A good cut of melon on a hot summer day

With three kids awake before seven, it can be a long day. It could be even worse when looking at my phone. I still felt a little cold and checked the temperature, -2. It was a good time to thank God. Here I am in a house that is just three feet, some wood, insulation and a heating vent away from this brutal temperature. I am blessed that I am on the inside looking out rather than the outside looking in. I say a prayer for those who don’t have homes and hopefully found some warm place to be indoors. Life can be full of glass half empty or half full moments. This weather makes me think what five months from now will be like. This weather makes me think how crazy this world can be. Five months from now we will forget about this cold, cold weather and start saying things like I can’t believe how warm it is. I look back to last summer and one of my favorite summertime things, relaxing and eating some good cantaloupe.

Cantaloupe has to be one of my all-time favorite fruits. It has such a smooth and great taste. The problem with this fruit, it’s like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get. It’s not easy to pick out a good melon. I have tried all the methods: smelling, tapping, looking distinctly at the color and choosing one based on size. Sometimes they are great and sometimes they are a complete failure. I am about 50-50 with picking a good melon. Yet when I am right, there is nothing better than this beautiful great tasting fruit in the middle of the summer. It’s sometimes hard to pick great fruit, but it’s worth the gamble everytime.

 Good tasting fruit can be tough to find, but Paul uses good fruit as an example for what a good Christian looks like.

 Galatians 5:22-23…

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.”

 Being a Christian and living life according to God’s way can be a losing battle. We can struggle daily to keep our composure. Sometimes we are good fruit, people can see us being full of everything talked about in this scripture. Other times we can fall short, we can be bad fruit. It’s a daily struggle what we bring to the table. There are days I do extremely well, but there are days I fall completely short. I mess up, I lose my cool, and am bad fruit. It’s a daily and sometimes hourly battle to be good fruit.

This is the challenge with faith. We have to look on the inside and produce on the outside. We can know everything the Bible teaches but unless we show the characteristics show above we fail. Living life God’s way is a challenge. Some days are extremely hard, but it’s during those times we are especially called to be good fruit.

 What will you become today? With this weather, with the bad stuff going on in your life, you can choose to be bitter, angry, mopey and miserable. What happens to bad fruit? It gets thrown out, people don’t eat it. People want to surround themselves with people that lift them up. Not saying you have to fake being happy (There are fruits that look great but taste awful) but knowing there so many things to still be thankful for can be a great start. Become what you believe, be full of love and peace today.

 

Have a great day.

Boston

A marathon effects more than the city it’s in. My friend Kohon mentioned this marathon effected more people and countries then anyone can imagine. Boston has a strict time guideline in order to qualify for the race, some marathoners spend their whole lives trying to qualify for one of the races on their Bucket List. People from all over the United States and the world come to Boston.

Before two reconstructive knee surgeries, I had the goal of running the Boston (Boston is the one of the only marathons that require a qualifying time, I could not make the time cut yet). My time for the marathon was about the time the explosion went off. Long past my marathons days as I look at this tragedy as a minister of Jesus and see the hurt that people post from this. It’s a sad state and often people ask why would a loving God allow this to happen?

Throughout my time as a minister you see a lot of bad things happen to people. Sometimes it’s when people are already down and something worse happens. Haven’t they been punished enough? Then a tragedy like the Marathon happens and people without understanding call out to God, why God why? To answer this I am going to spend the rest of the time talking about suffering and choice.

We all have a choice. There is something called the free will defense that people a lot smarter then I came up with to explain when bad things happen. The free will defense is this…

1.      God is absolutely perfect.

2.      God created only perfect creatures.

3.      One of the perfections God gave some of his creatures was the power of free choice.

4.      Some of these creatures freely choose to do evil.

5.      Therefore, a perfect creature caused evil.

Every day we have the choice to do good or bad. Which do you choose? Today do you choose to go to work/school or the bar/or skip? It’s a choice an individual makes that can affect other people. We make thousands of choices every day that directly affect us and the people around us some directly and some indirectly. The people that chose to do this in Boston, chose to do evil. Their choice affected people all over the world for this international event.

Even with free will, why do people have to suffer? This is a tough question that you can look at with other questions. If God stopped all evil right now what would that look like? If God destroyed everything that caused unjust suffering and evil – what would survive? We can all do evil and that is where we struggle with sin. Suffering might cause us to be protected from an even deeper evil.

Not all suffering can be bad or evil, it can be pain. Sometimes in life we have to suffer to experience something great. I haven’t met a women who has cherished child birth but you love the result when you get that awesome gift of God in your hands. You sometimes have to suffer and endure hardships to get where you want to go in life (School, strict training, unpaid internship etc).

This doesn’t explain the event in Boston but hopefully you would understand a loving God does not want tragedies like this to happen in the world he created. While things like this do happen, sadly. God gave us Jesus to comfort us during these tough times. God is a loving and just God who cares about the people and I am sure is sad over this tragic event.

Through our lives we have a loving God who sacrificed his only son Jesus for us. Jesus took all of our sins and died for us. Through the bad things in life Jesus loves you cares for you and is sad when you are down. Through the suffering Jesus is always there with you. You can always go to him with your problems.

Good or bad

We have a chance to be good or bad. My son Ty can be one of the most lovingly and sharing kids. It's normal of him to go somewhere and not eat all of his food so he could share some with brother and sister. He will go to the doctors office and always get a little sticker for his siblings. Yet while he can be good, he can also be bad.

Ty had some issues with listening to his Sunday School teachers. He bent one of his teachers fingers around and also was repeatedly hitting his teacher. Not the behavior we expect. For the good he can do, the bad he can also do. We can be the same way. While we might not hurt our teachers like Ty did, we have plenty of choices to do good or bad.

What we do can effect us in positive and negative ways. Listen to what Paul says in Romans 6:21-23...
What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

There are bad things we do that result in bad. This is what happens with sin, we can do things and face the punishment in the end. When you do bad things, bad results often happen. When you do good, good things can follow. Doing bad things against God's will is sin, nothing good happens from sin. Yet with faith in Christ, we are offered something even better, eternal life. You don't have to be ashamed anymore when you have Christ. You can be good.

You can do bad or you can do good. What do you regret in life? What if you didn't have to be haunted by those regrets? This is what Christ offers, no matter how much bad you have done, you can be modified. You don't have to be the person of your past and you can be a better person in the future. I love Ty, hopefully we will see him do more good and less bad. What about you?

Have a great day.

If your friends suck, maybe it’s you that sucks and they’re all awesome

Having friends can make all the difference in the world.

There have been scientific facts of what having friends in our lives can do for us.  Lower blood pressure, higher happiness in life and other things you can find out if you go to the Mayo Clinic website.  It’s nice to have great friends.

Friends came through for Paul in Acts 27:3…

“The next day we landed at Sidon; and Julius, in kindness to Paul, allowed him to go to his friends so they might provide for  his needs.”

As Paul was sailing as a jailed prisoner, he was able to go see his friends to meet for his needs.  Friends can meet a need in our lives.  Friends can make a huge difference in the lives of others.  Sometimes though, we are not the best friends.  We think of our own thoughts and wants above others.

There was a time I thought I was really good friends with someone else.  We were talking online one time and I noticed the conversation was all about him (This isn’t always a bad thing). So I kept talking and saw if he would swing the conversation around, her never did. We were decent friends, but I realized the majority of the time we just talked about what he wanted to do.

Finally I decided to stop calling him and saw if he contacted me back. He never did. As a result, we went our separate ways. There are times I have not been a good friend and need to work on it. A good friend can make all the difference in the world.

I am glad to be surrounded by so many loving people.  There are things I need to do to be a better friend. What are something’s you like in a friend? What are things you can improve on to be a better friend? Are you a friend that can meet other’s needs? If not, you can improve and help someone out in a tough time. Try to work on being a better friend today.

Have a great day.

Bad deals

Sometimes we get a bad deal.

 

When Hailee and I moved to Terre Haute we decided to give a cable or dish provider a second chance. We were burned once and hoped this time it would be better. Part of the contract we signed said the deal included local channels, they said it would not be a problem.  After 4 months, multiple calls and letter, we found out, this wasn’t the case, they lied.

 

It was disappointing as they went against what they said they would give us.  Eventually we couldn’t settle with them and paid the $180 to cancel our services with them, even though they were the ones that didn’t follow through with the contract. Sometimes we are thrown a bad deal.

 

Disappointed but learning from that situation we switched to a different company. Sometimes we get into a bad deal, luckily I have not been in a bad deal like what Paul had to deal with. Paul was basically put in jail even though being completely innocent. On top of that and multiple trials, he ended up in a court with Felix. Felix thought he was innocent but was waiting for a bribe from Paul in order to release him.  Paul wouldn’t bribe him.

 

As a result he was a prisoner for over two years. Would things get better? Acts 24:27…

“When two years had passed, Felix was succeeded by Porcius Festus, but because Felix wanted to grant a favor to the Jews, he left Paul in prison.”

 

He was innocent, defended his case and Felix had a chance to release him before being succeeded. Instead he was left in jail for a favor. That sucks. I couldn’t imagine how Paul handled this news.

How would you handle it?

 

Sometimes life isn’t fair.  You can feel like all the cards are against you.  Hang in there.

 

Even with all Paul was going through, he never did give up. Don’t give up.  Sometimes there is a bad deal, and we have to make the best of the situation.  Hopefully that situation isn’t as bad as Paul’s but there is a chance for improvement.

 

Even in the toughest of times Jesus is there for us.  He is a healer and an awesome provider (Thank you Chris Tomlin for the reminder).  You don’t have to rely on your own power to fix all the problems.  Trust in God, that is what Paul did.  You can too.  Even through the worst of deals, we get another chance.

 

Have a great day.