Burning Ones

Hello everyone,

I figured I’d post a quick little entry in regards to what I’m thinking about at the moment. I’ve been struggling with the concept of rejoicing in my sufferings. Please understand that I know that what I go through is not even worth comparing with the suffering that the persecuted Church goes through on a daily basis around the world. I understand and attempt to appreciate the tremendous blessing of living in a country where I am free to express my faith without fear of much more than people laughing at me. But, in fact, that is kind of what my current thoughts have been about…

I know that I am to rejoice in my sufferings knowing that they will in the end produce endurance, character, and non-shame producing hope. However, currently, I find that I am suffering more because of my own shortcomings than because I am being persecuted by some outside force. I quite simply have a quiet and ever-present understanding that I am not living up to the standard that my savior set when he came to this earth. This causes me great consternation and pain.

Don’t misunderstand me. I do not believe that salvation comes by works or any such hogwash as that. I understand that salvation comes by faith in Jesus alone, and that I am saved by grace through said faith resting solely on the unbelievable and unrelenting mercies of Father God. This is not an issue of salvation (or that moment when I was made to realize that God had chosen me to be a part of his family, or my eternal security, etc. etc.), this is an issue of what I do now that I understand that God has blessed in that incomprehensible way and called me his own. How am I living up to that call?

Well, the answer is an undying, “NO!” Of course I am not. However, there are times when I feel that I have allowed God a little deeper and he has taken over a little more and I realize that I’m obeying him a little easier and it brings my heart solace that I am not causing him to work something together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose (in other words, me). You see, I always want to be in the will of God because I know that when I’m walking in his will I’m actually participating in causing all things to work together for the good. If I’m not walking in the perfect will of God, then I’m not helping, but instead, I am creating more of a need for God to work things out. This brings me a tremendous amount of depression; of suffering.

However, I don’t think that this is the kind of suffering that is supposed to bring me joy. I don’t know… My own short comings are just that: short comings. I should desire to stamp them out, right? I should hate them with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength as much as I should love the Lord my god with all of the same things. How can I rejoice when I know that I am failing to live up to the calling with which God called me?

Anyway, this was just a little thought ramble. I don’t really know where it’s going yet. Any thoughts, feel free to leave a comment or two. I’d love to get a little discussion going.

It seems to have been a rough week for me. I’ve been struggling to focus and get to sleep on time and all that stuff and it’s just been ridiculous. Lauren’s Graduation was a ton of fun but it certainly ate up a ton of time. However, it was still really awesome to see my cousins and aunt and uncle and grandad and other uncle and hang out with Jesse (for an extended period of time… He’s such an awesome guy! I’m so happy for Katie!) and my sisters and my dad (I missed my mom but I think she had a good weekend…). Anyway, it was just a ton of time.

Ever since then I just have not been able to focus at all. I haven’t really done any “work”, per-say. I’ve just been kind of futzing around. It’s really kind of depressing.

However, God has been good to me, as he relentlessly is. I’m so unworthy of his kindness and yet time and time again he just meets me in my quiet times with him and tells me how much he loves me and how much he approves of me and I’m talking I’m a wicked, sinful, ungrateful, no good, poor, pitiable, blind, and naked guy and he just loves on me all day long. It’s unreal.

So, that being said, no cool theological points this week. I’ve been struggling with God because I feel like I’m barely willing to do a thing with him, so I’m just trusting in his grace at the moment. There’s no safer place to be.

Well, slowly slowly this site is coming up to being ready for full deployment. The Latest development is that I got a working contacts page up on this site. Hopefully now people will be able to come to this site and do more than just comment on a blog entry. Now you can actually e-mail us!

Well, I’m told that the first time you get spammed on your blog, it means that you’ve started your rise to fame. So, I suppose me and Jess are on our way!

Yeah… right :P

The recent happenings…

Well, it feels like it has been a long week, but I’m not really sure why. I’m actually trying to think of what I even did over the past week and I can’t really think of much. I’ve redone the office (as pictured) and I think it’s pretty sweet. It’s really quite amazing what the extra screen real estate let’s you do. Right now, I’m using Write Room to write my blog entry and I’ve got Terminal open with iChat and iTunes on the screen right next to me. It would be nice if the big LCD display that I’m using didn’t have a huge mark on it, but that’s ok. It’s better than being stuck at 1280×960 all the time.

I finally finished the first discourse of The Existence and Attributes of God by Stephen Charnock, which is awesome and amazing. We organized the room, which was a complete and total disaster and it took us at least 2 or 3 days to complete because we just could never push all the way through it. I did some more biking, which is super enjoyable and energy conscientious. My bike is a bit of a disaster though, as it seems that almost every other ride something else breaks. This last ride my gear cable for the rear drive train decided that it was time to snap, so I had to get that replaced today which cost me a whopping 35 bucks. No fun!

My older sister now officially has a boyfriend!!! WOW!!! I’m so excited for her. Jesse seems like a really great guy and I’m just really happy for both of them. Katie has been wanting to really settle down (not that she was living a wild life before, but she just hasn’t really ever had a boyfriend that actually seemed like he would be a God given candidate for marriage) for a while now and I think that she is going to have a real testimony of God bringing 2 people together without much effort on either one of their part. I think that is how it should be. Eve was brought to Adam by God. It seems kind of destructive whenever we attempt to ‘hook ourselves up’ with each other.

Also, today I had a band practice! It was pretty insane and awesome and a great deal of fun. It’s been forever since I was in a pre-written band situation and it’s been a very long time since I was playing the bass (as I have only been playing the guitar lately) and it’s been an even longer time since I was playing any sort of hard music. Needless to say, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I showed up and my great friend Alan Popoli said, ‘OK, here’s your bass. Let’s start teaching you the song.’ So off we went. I think that even though I felt like I was hanging on by the seat of my pants most of the time, by the end of the night (we might have practiced for an hour, if that) I was actually doing pretty good. The music was awesome nonetheless. It kind of reminded me of very early Zao stuff (i.e. all else failed), which I love. Alan was alternating between singing and playing the guitar (at this point he couldn’t do both at the same time to well. I don’t blame, he was playing ridiculously complicated stuff as far as I’m concerned.), and his two buddies (who I hope are now my two buddies) Andrew (Guitar) and Nick (Drums) (hope I’ve gotten there names right, I’m horrible at that) were just rockin out. It’ll be a long time before I can start to move again (I can barely play bass :) ) but I think this could really be awesome. We’ll see where it goes.

So, like I said, it doesn’t feel like we did a whole lot this past week, but I’m exhausted nonetheless. However, I’m gonna try to get on to the meat of the post now.

Current Meditations

Recently, I’ve been being tag-teamed by two books that have really been rocking my world (not including The Book, which is always in the process of rocking my world). Probably about 6 or 7 months ago I was really feeling convicted that I was wasting my time with a lot of reading that I was doing. The fact is that most books that are out today that are ‘must reads’ will not be around in 100 years. It’s just how it is. Most of the authors that we think are really important today will have no lasting impact. History proves this. So, as Leonard Ravenhill, I believe, said (allow me to very loosely paraphrase), “Please don’t buy any book until it’s author is dead and buried and some measure of his or her life has been taken. Otherwise, you’re probably just going to be wasting your time.” I set out to fill my heart and mind with what has fed Christians for the past centuries, not the past year. I appreciate current ministries (I’m even fed very often by one called IHOP-KC as well as others), it’s just that stock has not been taken of their effects. There are huge numbers of books out there that I have never touched that are already proven. I figure that I should start there…

I went out and bought a bunch of Christian Classics; books such as The Imitation of Christ, The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross, The Interior Castle by Saint Teresa of Avila, Finney’s Systematic Theology, Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer. I’ve basically been working my way through them ever since, and man do they deserve to be called classics. In regards to the Bible I’ve been studying Jesus (specifically the book of John); in regards to books I’ve been studying God. The last time I was up at a OneThing Leadership Summit, Dwayne recommended a few different books but the only one I really felt lead to check into was The Existence and Attributes of God. You know how it is when you see something and you feel a little nudge towards it in your spirit from God. Anyway, I went to the book store and gave it a quick once over and decided immediately that I should buy it. It’s a really huge book and it’s very dense so it takes a lot of effort to read (as most good books do) but I’ve found every page to be totally worth it. I’m going to attempt to give you a little taste of Discourse Number 1 in the following few paragraphs and then we’ll sign off.

The Existence and Attributes of God - Discourse Numero Uno

As I said previously, The Existence and Attributes of God is a big long book dedicated to the long and loving meditation upon one subject, God. It contains 9 discourses (basically huge chapters) that are all about God. Something that the IHOPers have been saying lately is that the most neglected topic in the Christian religion is God. No one preaches on God. And yet he is the center of our faith. Everything is from him and to him and by him, and yet we do not study him, and we do not think about him, and we do not meditate upon him. I’m fully convicted by this statement. I want to get to know God. Let us proceed then

Discourse Number 1 is entitled ‘On The Existence of God’ and it centers around a discussion of the abject foolishness of not believing in a God (or higher power, or deity, or something supernatural). Charnock does not yet even really get in to whether or not we should study and behold and meditate upon the Christian God, he only proceeds in great detail to slam the atheist. I’ll list some quotes below.

For the first, every atheist is a grand fool… It is a folly; for though God be so inaccessible that we cannot know him perfectly, yet he is so much in the light, that we cannot be totally ignorant of him; as he cannot be comprehended in his essence, he cannot be unknown in his existence; it is as easy by reason to understand that he is, as it is difficult to know what he is.

The notices of God are as intelligible to us by reason, as any object in the world; he is written in every letter.

It hath been universally assented to by the judgments and practices of all nations in the world… The notion of the existence of a Deity was the same in all, Indians as well as Britons, Americans as well as Jews…’Tis so twisted with reason that a man cannot be accounted rational, unless he own an object of religion; therefore he that understands not this, renounceth his humanity when he renounceth a Divinity… It hath been owned by the wise and ignorant, by the learned and stupid, by those who had no other guide but the dimmest light of nature, as well as those whose candles were snuffed by a more polite education, and that without any solemn debate and contention.

There’s plenty more where that comes from, but I don’t even have time to get into it. At a later date I will publish some more thoughts on this book but for now I’ll just give you the broad strokes. Besides being a slam of the atheist, the first discourse serves as a meditation on the simple fact that God is, and the profound joy that simple fact should bring to us. I think that the chief thing that I have brought away from this so far is that I have become jaded in my education. This is something that Tozer and Charnock have done particulary well in their tag-teaming of me. Both of them, though they seem to be extremely intelligent men, have no fear of taking the humble road and admitting that we as humans know next to nothing.

Through my education I have allowed something as ridiculous and incomprehensible as a seed growing from germ to tree to pass over me as if it were something I could account for in my limited reasoning. I’ve been convicted anew that Science at its best is nothing but a highly detailed method of describing what we can see. We can truly account for nothing. We cannot answer any question that goes beyond “how would you describe what you are seeing?”. How does the tree grow? We can go as far as describing the little atoms interacting with each other but why do the little atoms work together? We can observe the things that happen most often and call them laws but why do the laws exist and what makes them constant? Just because we can see what happens does not mean we understand what is happening. It is man at his most arrogant when we look at the vast complexity of the world in which we live and say that we understand what is going on. It is evidence of the vastly depraved nature of the human race that we look at our universe and declare that chance did it. That declaration is rooted in the fact that we desperately want to be our own master. We desperately want to deny God.

I might say that Charnock’s main point in Discourse 1 is that belief in the existence of a God is NOT just an issue of faith. Belief in the Christian God is and can only come to us via revelation, but belief in a God that is some how controlling things providentially and keeping the universe in order becomes more and more obvious the more you think about the complexity of the world. I’ll attempt to quote Thomas Carlyle via Tozer here:

Thomas Carlyle, following Plato, pictures a man, a deep pagan thinker, who had grown to maturity in some hidden cave and is brought out suddenly to see the sun rise. ‘What would his wonder be,’ exclaims Carlyle, ‘his rapt astonishment at the sight we daily witness with indifference! With the free, open sense of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole heart would be kindled by that sight… This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas; that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain; what is it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all.’

How different are we who have grown used to it, who have become jaded with a satiety of wonder. ‘ It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty,’ says Carlyle, ‘it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our want of insight. It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it… We call that fire of the black thundercloud ‘electricity,’ and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.’

With that thought, I’ll close out for tonight and go have a wonderful sleep with my wife.

I love you guys!

Well, I just discovered that users of Camino are presented with a horrifyingly wacked out site. As much as web standards are supposed to help, it’s almost too frustrating to develop a site that you know is standards compliant and does everything the way it’s supposed to, but won’t display right in all browsers. Frankly, I’m kind of sick of the whole browser wars thing…

So, if you’re using Camino, accept my humble apologies for overlooking you up until this point. I will begin to research why the browser will not display the site as it should.

P.S. there’s no update yet on why IE 7 won’t display the site correctly, nor have I had occasion to check whether it still doesn’t, I’ll get to that too at some point.

P.P.S. If anyone reading this blog knows the answer to the question, feel free to leave it here in a comment. I would be uber-grateful!

WOOOOOOOOO!!!

I’m definitely going to center my post tomorrow around this book. It’s been an incredible read so far. Very challenging and very uplifting. I hope to convey the message of Discourse #1 concisely and easily, but it’s going to take a lot of work. However, despite that, get your hopes up!

So I’m a day late, but that’s ok :-)

I was listening to a teaching on the Onething podcast from Mike Bickle about getting a burning heart (I was upset God at the time and just wanted to zone out with an audio, but God’s very good to me and I know it wasn’t just me, hehe). Anyway, to sum up the message Bickle talked about Ephesians 5:18-19 and proposed/stated singing the Scriptures as the best way to get a burning heart. Now, even in my disobedience, I will always admit that there’s nothing more I want than a total on-fire heart for God where He is my everything and my everything is in Him. So I tried it and I immediately got really tired and this image flashed in my head of a truck-load of these men in black shirts, pants, and sunglasses. I thought it was a little odd because it wasn’t a scene from a movie or anything and I had never seen it before. But I brushed it off because I was falling into that sleep-awake state as I was singing the Scriptures and it was probably some random image my brain produced (which is such a lie). But I realize now that God was trying to warn me that He had brought me into something new and the devil was bringing hell (demons) to my door.

So the passed couple of days have been a hell ride! Ugh, it’s been awful. I really felt God leading me to take Monday night prayer off and just spending the time with him and I feel SOO much better, but I was like uber attacked with all these lies that I’ve totally been buying into. And now that I think about my dreams a few weeks ago were warning me of this, but of course you don’t think of that when you feel like you’re unloved, making no progress, abandoned, and just an annoyance to God. So I spent a good deal of my time ignoring God, crying all day, complaining to Timmy, and staying away from getting Scripture into me because it just got too hard. So I just really got to get more truth into me over and over and over again until it comes out of my ears. And my whole pride issue wasn’t helping this at all.

Yesterday was our first anniversary :-) no, we didn’t do the whole “take the cake out of the freezer” thing because:

1. We’re not really into the whole “traditions”… we’d rather make our own.
2. We’re on a no meats-and-sweets fast.
3. Timmy doesn’t like cake.
4. We didn’t have a cake at our wedding, we had a choclate fondue fountain (which is highly recommendable). But had we had a cake the 1-3 would still apply.

Anyway! We spent the night hanging out (we went to one of our favorite Mexican restaurants) with Tim’s older sister and her new boyfriend, Jesse (who we are VERY excited about and I end up praying for them a lot because my mind tends to get distracted when singing/praying Scripture and then I think of them and how happy I am for Katie and so I’m like “Oh, God! btw!” hehe.

Saturday was Alex and Jaclyn’s wedding!!!!!!! It’s was fantastic and I am SOO happy for them. I am actually surprised at how happy I am for them… I didn’t expect to feel like this. Maybe it’s a small taste of what John the Baptist felt when his “joy was full” when the Christ, who he had spent his life preparing for, came. Let’s hope :-). Jaclyn looked absolutely radiant (as she should- Alex is a great guy to marry). And I LOVE this picture of Alex!I cried a lot… but I also cried a lot because they’re leaving in like a month for Kansas City for like three-four years. They actually don’t know how upset I am about it but that’s ok (I’m not one to really show emotions). They’re in Disney World right now (so I’m also kind of jealous because I’d love to go on a vacation, hehe). The whole day was just a huge array of emotions, but when it’s all said and done I’m super happy for them and hope they’re doing fantastic.

Photos complimentary of Michelle Fitt, who doesn’t really know I stole them :-).

I’m still really excited about the Call. We’ve been listening to Lou Engle’s message a few times a week (which will get you pumped up no matter what). The 40 day fast is going good. I’ve decided I should probably start working out so I’m going to commit to doing that Mondays and Thursdays and I am REALLY sore. I did a Billy Banks Tae Bo video and it just killed me. You’re supposed to be sore the next morning, and I was sore a few hours after the video.. I can’t imagine what my arms are going to be like tomorrow morning.

So YAY! God loves me.

And here’s a picture of us Vishers (left to right: Tim, Me, Christina, Daddy-Don, Katie).

Well, I’m giving serious consideration to completely redesigning (save for the color scheme) the site, because as I look at how I can incorporate the blog better into the main site, I’m realizing that the way it’s set up (specifically where the navigation section is) isn’t very conducive to the inclusion of the blog.

Not totally sure what I’m going to do about this, but I think that the first step would probably be to move to a horizontal nav bar. The other problem at the moment is that in the source, the navigation section does not appear until after the main content, which is a standards oriented design no-no.

We’ll see where this goes…

Don’t get me wrong. I understand that the blog as of yet is not really integrated into the rest of the site. But, compared to what it was before… Well, you get the picture. At least the look and feel is slightly more integrated and the comments don’t look terrible.

That’s enough for tonight, I’m tired and I have a wedding tomorrow. YEEEEEEEEEEEEE HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAW!