Tag Archives: purpose

Shadow-Boxing

A friend posted a cartoon that caught my eye. The character looked over a list of resolutions and expressed frustration, knowing this year’s efforts – like so many others – were doomed to failure. Then he changed the list to negative versions. “Get fat. Become weak. Watch more TV.” That kind of thing.

The last scene has his son looking at the list, while he lifts weights and sweats in exertion. His son says, “You’re off to a horrible start on these, Dad.” And he replies, “I know.”

I like that. 

I thought about 2015 and what I accomplished:

  • published three books available on Amazon and CreateSpace
  • regained an additional aircrew qualification in the military
  • Deployed to the Middle East for three months 
  • flew 89 sorties in the fiscal year (October – October) — roughly 1 every 4 days
  • beat out the rest of my coworkers on flights (one friend made it to 85… the next highest had 20 less than us)
  • started a family devotion time with my wife and kids
  • knocked out 5 separate debts
  • crawled out of the unfit mess I’d gotten myself into
  • started a walk-to-run program after not running for about five years
  • reached my lowest weight in about 10 years
  • used my talents in professional settings – performing vocals for the Japanese and American anthems for a co-worker’s retirement and playing Christmas tunes for social hour at our squadron holiday party
  • Played and sang for the chapel while deployed

All that said, I know “the rest of the story.”

  • I struggled for years to put those books together and can’t shake the feeling they could’ve been better
  • I’ve dropped several balls at work that now need to be addressed
  • I’ve let my relationships with my wife and kids grow stale or routine
  • I’ve done the same with my faith
  • I continue to make terrible spending decisions based on convenience, impatience, and selfishness
  • We’ve added or increased a couple debts while eliminating others
  • I crawled back into the unfit mess by ignoring fitness while focusing on other things
  • I’ve gained back most of the weight I lost
  • I’m still not doing anything on a regular basis with the talents I possess.

So this year, I’m not making empty promises to myself about what I will or won’t do. Like the comic, my list is full of anti-resolutions–the bad answers to questions I ask myself whenever I consider what 2016 holds. 

And I took a cue from a friend who recently posted a verse she chose for the year. My selection speaks to my frustration and my desire for better answers.

“Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.”

‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭9:24-27‬ ‭ESV‬‬

http://bible.com/59/1co.9.24-27.esv

I look forward to what this year holds… not because I expect some “new me” to appear. I just want to find the one I know already exists deep down.

Echoes part 1

WattPad is running a contest / writing challenge for 2015. The goal is to write 10,000 words of a story within 30 days–originally within the month of August, but they’ve extended the deadline to September 30th to allow for those who may have started late. 

After NaNoWriMo last year, 10K seems like nothing!

I’ve posted the first chapter of my Echoes story to the site. I plan to have some fun exploring the world inside Hope’s head, and the interplay between Forsephore and her soon-to-be-revealed nemesis. I’ve already got the climactic confrontation sorted out in my head, more or less… but I feel there’s a lot of winding paths along the way that I can explore.

Care to join me? Check out Echoes

Here’s a glimpse of Hope and the host of Echoes that exist within her.

   

Considering Why

A blog I follow on writing posted this lovely YouTube video of my favorite author, Brandon Sanderson:

His personal story is compelling to me on several levels.

I’ve said elsewhere on this site that it feels like I do a number of things at the “karaoke” level — well enough that people are impressed, but only when it’s free. Writing is one such endeavor.

Songwriting for Christian worship services is another. I have over a hundred songs inspired by sermons and Scripture over the last seventeen years. Some have been used in church services for a season, many have been files taking up space on a hard drive. Similarly, I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words, including two complete novel manuscripts and several short stories. But most of those are (for now) using up cloud storage space and nothing more.

Positive feedback from alpha readers is helpful. But let’s be honest; these are my friends and acquaintances over the years. They’re willing to pick up and read a novel because we already have a connection. I won’t be so lucky with your average reader browsing through a pile of self-published e-books on Amazon.

A friend of mine sent me this picture, which I took as much needed encouragement:  

So… why write? Am I willing to put forth the effort to craft the seven or eight novels bouncing in my head at present, knowing they may do nothing more than collect dust and entertain my kids? Am I willing to pen songs for personal worship knowing they might never be played in a public setting? Am I willing to throw a handful of words onto this webpage and click “Publish” knowing I might never have a bunch of Likes or hits?

Yes. I hope you are too.

Favor Vs Trust

I saw this on my FB feed, posted by a friend who often shares various positive affirmations from a number of Christian ministers:

Maybe this is true. But it shouldn't be expected or assumed in every situation.
Maybe this is true. But it shouldn’t be expected or assumed in every situation.

The Scripture reference provided is to the passage in Genesis where Joseph begins his painful journey being sold into slavery in Egypt. Through a variety of divine interventions and up-and-down circumstances, Joseph experiences blessings and pain until he ends up second only to Pharaoh in the kingdom.

With the benefit of hindsight, Joseph is able to tell his brothers that what they meant for evil, God meant for good, in order to save his family and the future nation.

Sitting in the pit and sitting in prison (just like sitting in Potiphar’s house and in the palace of Pharaoh), Joseph doesn’t know all that. He might have hope, based on God’s promises when he was young. He might have faith that God’s going to do something. But he has no certainty either way.

Yet Joseph remains faithful, for he trusts that God is also faithful.

When I read the status above, about God’s favor, I am grieved and distressed by the thought that we have missed the point.

We have a great hope that “God will work all things together for good for them that love Him and are called according to His purpose” (Rom 8:28). That may give us a warm fuzzy that something good in the future will come out of our present pain.

But we’re called not to count on the favor of God to rescue us. We’re called to live out of trust in God, regardless.

Consider Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Daniel 3. It’s a great story of how God protected His children in the midst of persecution. It would go very well with the status quoted above. Favor is going into the furnace’s flames, and coming out proclaiming His name. Or something like that.

But there are many Christians, so very many, who suffer and die and never see the manifestation of God’s favor. We may not see a Christian promoted to second-in-command of all of North Korea, or a trio of believers standing up unharmed by the AK-47s of ISIS in Iraq. We might not see God promote us to a position of our dreams or use us to display His power to an entire nation or community.

Do we enjoy His favor any less? Do we remain any less faithful?

Is favor the focus? Was favor ever Joseph’s focus?

I don’t think so. In pit or in palace, in fire or fame, as Christians our eyes must be fixed not on God’s immediate deliverance but on His eternal faithfulness.

17 If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. 18 But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”
Daniel 3:17-18 NIV

Author Blog Hop

At the start of April, Angela D. Meyer posted my bio and picture on her blog as part of a “blog hop” where writers trade info to increase exposure.

Angela has been a core part of Omaha WordSowers since I joined two years ago. She’s part of the fantastic critique group (where I’m getting the ideas I’m using for this year’s A to Z blog challenge on Elements of Critique). My wife and I attended her book release party, when Where Hope Starts first went on sale. And I had the privilege of being one of her readers for her exciting second book’s manuscript. Though publishing her first book and working on the second have forced her to reduce involvement in the writer’s group, Angela still helps run some of the WordSowers social media.

20140409-163755.jpg

Here’s her information, in her own words.

Angela D. Meyer lives in Omaha, NE with her husband of more than 22 years. She homeschools their daughter and recently graduated their son who is now a Marine. She has taught Bible class for over 35 years and served for almost three years on the leadership team of her local Christian writers group. She loves God, her family, the ocean, good stories, connecting with friends, taking pictures, quiet evenings and a good laugh. Someday she wants to ride in a hot air balloon and vacation by the sea. Her first novel, Where Hope Starts, shares the story of God’s redemption in the middle of a crumbling marriage.

The blog hop also came with four questions. These are my answers, not Angela’s.

1. What am I working on?
A fantasy novel called Refraction. You can see chapter 1 here.

Lyllithe Aulistane is the adopted daughter of her town’s senior religious leader, the Eldest of the Abbey. She’s also a Ghostskin – a pale half-breed of human and air elemental. Her Gracemark and training with the Abbey call her toward a pacifistic life of ministry and healing as a Devoted. Her heritage and passion drive her toward adventure, using the power of the elements to prevent harm instead of mending the wounded. And her curiosity leads her toward an unknown source of power that beckons even as it repulses her.
While she struggles to choose her path, she meets resistance at every turn. The Abbey rejects those deemed impure, and the Arcanists demand intense discipline. Though Lyllithe finds allies along the way, there are many more who seek her life. From the lowest highwayman to the highest political levels in the capital city of Aulivar, Lyllithe and her friends become valuable pawns in a game they cannot see.
But when the stakes rise to include the lives of an entire city, Lyllithe can’t afford to make a wrong move.
“From daybreak ’til the sun goes down, Devoted shall I be.”
Devoted, yes… but to what?

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I’m writing for the mainstream audience, not the Christian market. However, I am employing Christian concepts behind the magic systems, political/cultural/religious organizations, and overall world theme. Essentially I’m aiming to write a fantasy novel that fits a Christian worldview without preaching to its audience.

3. Why do I write what I do?
I love communication. It’s my job in the Air Force, but it’s also a hobby. The idea that a writer can create a scene and somehow transfer that thought near-directly into the mind of a reader is powerful stuff. Being a Christian, I of course hope to communicate some measure of biblical truth in what I write. But saying that carries so much baggage in today’s Western society, where all sorts of cultural and political issues are too polarized for any meaningful dialogue. I have good friends “on both sides of the aisle” between Democrats and Republicans, Christians and atheists, heterosexuals and homosexuals, rationalists and idealists. I don’t want to add to that strife we see all around us. I’d rather explore some of the struggles and common experiences we can all relate to, with a heaping spoonful of grace mixed in.

4. How does my writing process work?
For a book, I need to outline. I have to map out the start, some milestones on the way, and a destination. I’ll plot out the various conflicts I see at the start, and jot down ideas for how to build on those. I write journals or practice scenes with characters until I get a good voice for them in my head.
Then I go chapter by chapter, scene by scene, until the work is done (or more likely until I see large-scale problems with the whole project, and start over, making corrections along the way).
This question is better for a writer known for finishing their projects, I think.

And now’s the part where I should have authors with whom I coordinated further hops. But I’m in the process of moving overseas, so I have not done my due diligence in getting other bloggers signed up. So unfortunately, my post is a blog flop, and this particular bit of hopping stops here.

Even so, I still wanted to give Angela’s work the attention it’s due.

God's Gifts Make a Way

This is the third of five “God Leads” devotionals based on my experiences as a young Christian man in the military.

GOD MAKES A WAY FOR HIS GIFTS IN US

…According to your faith be it unto you. (Matthew 9:29, KJV)

“He’s so amazing,” I said. “I wish I could play and sing like him.”
Friends from church invited the singles over for spaghetti. While we ate, we watched a video of a musical minister leading worship from a piano. I started playing with our church worship team using one of this singer’s most popular songs.
“His lyrics minister so well,” I said. “They speak right to people’s needs.”
Our church bass player agreed with me.
The host looked us both in the eye. “I see God doing the same thing in you two.”
The bass player said what was on my mind. “Oh, no, not me. I couldn’t do that.”
The host stood up and declared, “Be it unto you according to your faith.”
I was shocked, frozen to my seat.
“Little faith, you reap little,” he continued. “Big faith, you reap big.”
The words echoed in my thoughts for an hour. I drove back to church long before the evening service and sat down at the piano.
“God, if that’s really something You’ll do, then… have Your way.”
I started playing. I chose a few chords, thought of some words, and sang. In two hours, I wrote four songs.
Since then, I started hearing music in my pastor’s sermons. I wrote over one hundred songs. We translated one into Japanese, and several became regular tunes at our church. I believed God, and He answered.
But I am also haunted by one thought, and I hope I’m wrong:
I never saw the bass player write any songs.

Application: Following God’s lead means taking chances and trusting Him for results.

The Mirror

For a Monday Morning Snack, here’s a short piece about mercy and judgment.

The Mirror

I looked out the window at the world, angry at all the injustice.

Then I looked in the mirror, ashamed at all of my own.

I looked out the window at two men in love, and my religious beliefs rose in offense.

I looked in the mirror, saw how little I love, and I was humbled.

Outside I saw greed ignore need and I was enraged.

Inside, I saw my own selfishness, and I was appalled.

I looked out the window at passion paraded and praised, and I stood in judgment.

I looked in the mirror at my lust and desires, and I cried for mercy.

I looked out and saw people reject God’s word, and I thought them foolish.

Then I saw my life contradict my professed beliefs, and I was disgraced.

I looked out the window at everything wrong, and asked, “God, what are You going to do about this?”

Then I heard Him respond, “I gave you a mirror.”

Counting Beans

Yeaaaahhh, hi...
Did you get the memo?

TIRADE THURSDAY!

“Hello Peter, whats happening? Ummm, I’m gonna need you to go ahead come in tomorrow. So if you could be here around 9 that would be great, mmmk… oh oh! and I almost forgot ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too, kay. We ahh lost some people this week and ah, we sorta need to play catch up.”
– Bill Lumbergh from Office Space

I jotted this down in the morning before my flight, and happened to check e-mail at the end of the day. Sadly, I had no idea how applicable my first Tirade Thursday would be. Sure enough, now we’re considering how we might be able to reduce training time by 33% when we can barely keep up with what we’re doing already. Why?

Let’s talk about “counting beans.”

No one actually counts beans, I hope. I picture some poor soul in a factory hovering over a conveyer belt, checking off dozens or hundreds of beans. Dear Lord, that’s why we have machines and robots, isn’t it?

But in the military (and I’m sure in many civilian jobs), there are many things we do count, and “bean-counting” is an expression that captures this need. We absolutely must count these things, because if we don’t count them, how will we know if we are succeeding in our mission?

I say that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because I know that numbers and quantifiable figures generally drive management. No one is ever satisfied with “We produce quality” as an answer unless it is tied to some metric that puts a number on a spreadsheet and shows the quantity of our quality.

That said, it’s difficult to stay motivated when bean counting becomes the obvious purpose. “Beans” in this rant refers to any end product or desired result of our business, something that can be given a number in order to show success or failure. Maybe it’s students trained. Maybe it’s flight hours. Maybe it’s tickets processed, or TPS reports filed in accordance with your eight bosses’ wishes.

A classic military example is how we budget. In order to get the most money out of the upcoming year’s budget, we must show that we used up all the money we received this year. By using it up, we prove that we needed that much money and then some. So when the new budget is drawn up, everyone can see that we need at least as much money as we got last year. Maybe more.

What that leads to is spending money for the sake of spending money. We’ll fly a few extra minutes on every sortie, because that way we use up more flight hours, and that way we prove that we need the money for fuel for however many flight hours next year. Every 15 minutes counts! (Minutes matter, or so I was always told while deployed. I guess it’s true, in a way I never realized.)

My wife spent a few years as a Civil Engineer and saw how this worked in her career field. “We have X amount of money. We have to spend it or else we won’t get as much next year. Let’s buy this top-of-the-line truck to upgrade our fleet of civil engineering vehicles. This will be the best one we’ve got.”

The truck arrives, and someone realizes, “Hey, no one here is certified to use that thing.”

So it sits under a tarp for months.

Count MORE.
Count ALL the beans!

But that’s okay, because getting a truck that is useful was not the point. The point was spending the money in order to get the same amount of money next year. And on that note, they succeeded.

Great success! Count them beans!

Last year, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force put a book on his recommended reading list, and I sure hope some people give it a read. It’s called Start With Why, and it’s all about understanding our purpose in order to make the most of our efforts. Too often, we focus on the beans, the number that captures what we did and how much of it we did.

But the beans sometimes become the mission statement; they demand more attention than they are rightly due. We forget the “why” that explains the value of the beans.

If the count of things you do becomes more important than the things you do, revisit your organization’s “Why.”

If the quantity of product or service outweighs quality, refresh your memory of “Why.”

When something that serves a purpose has now become THE purpose, remember your original “Why.”

Without a good grasp of why, all the hows and whats don’t make much sense.

No one will ever admit that counting beans (the what) has become more important than feeding soldiers (the why). No one ever confesses that quantity gets far more attention than quality. Quality gets its share of lip-service.

But trust me. The peons in the cubicles know what really matters. We’re not fooled. We’re the ones doing the counting, remember? We fill out the trackers and document all the events. No one ever asked how good the beans taste, only how many we counted.

Another 14 Years

In March of 1998 I found a wallet on a street in Bellevue, Nebraska.

That moment led by twists and turns to this Sunday morning’s service, where I have the opportunity to play for the Bellevue Christian Center worship team. I am nervous, but my fears are overwhelmed by excitement at the prospect of being a part of this.

I was at Offutt AFB for a short training TDY from my home station, and we were staying in a beat up little hotel room on Fort Crook Road. I had never been here before, and this is long before the days of Google maps. So I tried my navigational skills by using the map in the telephone book to figure out where the nearest shopping center might be. And I started walking up the road to see if I could find it.

Not far into my stroll, I was crossing a street and found a wallet laying in the middle of the road.

Full disclosure, my first thought was maybe there’s money in it!

Thankfully, that thought was quickly replaced with maybe I can return it–with any money still inside–to be a witness of the love of Christ to whoever lost their wallet.

So I gingerly opened the wallet to see whose it might be.

The first form of identification I found was a card certifying ordination as a pastor in the Assemblies of God.

So much for witnessing. I think this guy’s good to go.

This was special for me. I grew up in an AoG church, and I had been across the States or overseas, far away from home, for a few years now.

I took the wallet and continued on my way. When I got back to the hotel, I sought out a pay phone (remember those? We all didn’t have cell phones back then) and called Pastor Petey Tellez to let him know I’d found his wallet.

Pastor Tellez was of course very grateful. He came out to meet me and treated me to a breakfast. We chatted for a bit, and I told him my thought process when I found the wallet. We had a good laugh.

He told me, “Hey, do you have a car or anything? Do you need a ride to church? Or anywhere else?”

And so that Sunday, during the short one-and-a-half weeks we were at Offutt, I got to attend the church where Pastor Tellez served as an associate pastor of some position or other that I honestly can’t remember.

I walked into Bellevue Christian Center and was surprised by the size right off the bat. I’d never been in a church that could fit more than about 200 people.

The service was great. The speaker was dynamic, but he didn’t just present a pretty sermon that barely touched on Scripture. He also performed an object lesson that sticks out in my mind to this day… climbing a tall ladder probably 15 feet into the air.

(The point, if I recall correctly, was that no one just goes to the peaks and the best of circumstances in life or in personal holiness without taking one step after another to climb there. You have to keep working at it, and suddenly you find yourself looking from a much different perspective.)

What I loved most was the worship team. I was just starting to play piano for my local church, and I was just starting to write songs for worship. I paid close attention to how they were ministering, and I was impressed. It wasn’t a show about them or a performance to command attention.

They were pointing a huge sanctuary full of people to God, and they were getting out of the way.

I wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to be up there… not because I’m so important or special, but because what they were doing resonates with my heart.

But we were leaving in a few days.

I came back on another TDY to Offutt in 2005, and attended one service. And then I was gone again.

In 2008, I was sent here for yet another training course, and I knew I’d be here for anywhere from six weeks to six months. I showed up at BCC and hung out after the service to ask if they had a need for a pianist, since I had not much else to do while I was there.

The leaders pointed me in the direction of Pastor Herbie Thompson, who was running the young adult ministry Pergo Deus. I showed up to the Friday night Pergo meeting and was surprised at the genuine welcome and sincere care I felt from the young adults there.

You know the way greetings sometimes go in church. There’s the head-nodding conversation that says “I really don’t care what you’re saying, but I want to welcome you for your first time here… so I’ll keep listening and muttering an ‘mm-hmm’ now and then.”

That’s not what I experienced.

Pergo was the real deal.

I know this, because the same people were happy to see me the next week. And they remembered my name. And they remembered the concerns I’d mentioned.

Pastor Gary Hoyt, the lead pastor at BCC, is the same way.

Pastors Gary and Laurie Hoyt

I chatted with him briefly one Sunday after the service in 2008. Then I left, because (Surprise!) I only had to stay for the six week TDY, not six months.

I came back for training in 2009 about a year and a half later. Pastor Gary remembered my face, my home station, my family, our previous conversation, and several aspects of my job in the military. (He did need confirmation of my name, because he didn’t want to call me “Brother” or “Hey you” or something random. All in all, I was impressed.)

Once again, I started playing for Pergo as often as they’d have me, and I attended Sunday mornings. Just like Pastor Gary’s Sunday messages, Pastor Herbie’s sermons on Friday night were clear, powerful, and heartfelt.

But the worship team on Sundays didn’t seem to need a piano player, so I never thought to ask.

Turns out, when you have a large church, you usually have a lot of musicians… enough to allow people to rotate on the schedule and not play every single week. That’s something I’ve always wanted to see happen where I’ve led worship in the past, but it was never an option.

I realized later I probably should have asked about playing long ago.

So when we finally moved to Offutt AFB as a family early in 2012, I did not want to miss the opportunity. Once we knew that BCC was the right place not just for me but for my whole family–and thankfully that did not take long!–Jami and I approached the Worship Pastor and asked about joining in the ministry.

It’s not some great achievement to be a part of a worship team, I know. People do that all the time. But it matters a lot to me that I get to be a part of this one, finally, after all this time of being blessed by their ministry.

The ladder lesson is right. Our spirituality and our ministry takes time. It requires taking one step after another. You don’t just walk up and jump up to the top to see what’s up there.

But once you reach the goal at the top of the ladder — in this case, looking out as a room full of people are abandoning themselves to give praise and honor to the God that you’re abandoning yourself in music to praise and honor —

The view is worth it.

I Know

http://soundcloud.com/sonworshiper/i-know

Two people are essentially to blame for this song’s existence.

C. J. Monet has really been entertaining me with his music (hence the techno style to this track), and Pastor T. J. Cristobal preached a great sermon on Ephesians 6:10-18 at church today.

Our identity is a crucial component of how we live our lives, how we decide our course of action, how we evaluate what’s going on around us. Our perception of who we are and what we’re worth dramatically affects how we interact with everyone and everything else. “Perception is reality” is a common enough expression, and I don’t use it to mean that if I think I see a pink elephant, there must really be a pink elephant. I use it to mean that I will respond to what I perceive, what I see, what I understand… not necessarily to what is actually true.

For Christians, this “perception” may be found in answers to questions like these:

Am I a sinner? Or am I a saint who struggles with sin?

Am I a failure? Or am I an overcomer who sometimes fails?

Am I worthless? Or am I the object of the affection of the Creator of the universe?

Am I unlovable? Or am I precious enough that God Himself would die for me?

(I’ll add a caveat, lest we Christians get all presumptuous and puffed up in our recognition of God’s love toward us. All those other people out there in the world, the ones our community sometimes wants to judge and protest and so on–those people are just as much the objects of God’s love as I am, and it’s my job to communicate that to the world, because the One I claim to follow “did not come into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved” (John 3:17). So yeah, don’t forget that part of your identity either.)

What have you discovered about who you are? What have you learned about what you were meant to do with this life? I know whose I am, and I know who’s in me.

You’ll say that I am weak, that I’m not worth a thing

You’ll say I should give up, that there’s no chance for me

You’ll say that nothing’s changed, that I am still the same

I say that Christ is in me and there’s power in His name

The old is gone, and the new has come

My victory is won by all that Christ has done

 

 I know whose I am

and I know who’s in me

I’m not who I was

’cause Christ has set me free

I know what He’s done

And how He’s changing me

I know the Holy One

And what I am called to be

Jesus, I am Yours, I am Yours

Jesus, I am Yours, I am Yours

 

I am called, I am chosen, I am loved, I am redeemed

I am free from condemnation, rescued from my enemy

I am purchased by my Savior, who lives inside of me

I am dead to sin, I am secure in Christ my hope of glory

The old is gone, and the new has come

My victory is won by all that Christ has done

 

No matter what the world may say

No matter what the world may do

My identity and destiny are only found in You