Last night I went for one of my midnight skates through the town of Greensboro. It usually helps me relieve stress, focus my mind, and be quiet. All while working up a sweat, and staying in shape. Anyway I skated up to this small industrial park a couple blocks from my house. I skated around the parking lots of all these buildings, then sat and prayed for a while. After praying, I skated some more and ran across this cool little rodent. It looked like a hedgehog mixed with a guinea pig, mixed with a squirrel. I still dont know what it was but it was dumb. No, let me explain.
He was obviously lost because he was sitting in the middle of a huge parking lot, and he clearly was not a parking lot dwelling kind of rodent. We sat there and checked one another out for a minute, he wasnt moving and neither was I. Well when I moved closer… he bolted. It was really funny because You could tell he was using up all the speed and energy he could muster and he wasnt moving very fast at all. His claws slipped all over the pavement and he could hardly control the movement of his chubby body. I kind of chased him in circles for a while… sadly enough just for my sick humor. I got a kick out of whatching the thing panick… I didnt want to kill him, but I suppose he didnt know that. As I chased him, he started heading for a brick wall… and I thought… huh? hes going to corner himself. So hes running as fast as his little stubby slippery clawed legs will take him, Im trailling him trying to slow down so I dont crush his little body with my skates. When I stopped I looked up and whatched him plow directly into the brick wall. This was even more funny to me. Hysterical in fact. He sat there kind of stunned, and when I moved in again he took off. Slidding and scampering across the parking lot to another building, with me chasing shortly behind. Again he failed to stop and head first slammed into the glass door of another building. After he ran into a third wall I finally decided it was time to chase him into some grass where he would likely be alot more adapt to exsist.
The sad part is… much like our Guineahogsquirrel counterpart, We are blind. We often run into walls. There is nothing wrong with our vision. I dont believe there was anything wrong with the vision of the rodent due to the way he reacted to my movement. However over and over and over again we run into walls. Simply because we dont know what God wants. Much like the rodent didnt know I really just wanted to pet him. Gods intentions are for us to prosper, but sometimes we need to fail. God kind of puts us out in the empty dark parking lot and allows us to scamper around aimlessly, missing where he wants us to be. He leaves us there until hes done showing us how dumb we are… and then simply shows us where he wanted us to begin with.
Often times I think when we view Gods forgiveness we see it as a free pass to be complacent. Like God has forgiven everything we have ever done and everything we will ever do, and His son died for our sins, so its okay to be the way Iam. This I have realized is probably a lot like peeing on Jesus’ sandals.
It is that very reason that Christians are probably viewed as hippocrites and liars. Our Outward expression of the Gospel is so life less, so similar to a secular counterpart that there is nothing to believe in. It was not that Jesus died to forgive us… He died to set us free.
It is true that we no longer have to sin. We have been set free from sin, sent out of slavery… Jesus was abolition! Not forgiveness. Meaning one of two things. We choose to sin and we don’t care about Jesus, or anything in the bible or any part of the christian faith for that matter, which is pretty much renouncing Christ. Or we just aren’t working hard enough to excersise our freedom from sin. If Jesus only died for the sins commited before his death… theres two-thousand and seven years worth of people still held in slavery. Is that a Savior? Alot of times I hear white people talk about black people in a sense that seems like black people cant let slavery go. Like they are still held in bondage. Most christians I know, live that exact same way.
We live like everyone else we know. Stuck in a mundane, self centered, slavery kind of life. This is sad. We wonder why no one likes Christians…? Why no one believes in Jesus Christ…? Why the world isnt changing…? Its because we fail to recognize not our forgivness, but our freedom!
Has anyone ever tried to out think God? I dream alot… about all sorts of stuff, sometimes I dream so much so that I think I excersise every possbile option that could possibly happen. Then God does something that was totally opposite of anything that could have been expected and yet in some way produces the same outcome.
Im not sure if God does this to make us realize how dumb we really are… If he sits up there and says “Mike, when are you going to learn no matter how much you think about or plan something, I can do whatever I want, however I want to do it, and you cant stop me.” However His one plan always seemed to be 5946987549 times better then the 800 other plans I wasted all my time thinking up.
In some ways it discourages my dreaming… In other ways I like to think im Inspiring God. Like maybe if I just keep thinking up rediculous things, He’ll have to continue to out think me, and answer prayers and work miracles.
This is pretty random and has no real story other then trying to figure out the huge vast infinte extent of Gods realm, and how no matter what we do God is always a step ahead… We are pretty much wrecklessly spinning down a hill of ice out of control, and no matter what are plans and dreams once were… they are nothing in the eyes of our soverign God
I recently found my Ephesians commentary on my bookshelf behind some other books. I thought I lost it. Anyway the discovery led me to start studying through the book of… you guessed it! Ephesians. Which previously got put on hold because I was discouraged, for losing the one I got for Christmas
In any case I was I was studying through the first couple verses really feeling good about myself. The fact that we are Holy and blameless before Him. That we were predestined to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ… great stuff! Verse 7 then says we have redemption in Him through His blood. I thought back to times when I didnt realize I needed redemption through any blood.
As I sat there and meditated on His word one specific thought came to mind. I Remember how there were times in my past when I would see how long I could be sexually pure… not to be Holy, but to see if it was even possible! At that time I had no clue what it meant to be enslaved to sin. This being pure never lasted long at all. I sat there with redemption still running through my head, thinking about how I was so enslaved to the lusts of my heart… These really are no more then natural sex habbits to most young men, but if you understand the extent of what Im saying, then you know what Im talking about.
It was in that moment I saw the power of Gods redemption. I recognize now how enslaved I was… and how redemption is what comes of recognizing we are enslaved to sin. That the blood of Jesus Christ has set us free. Realizing through Gods redemption, and the strengthening of His spirit in us we can overcome those desires, and past habbits… and what a delight it was for God to bring me back to a day when I couldnt escape sin. To humble me, and to see the work he has truly done in my heart. To see how Ive truly grown closer…
I was jogging earlier this eveing and after I had traveled a pretty long distance I saw some grass that looked tremendously comfortable. I think I realized God wanted me to sit in this grass and just take things in. I sat there and marveled at how beautiful this grass looked, and I watched some moths flutter around the streetlight above my head, and my eyes eventually traveled up into the stars.
I laid on my back and just thought about how complexed everything really is. How I have absolutly no understanding as to why the grass was so green, how a moths wings work, or why stars even exsist… but in that moment it was all so simple. It was God. It is God. It will continue to be God, for now and forever. All that goes on around us, it belongs to God.
Life will continue to be complex, its our job to find the simplicity in complexity. To seek Gods face through his scriptures, and simply live our lives doing everything we can to become as Holy and as reightous as we can be… and not allowing the complex to take us away from the simple.
