Their Story

I think one of the most intimate things you can do with another person is to simply sit with them, listen, and share in their story, not with any other motive than to be there for them and allow them the opportunity to be open, completely vulnerable, and, for once in their life, free, as you walk hand-in-hand with them through their hopes, their fears, their dreams, and their stories of who they are and how they came to be the person sitting across from you at this point called the present.

Anything Less...

It influences and inspires us; it drives us to madness and obsession.  It can as easily lift us up as it can bring us to ruins.  Nothing moves or changes us like love.  There is no greater motivator or demotivator than love or its absence.  It is the driving force of our lives.  And yet we have no idea what it truly is, do we?  We all call it the same thing, but we all carry different definitions for it, while still expecting others to know exactly what we expect out of it.  And if we don't receive it just the way we want it, it turns from love to bitterness to hate to apathy and all shades in between.  But then again, love – real love – does not hate or have indifference.  Love does not cause madness or ruin.  It's the ill-conceived ideas, the distorted definitions, and the unfounded expectations of love that do.

We treat love like putty, moldable and conforming, in our hands, but we lose our grasp on love precisely when we try to control it.  For love is unchangeable, more consistent than gravity and more painful when we fall from it than from a twelve-foot ladder.  We forego its amazing breadth and depth for a shallow drink that quenches us for but a mere moment.  We remain blind to love when we think love overlooks when, in fact, love makes us see things more clearly – it's just that those with a truer view of love choose to love in the face of even the most odious.

Do I love it when people do me harm?  When people try to control or take advantage of me?  Or steal from me?  Do I love being belittled or marginalized or altogether forgotten?  No.  But I love those in spite of these things.  For love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends.

If your love comes with terms and conditions; if it knows not sacrifice, but only how to consume, to feed your ego and solely satiate your desires; if your love does not create the beautiful and the whimsical and instead leaves a bad taste in the mouths of those around you, is it love or is it something else?  Love never expires, never sours, never excludes.  It knows no bounds.  Anything less is not love.

The Only Way to Stop Hate

Why hold on to your hurt and pain?

Its accumulation and interest it gains

Is paid out in sums of bitterness and hate

And only serves to further fuel this sick, sick cycle.

The only way to stop this is to give away something undeserved,

Something unearned.

The only way to stop hurt is forgiveness,

And the only way to stop hate is love.

Good Friday?

It's a strange thing, our language.  Good was good until good wasn't good enough of a descriptor anymore.  It had to be cool or awesome or excellent or rad.  But then it was no longer cool to be good.  It was good to be bad, which wasn't necessarily the same thing when someone called you bad when they meant good.  So bad was good and good was bad until some time further when it wasn't so cool to call someone bad when they meant good anymore.

Good is good again, I think, and I think it's also good to be good once more, but when we call this particular Friday good, I don't think people really understand why it was so good.  It wasn't because we made it good.  And it's not good just because we have the day off (well, most of you probably do).  We didn't do anything on that particular day to make it good.  In fact, we did something bad, something really, really bad.  What mainly characterizes Good Friday is the death of someone important, someone good, someone who didn't deserve to die but did.  In our book, it isn't good when someone innocent is murdered unjustly.  And to die by our hands and by our sins makes it even worse.  But can bad once again be good for our case here?

Things in the beginning were intended to be good.  Creation was good, and with man at the pinnacle of creation, it was said to be very good.  But good wasn't good enough; man wanted to define good in his own terms.  And that's when things went bad.  The problem with us defining good is that we barely know what good is supposed to entail.  Our perspective is limited to say the least, and we see good in very limited terms – it's usually understood as what's good for me and what's good for me in the here and now, which is, in fact, bad because we don't take into account others as well as the hereafter.  So our pain and suffering, which we oftentimes blame God for, they are just byproducts of us trying to create good for ourselves (which usually comes at the expense of others and our future).  How can a God who allows this be considered good?  Well for one, if He didn't, we wouldn't exist today.  Us existing today is a good thing, for us at least.  And God allowing us to bring about good, to redeem what was good is especially good.

God knows good.  And He knew that He had to communicate with us good on our level; we needed to know good in our vernacular.  That's why He chose a people – to reflect His good.  That's why He came as Jesus through that group of people – to help us to redefine our lives.  And that's why He willfully made the sacrifice He did – to redeem what was once good.  Good Friday is only good when we look at it with new eyes and new perspectives, when we look at it with new understandings and new definitions, when we see the visible and invisible, when we look at past, present, and future, encompassing all, not just our small bubble we live in, but the whole wide world around us.

What we must come to understand is that our definitions are severely lacking.  We think bad is good; we think lust is love; and we think mere existence is life.  If we want to know good, know love, and know life, God has to be a part of our vocabulary.

Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday marks the start of Jesus' final week in Jerusalem, and of a journey that every Christian must go through as they encounter Christ Jesus.  From our initial celebration of Him coming into our lives, to the sudden and unexpected death of our own idea and perception of who we thought He would be for us and what we thought He would do for us, to the life, meaning, and purpose He brings anew to us as we finally truly come face-to-face with who He really is:  we must come all the way through this journey, past the pomp and circumstance and all of its religious trappings and into a real relationship with the One and Only, else we deceive ourselves and others with an incomplete picture of the Messiah.  Following anything less is following in futility a false idol.  If you have walked the "Christian" experience and new life hasn't been found in Jesus, you have yet to encounter Christ face-to-face.

Not Christianity, But Christ is the Answer

Have you tried Christianity and thought it wasn't the answer?  Did you once go to church and feel unchanged by your experience there?  Are you one of the many who have turned away from the faith because of a Christian's hate speech and hypocrisy?

The all too important, but often overlooked fact is that not Christianity, but Christ is the answer.  Christianity isn't supposed to change you, Christ is.  Christianity is a religion, a system of life and belief that consists primarily of hurt and broken-down people who are earnestly trying their best to seek after Christ and bring all people under Him in order to advance His kingdom and bring honor and glory to the Lord and Savior of all creation.  They are imperfect as are you.  They make mistakes as do you.  And there are some very well meaning people (and also some not) in Christianity that do and say some very wrong things, as there are some outside of the faith as well.  Just because someone labels themselves as a Christian, it doesn't mean that they are the best representative of the Christian church, or of Jesus Christ Himself for that matter.

Do not fault Christ for His followers.  Do not let His people dissuade you from the truth.  If I or anyone else is not smart enough or loving enough or good enough to convince you that Jesus Christ is the answer, it doesn't stop the truth from being true.  And the altogether, wholly complete, all things considered, matter of fact, absolute truth is that you still need Jesus in your life and that a life apart from Christ isn't life at all but entirely meaningless.  It isn't enough to attend a church.  It isn't enough to be a better person and do good things.  It isn't enough to say a prayer to accept Jesus into your heart.  If your Christian experience or experience with a Christian wasn't life giving, then you have yet to encounter Christ.  And I hope and pray that you will have that encounter... soon.

Love Began

For much of my life I used to think that life begins when love begins, but, as I think about it now, love began well before life ever did.

Love Unfounded

Alone you lie,
Whether next to someone or not.
For something sits at the pit of your stomach.
A hunger.
 Unsatiated, unsatisfied, unfulfilled
By what you thought was love,
What you thought was real.
But it was not –
Or it doesn't seem to be,
Not anymore at least.
How strange it all seems
As it worked out so well
Ten thousand times on screen.
And a million songs about it
Framed your every feeling so well,
They all could've been about you.

But where did it all go wrong?
Where is your happy end?
Talk with the troubadour,
Sit with the storyteller,
And you'll likely be confounded
By a love unfounded.
Like getting a grasp of unsolid ground,
Love cannot be summarized in three minutes or less,
Nor can the real deal be caught on a 90-minute reel.
And yet they still try.
And still we buy into their lies.
We're formed by misinformation,
By hackneyed hacks of half truths
Who haven't their story straight.

There's something to it, though,
And that's why we still listen,
That's why we continue to tune in,
That's why we're willing to believe
In something we cannot see,
Nor grasp.
We can get on one's case
For believing in the ethereal,
But that's exactly what we do with love.
But what else are we to believe in 
In this crazy, broken world we live in
But in love?
It keeps us up at night,
But powers us through our days.
It's the only thing worth living and dying for –
But we don't even know the half of it.
And that's why we can never get enough of it.

We only know how it makes us feel
And that we cannot go on without feeling it –
And never do we go beyond that.
So we do what we do best
With such a precious commodity.
We consume it and control it,
We horde it and we whore it
Until we bleed our better halves dry of it.
But it simply is never enough
Simply because of this one reason:
We're having a one-sided affair with love.
Our lives have been based
On an incomplete definition
Off of an idea
Whose thought was never thought all the way through.
We've only been living from a fraction of our souls,
A portion of our true potential.
So how can we know the real potency of love
When we limit our understanding of life?

It'll never be enough to put love in a box
And tie a nice bow on it.
Or to frame it up for you and your friends
To look at and admire.
The only way we'll ever be whole
Is to be wholly open.
And the only way we'll understand love
To its fullest extent
Is to be open to the one who first loved.
What is love to the author and creator of love?
The answer may surprise you.
Love truly is the most splendid splendor
Which needs no window dressing
And cannot be contained.
Not by a box.
Not by a frame.
Not even by life itself.
So why do we try to?

Why do we strain to contain it
And see it not for what it is
But what we want it to be?
The most appealing presentation
Isn't always the most accurate representation.
Nor is it the best.
Love actually may be where you left it a while ago
Lost, abandoned, and forgotten
Because of a misunderstanding
Of something you were not willing to understand.
Where truth and understanding reside,
There, love will be.
Don't manipulate and murder
For a knockoff of the real thing.
Don't pay with blood, sweat, and tears
For what is cheap plastic
When true love is already a free gift
Whose price has been paid
By the one who gives it away unconditionally.
And its rewards can be redeemed only
When you love in return.