Bring together or tear away

We all have the ability to bring people closer together with our actions or pull people away. There was a college basketball team a couple of years ago in which the team just missed the NCAA tournament after going 20-9. The next season they were supposed to be a major team that was going to go far in the tournament. Instead the team went 9-23. The team’s best player that was up for a national player of the year honor couldn’t hit a shot. He would still score 25 a game but it would take 30 shots to make it happen. They stopped working together and fell apart. The same thing can happen in our lives and in the church when we don’t fight for unity.

Unity is important in our lives and in church. Paul tried to bring to church in Thessalonica back together in the end of his book. Paul shares this in 2 Thessalonians 3:16-18, “Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times and in every way. The Lord be with all of you. I, Paul, write this greeting in my own hand, which is the distinguishing mark in all my letters. This is how I write. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.”

There was a lot of division in the church and Paul’s goal was to bring the people together. The truth is what Paul hoped the individuals and the church would find. This truth was God’s will. If the people focused on this truth, the problems would go away. Paul often wrote to a scribe like figure and the fact Paul wrote the end of this book stands out. Paul wanted to unite the people.

We can bring peace. This section of scripture focuses on the matters inside the church, but can apply to our overall lives.

In our lives ask yourself…

Am I promoting unity or not?

At home?

At work or school?

With our friends?

With people we don’t care for?

We have the chance to bring peace in our lives.

That basketball team didn’t have unity, but the coach and team worked at it and the following year, they made the NCAA tournament and had the biggest win total change in college basketball. When we live in peace, good things happen.

How can you make peace happen in your life?

Have a great day.

Easy to get overwhelmed

What are you thankful for? It’s easy to get bogged down in life. We can get stressed, overwhelmed and on edge pretty quickly.

Today, after dropping off the kids at school, I started my day making a list of everything I needed to get done. After about five minutes of writing my list, I started to get overwhelmed. I had so much to do and there was no way I was going to finished everything today. My day just started and I was already disappointed with how my day was looking.

How do you start your day, is it calm, is it peaceful?

Listen to how Paul stared his letter to the Church of the Thessalonians. 1 Thessalonians 1:2…

“We always thank God for all of you and continually mention you in our prayers.”

Every letter Paul authored except for the letter to the Galatians, Paul starts with a similar opening, giving thanks. How often do we start our day giving thanks? What if instead of focusing on what needs to be done, we need to focus on giving thanks and seeing how that leads the way.

I think Paul was on to something with starting every letter with thankfulness. What if we made this a point of our life? What if we started out thanking others to start our day. What would our social media look like? What would our family look like? What would our workplace look like if we all started our day sharing what we were thankful for instead of what we have going on?

I have so much to be thankful for and I need to do a better job of showing that.

How about you?

Have a great day.

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.

RIP Aunt Paula

“Go outside and play with your cousins. You can not come in unless you are bleeding! As kids we weren’t happy being told to go outside and play after doing it all day. So we decided to have some fun. We had a whole bunch of black cherries outside and knew what to do. My we grabbed some black cherries and smeared them on my cousin Juston’s arm. It looked like he had a huge gash on his arm then we threw water in his eyes to make it look like he was crying. We ran around the corner yelling, “Mom!” As my mom and Aunt Paula looked outside, my Mom screamed and started to run around. My Aunt Paula on the other hand looked at us kids, and yelled to my mom, “Jennifer, they are faking it!”

It was hard to get anything past Aunt Paula. She cracked me up that day as us kids could not fool her like we did my mom. Aunt Paula was amazing. She was someone that was always an absolute joy to be around. She was never afraid to tell her opinion honestly and the majority of the time was right on the mark with what she said. For the past couple of years she battled cancer like a champ. She never gave up even after it looked impossible to come back from. She was a fighter.

My mom told me we needed to get up and see her a couple of weeks ago. We listened to my mom and went up there. We got to visit with Aunt Paula for her third of five kids high school graduation. It was a great time. She was a fighter to the end. Before we left Traverse City, we swung by the hospital to visit her. We knew it would most likely be the last time we would see her on this side of heaven. As we were saying what would be our final goodbyes, she said, “This isn’t a final good bye, I will look forward to see you at Dirtball (Our huge family camping trip) next month.” So instead of saying good-bye, I said, “Seeya later Aunt Paula.” It was the last time I saw Aunt Paula.

She fought cancer boldly. She never gave up and gave it her all. Long after they told her she would pass away she kept on fighting till the very end. It makes me think of a Bible verse from Matthew 11:28, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Aunt Paula you were a great wife, mother, grandmother, friend and aunt. You will truly be missed by everyone who was blessed by having your presence in their lives. I love you and will miss you so much. Rest in Peace.

Brand X tastes better than the name brand

Box mac and cheese is my friend. Growing up it was one of my favorite lunches to have. My brother Zach and I would eat four boxes of this at a time. There was one stipulation, we always ate the Meijer’s brand. Our parents raised four kids, money was tight and we were always raised on the off brand stuff. Some of it is better and yes I chose brand x over the named brand stuff every time. What are items you like that are the off brand?

Imitation is not always bad. An off brand is just mentioning I am like this other object in almost every way, but I might be a little different therefore my price is cheaper. Sold. Imitation goes beyond food and goes into life.

1 Corinthians 4:16-17…

“Therefore I urge you to imitate me. For this reason I have sent to you Timothy, my son whom I love, and who is faithful in the Lord. He will remind you of my way of life in Christ Jesus, which agrees with what I teach everywhere in every church.”

Good people can remind you of good things to do. If someone has a good trait that you like, it’s ok to try and mimic it. Paul is telling this church that if you are living off track, it’s good to imitate people that are going in the right direction especially in spiritual matters. Paul sent Timothy to the church to help keep them on track to what is important. This is why reading the Bible is a great thing. If you want to be like Christ, do what Christ does.

Who are people in life you look up too? What do you look up to them about? Imitate what good people in your life do and you can improve. I look up to some of the most genuine loving, caring people full of grace and mimicking them makes me a better person. Imitation is not always a bad thing in food or in life. What type of person do you want to be and who can you look up at to make it happen? Have a great day.

Good people can go to hell

There are plenty of good people that are headed for Hell. Maybe not today or tomorrow but later on down the road because of wrong ideas of what gets you to Heaven. I was going to be one of them.

I grew up Catholic and was made sure that we attended Church at least on Easter and Christmas (We did attend a lot more and I went to Catechism until fourth grade). After elementary school we attended church at everything from a Catholic church to a predominantly black pentecostal church. I knew who Jesus and God were but I gave up on Church mentally. I thought everyone was a hypocrite, lived one way on Sunday and different the rest of the week. I believed in Jesus, but didn't go much further then that.

I thought faith was so much more then believing in Jesus. I figured there was a scale that mattered. If I did more good deeds then bad deeds, not only would that show up the people that claimed faith, it would gain favor in the eyes of God. So in high school, I rarely drank, never smoked, never had sex and tried to be nice and a good person to everyone. I didn't think I had any enemies and never tried to make enemies. Certainly I was way ahead of some of my so called Christian friends that partied, tried to have sex with everyone, drank like a fish and smoked anything they could get their hands on. I was better then them. Man was I wrong.

God tells us this in Romans 10:1-4...
"Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved.  For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Since they did not know the righteousness of God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes."

We can think we know what gets us to heaven, but it could be our own understanding. The Scripture above tells us the people of Israel at the time were zealous, "the God intoxicated people." They might have been for God but not for God. They thought they had their understanding of faith and it was not right. The majority of them did not believe in Christ. Therefore they thought the good things they were doing and the rules they were following (Obeying the 600+ rules God/Pharisees gave) were the way to live. They were wrong.

Faith in Jesus gets you to heaven and it's the only way. Israel did not submit to God and acknowledge who Jesus was. The result would be a tough pill to swallow at death, Hell. This is one of the biggest lies today and a lie I believed for a long time. Just because you are a good person doesn't mean you will go to heaven. If you think you are going to Heaven because you know of Jesus, shoot, the devil knew who Jesus was and what he did, yet he won't be in Heaven. A lot of peole in Israel missed this, but you don't have too.

A drinker, smoker and someone who had a ton of pre-martial sex changed my thinking on faith. This friend was a Christian and went to church every week when I didn't. He told me Church is about worshipping God and Jesus. Everyone who goes to Church is messed up in one way or another because we all sin. He told me God expects us to be perfect. I couldn't grasp this. We aren't perfect people I told him. Exactly he responded. He went on to tell me this is was Jesus did, he died on the Cross for you and your sins/mistakes, when you have faith in Jesus you accept who Jesus is as your personal Lord and Savior he covers the area you fall short and as a result you get to go to heaven. I remember telling them, "I'm a good person." He told me, "Not good enough."

It took a little while before this sank in. Finally on November 5, 2000. I finally got the point and was baptized. I realized something a lot of Israelites didn't, Jesus paid the price for my sins on the cross and he was my savior. He died for me. Recognizing this and having faith in him allowed me to go to Heaven. No matter what good things you have done, it's not good enough, God wants to see perfection when you have your one on one meeting with him after your earthly life ends.

Faith isn't about doing more good deeds then bad deeds, it's about a relationship with Jesus.  What is your relationship with Jesus? Who is he to you? Christ wants to take you in, but you have to make the decision. The ball is in your court, what are you going to do with it? If you never made that decision, find someone you can talk to about this. If you have friends that have struggled with this, maybe God intended you to be the person they would talk to about this.

Have a great day.

You hurt? Rub some dirt on it

“Everyone’s going to die…” in response a person said, “Yeah, but not this week.” One guy terminally sick and was told he was going to die very soon, the first guy had no clue. Things happen in life that are out of our control. We all have times like this. We have a chance to let a bad event overtake us. Will you let that happen?

Honestly it’s not that bad. This was a phrase I said a week before my baseball season when I was younger. Our first game was a week away and we had one of our final practices. I was the starting catcher. The hitter hit a lazy pop fly in foul territory going towards the dugout/first base side. I lived for moments like this. I threw off my helmet and ran to try to catch up to it. I had a great jump and was about to make a nice diving play, except for one unforeseen problem, a rock. In foul territory was a rock I didn’t see, running full speed I stepped on the rock. It caused me to slip just as I was leaning towards making the catch. I reach out but was thrown into the ground with my wrist being the first thing to hit the ground. I was in pain.

The coach came over to me very quickly and asked if I was alright. Something was wrong, but I wasn’t going to admit that. “Nope, I’m fine,” I stated. I sat out the rest of practice. My wrist hurt and I couldn’t close a baseball glove. After three days of being in pain, I went to the doctors to find out I broke my wrist. I was hurt and I wish rubbing dirt on it would have helped, it did not.

Bad things happen in life sometimes, yet can things really be that bad? We all face different challenges in life. Sometimes those challenges hurt us, they can cut deep. Yet in the scheme of life they can be very small in comparison. Listen to what Paul shares in Romans 8:18…

“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”

Man, there are some verses in scripture I read and feel the power of God. We are suffering people in so many different ways, whether mentally or physically. Yet when we have God and trust in Jesus with our lives, the present sufferings are a blimp on the radar. God is God and will do amazing things. Know this, trust in this, through our imperfections Jesus allowed us to experience eternal life when we give our life over to him. What you are going through Jesus knows about wants to comfort you and wants you to know there is light at the end of the tunnel. There is something to look forward to when you have Christ.

We were never meant to die at the side of the road like roadkill. We have a chance with our life to experience greatness. If you are going through some struggles, hang in there. Sometimes we experience lows in life just to experience greatness or to see how good we have it normally.

Bad things happen but don’t relish in them. Rub some dirt on it, know it’s temporary and God has plans for you! We always have something to look forward to when we are Christians, no matter how bad life can get, we are given eternal life. Don’t stress too hard on small things that have a low value. Hang in there! God is with you!

Have a great day.

Laying in a hospital bed over winter break

Laid up in a hospital bed is not how I like to start my winter break. Several years ago, this was the case, stomach pains sent me to be admitted. I shared a room with someone I have never seen before. His name doesn’t ring a bell, but he is a guy I will never forget. Having intense stomach pains I was admitted to the hospital where I found out I had a roommate, over the next couple of days I got to know him better.

He was a guy from the Lansing area I would have never run across. There was something that was off about him but I could never figure out what was wrong with him. He was a nice guy, had a great personality, he cracked me up and seemed to be loved by his visitors. I found out this guy got wrapped into stuff he shouldn’t have been in. Now he was living in a tent behind a store in the Michigan winter.

This is what put him in the hospital. He didn’t notice it at the time but from living out of a tent in the middle of the winter he ended up with some form of frostbite and lost a couple of his toes. Now he sat here in the hospital waiting on what they were going to do. The doctor came in and told him all his toes would be removed from his foot they would be replace with synthetic (I vaguely remember). They were doing other things to help with the infection and improve that.

This guy had a great attitude and desire for life, with his remaining toes on his right foot he would often say, “Hey look, the peace symbol!” He cracked me up. Soon it wasn’t as funny.

He didn’t have insurance and would be sent away. What was going to be a couple of days of procedures and recovery was changed to some antibiotics and a boot out the door. For the life of me I could figure out why this guy couldn’t get insurance at all. It ends up he was heavily into drugs and even his visitors were family that tried to help him out from time to time but he never improved. The help he needed wasn’t from medical hospital but from a rehab place.

This guy’s life was wrecked because of drugs and his ability not to get help. What’s different between us and him? Not much. We are in the same boat, we are sinners and full of mistakes. Yet God gives us another chance, Romans 3:23-24…

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

This guy fell short of the glory of God and so do we. We are not mistakes but we make a ton of mistakes. God values each and every life and values your life so much. God loves you and you are free because Jesus gave us grace. Through all our sins Jesus washed them all away. Laying in the hospital bed next to my roommate, we came from different paths, had different struggles and yet we were in the hospital both seeking help.

We all need help from time to time. Whether it’s our marriages, our family, our friends, a physical problem or a bad habit like drugs or alcohol, help can be there for us. Don’t be afraid to seek help with issues going on in your life. If you had a broken leg, you go to a doctor, if something was wrong with your head mentality, you would go to a doctor too.

We serve a God that is loving and just. He wants us to be able to conquer those issues going on in our lives. I think about my former roommate from time to time and pray that he was able to get the help needed and kick the bad habit. God is love and is forgiving to those who seek forgiveness. If you need help, please seek someone to help you.

Have a great day.