covered her tracks by telling me she was holding it for a “friend” whose son wanted it for Christmas.  I still held out hope it was mine. Come Christmas Day, my panoramic picture was nowhere to be found.  I was destroyed, devastated and upset that what I had asked for was not there.

This got me thinking about my role as son.  I have often come to my heavenly Father with requests and desires.  Not simply wants, but many time legitimate needs.  My struggle has not been making the request, but as much my heart behind the request.  More than that my belief is God’s response to my request.

Jesus said this “ If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” As son of the Heavenly Father, I have struggled with my ability to see God opened handed with his blessings.  To often I have felt more like a beggar.

The distinction is that a beggar is not looking for blessings but bumming some small scratch to get by.  A son has access to the inheritance of the father.  The blessings of a son are only limited by his asking.  And the blessing of the father is a lifelong access to all that he has.

A beggar is just looking to get by.  A son is requesting what the Father already has stored up for him.

So my praying has had to shift.  I ask not as a beggar looking to the tiny bit to get by, but as a son with access to a Father wealthy with blessings already stored up for me.

I have been a bad son with a good father.  But I am learning he just wants to me to ask and act like a son.

And by the way, the picture was mine.  Thanks mom and dad!

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Plans and Pathes

“A man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord determines his steps.”
~Proverbs 16:9

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You may not need it, but here it is:  You have permission to plan.

I am persistent wonderer of God’s plan for my life.  Page after page of prayer journals are littered with the ever pressing question of what is God’s plan for my life.  It has seemed like I have been always asking God to write the script and direct the stage scenes of my life.  And in some ways the play seems to stay unwritten.

Then I was struck by these words from King Solomon: “a man’s heart plans his way…”  This is where my pen on the page hit pause and my thinking for nearly 39 years about God’s plan for my life for stalled.  I have permission to plan, but my plan has to be consistent with his path.

While I was spending my life like Mikey on a One Eyed Willies Goonie’s Hunt in search of God’s plan for my life, always looking for another clue, God was giving me permission to plan.

Here is the thing I have learned: the planning starts in the heart.  My plan can only be in line with God’s path for my life if my heart is in place of being connected to his heart.

My 7 year old dream and plan was to play second base for the Chicago Cubs.  It was a great plan.  I planned on wearing number #7.  I planned on living in a Brownstone in Wrigleyville and walking to the ballpark.  I was planning on retiring after 17 years, 13 All-Stars seasons, 2 World Series rings and a Hall of Fame career.  That plan never happened.  In part because I couldn’t hit a curve ball and because his path for my life did not lead to second base at Wrigley.

My heart is to speak and communicate.  Amazingly enough the path I find myself on most days is steps leading that way.  My heart and plan is connect to his heart and his determines the steps of my path.

That same wise king also penned these words: “Commit to the Lord whatever you do and he will establish (or set firm) your plans”.

God grants us the permission to plan, yet he sets us on the path to that plan.  We have one more responsibility in this: complete surrender of that plan to him.  It is the highest level of trust when we take what we hold most tightly to and loosen our grip and place into his hands.

So plan…dream…design…but know his will set your feet on the path.

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Costly…

“a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume”
Matthew 26:7

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Admittedly, I don’t own much of great value.  No Picasso paintings are portrayed on my walls.  The only thing from the Ming family is the empty fried rice box in the trash.  The Italian in my wardrobe is courtesy of the Olive Garden stain on my favorite button up.  So in a lot of ways I have a hard time connecting to this woman who brought something that quite possibly was a years worth of salary.   Google informs me that the average median US salary is somewhere just north of $50,000.

Great day that’s a lot of cheddar to pour out in one place!

For some reason, I think the dad in me saw this passage in a new light. Most nights my hands find those of smaller than mind to hold while we whisper prayers into the night.  Now granted this little precious pedal allows daddy to hold her hands while we pray.  Her older brothers insist on not, but the reminder was the same for all three.  The items of greatest value in my life are those that hold my hand back.

As father it was like the God tied an ACME anvil around my heart and dropped it off cliff in an attempt to crush the RoadRunner as I read those words again.  I realized it was not about Picasso paintings, fast sports cars and even international apparel.  It was about something that our hands hold that are most valuable to us.  To me it is those three lives that share my DNA and my address.

I came face to face with the question: “am I willing to put them at the feet of Jesus?”.

I know those of you who are better believers than me this is a no brainer.  But for the fellow strugglers like me take this road with me.  This woman took what was of greatest value to her and poured it out on Jesus.  What she held tightly to she had to let go of.

This seems to throw itself in the line of fire of my dad thinking.  It is the belief that these are my kids to love and hold and squeeze and raise.  My hands are the hands that will do all this. And this woman, who I may or not have been a mom, took something of such great cost and poured it out on Jesus. And that is where the car crash of my heart happens.  You have to let them go.

Christ is asking me as a dad to lay my kids at his feet.  What I hold with such value is the cost I have to pay as a dad.  It is an act of surrender and submission.  It is position of placing what is of such great value as the cost of my heart’s condition.

What is is really a question of is the same question asked of Abraham: “are you willing to hold nothing back from me even your kids?”  God has placed three alabaster jars in my hands that are of incredible value. The only way they can be of the best use to him is to poured out into their purposes. They find that at the feet of Jesus.

So mom and dad, as difficult as it is, we must take our little jars of great worth and pay the cost of putting them at the feet of Jesus.  It will cost us everything, but return a value that is world changing!

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