Tag: taking chances

Driving Force

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Driving Force

What pushes you? Do you have a motivation to push yourself because of a desire to be the best? Do you push yourself to provide for others? Do you do it out of greed, or a need to make the world a better place? We all have our dreams, but how do those dreams affect those around us? We want what we want, but at what cost? The life I’ve lived I have learned to weigh the good of the mission, verses the good of what’s truly important.

Driving Force 1

In our life we may only get a few chances to finally and fully meet our better half. How often does life get in the way, and divide the home. All I ever wanted in my life was to be remembered for something great. I wanted to make a difference and to leave a legacy for my children to have. I wanted to have a bunch of kids and in that hope and that dream my soul purpose was to make a happy home. All I wanted to do was come runnin’ home to the woman I loved. I tried every day to be a good man, a good husband, a good Christian. The days that unfold in front of us don’t always play by the rules, and we aren’t always given the fair shot.

See, the thing is, for some people the hard work that gains them notoriety, the success and happiness in life, comes with a measure of ease that’s not often true for everyone. No matter the hard work, sometimes things just go badly. What can a man do when he marries a girl, lives a good life, and looses her? When he picks up the pieces and starts over, meeting a new girl, spending more time together, getting married, and when you feel like you’ve got the keys to the city, so many blessings, what can you do when it explodes in your face? The explosion sends shrapnel through your body and you feel like your insides are oozing out onto the ground. How do you triage the worst of the worst and bandage yourself up? There’s something inside us all that forces us to pick ourselves up, and even if we limp on, we still move. For every one of us that driving force is different.

Driving Force 3

For me, it was God. God spoke to me, and although the words were about forgiveness the act itself was very clear. Go and make disciples. Go and expand the flock, spread the Gospel and fight the good fight. With the hardships of Job, and the mission of Paul, who said this life would be easy? The thing that most people miss when they say they are alone, and although they may be in this world, God is always with them. God is with us when we are broken, and if God spoke to all of us, I’m sure He’d say we are “Broken Together” How many of us wish in adulthood we could go back to simpler times. I myself have been thinking a lot about my time in high school and how simple it was. Do the homework, go to the club meetings, and try to keep up with friends. Friends, seems that concept gets lost as time moves us along. As friends get scattered by the wind it’s harder and harder to keep track of where they go, or rather, they stop keeping track of you. I have stumbled and I’ve fallen, and now I’m at the precipice of my life changing forever and I can’t hear what I’m supposed to do. I’ve tried to quiet my mind and listen, but the storm’s so loud I can’t hear. I’ve doubted myself, I’ve doubted my resolve and now that the time is upon me, I don’t know if I’m making the right choice. The prayers I’m sure are being heard, but I suppose at some point I have to just take the leap, plunge into the darkness and pray that the light of the Lord will shine brightly if nothing else through me. I know that no matter where I am the Lord is with me, and no matter how bad it gets, no matter how bad I feel, no matter the despair I’m in, God is always with me.

Driving Force 4

Knowing the knife is no longer there it feels as fresh as the day it plunged into my heart. I recently received a small set of cheap throwing knives. I figured I’d expand my list of talents in the hopes of adding more useless bullets to my growing list of useless talents. Knife throwing doesn’t exactly win you prizes with the ladies fathers, and it certainly doesn’t give you a good bullet for a resume. While I wasn’t expecting to be great, I wasn’t expecting to be horrible either. Boy was I wrong. I threw the knife twice, missed the box the first time (my aim sucked) and then threw a second time, and I’m pretty sure I hit the box with the handle side of the knife. For the record I watched an 8 minute video on knife throwing, and I was pretty sure I had a good handle on it, no pun intended. Sadly it started to rain and as I was throwing into a cardboard box, I decided to call it quits. I cleaned off the knife and placed it back in its sheath. While I was sitting here on the couch pondering the nature of this blog, it occurred to me that life is a lot like that experience. I failed my first two tries, but that doesn’t mean I will never get it. Sure the first video isn’t appealing, but neither was the first time I picked up my recurve bow, the arrow completely missed the target bag. You have to keep trying and practicing to be good at something isn’t life the same way? We can’t be expected to get life right all the time. We stumble, we fall, we crash, we love, we loose, and through it all, the only thing we can do is sleep, and wake up the next day and try again. Anything is possible if we only believe, and we have to have the faith in God that anything can be remade. Anything in our life can be fixed, and we can if we have the blessings from God to do so.

Broken Together by Casting Crowns

How I wish we could go back to simpler times
Before all our scars and all our secrets were in the light
Now on this hallowed ground, we’ve drawn the battle lines
Will we make it through the night?

It’s going to take much more than promises this time
Only God can change our minds

Maybe you and I were never meant to be complete
Could we just be broken together
If you can bring your shattered dreams and I’ll bring mine
Could healing still be spoken and save us
The only way we’ll last forever is broken together

 I was told recently we could never go back to the way things were. While that’s true, fixing what’s broken isn’t impossible. Though the broken, or shattered lives of the past may never be put back together, all we can do is focus on how we can pick ourselves up. See that’s what the driving force is all about isn’t it? What drives you to get back up when you’ve been knocked down? Why do you get up time and again, why do you stay in the fight? I think it’s important for all of us to review those traits inside each and every one of us. We must know what we fight for, what we want, what our personal code is, and live by it. My code aligns with Gods word the truth. I fight for justice; I fight for truth because truth is sometimes all we have in this world. I don’t like bullies and I stand firm against them even at the cost of myself. I pick myself up because I don’t like the idea of being seen as weak. I don’t like the idea of being deemed a failure. This last year I’ve fought to redeem myself. I fell hard last year, and I lost what I felt was my entire credibility. I felt as if my actions would be the doom of my life forever. While this may or may not be the actual case, some of the facts are undeniable.

Remember though, it’s okay to fall, and it’s okay to get knocked down. The Devil will try to keep you there, and what you need to do is listen to the voice of truth.

Voice of Truth by Casting Crowns

But the waves are calling out my name
And they laugh at me
Reminding me of all the times
I’ve tried before and failed
The waves they keep on telling me
Time and time again. “Boy, you’ll never win!”
“You’ll never win!”

But the voice of truth tells me a different story
The voice of truth says, “Do not be afraid!”
The voice of truth says, “This is for My glory”
Out of all the voices calling out to me
I will choose to listen and believe the voice of truth

 Don’t listen to the lies, the half-truths, or the feelings of worthlessness the Devil tries to tell you. You know you were perfectly made, and that is what’s important. You need to get back up because even if you’re broken, God uses broken people the most. You may be broken, but you can change the world even when you don’t know how to fix yourself. There’s a song that the Angels sing, and they sing for you. You can be the redeemed and through Christ made new. What drives you? Jesus, Jesus drives me to get back up and to always try to be better. You may not be good at everything, but there’s something you can do and be the best at. Find it, use it, and glorify God with it. Be the best at something, and if you’re going to take a beating in this life at least do it for God. Stand up, and look the Devil straight in the eyes and say, “I can do this all day!” (Captain America)

 

 

 

 

 

 

No Guts No Glory

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No Guts No Glory

Without risk there is no reward. Without storms there is no rainbow. Without winter there is no spring. Without the ability to scorch the fire there is no forging of steel. In order to build muscle you must work out, that process isn’t easy, it can be time consuming and painful. What about love? How do we move forward when we suffer that kind of loss of our spouse or family? In our lives we will loose people. It’s not a question of if, but when. Recently I was watching an episode of The Flash and I heard this quote, “You can either embrace the change and move forward, or fight it and get left behind” (The Flash) As much as change can be hard and even devastating at times, we must either embrace the fire, or allow it to consume us. When we suffer a loss of a job or a loss of a loved one, when plans change and we get hurt, we can only put one step in front of the other and allow the natural order to prevail. “Part of being human is learning how to deal with the unexpected… to risk new experiences, even when they don’t fit into your preconceptions.” (Geordi La Forge)

 When we try to understand the world, we must first understand and come to grips that the world is a much larger place we could ever know. We must understand that God is big and we are small. We must understand that the world is far greater in both directions we could ever see. When we look at our world, when we figure out life and that nothing happens without action. We cannot just sit by and pray things get better. We must learn to put boots on the ground. Ecclesiastes 11:4-6 “He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap. As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything. In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.” We must learn to get our hands dirty. The plants will not grow with just prayer alone, we must dig, and sow. Prayer that the roots take, and that water comes from the heavens. When I was in Iraq I often prayed that we would find the guy we were looking for, that being said we had to be the ones out looking. We need to take this into our lives. Ecclesiastes 9:7-14 “7 Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.8 Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head. 9 Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain[a] life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. 10 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might,[b] for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going. 11 Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. 12 For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.” We must learn to take what we have in our lives and appreciate it. How often do we take for granted what we have? The grass isn’t greener on the other side. We saw what happened when the Devil tempted Eve to see what the grass was like on the other side only to find themselves removed from Eden.

The world we know has evils in it and we must watch for the snares that can trap us and prevent us from moving forward. Those snares may wound us and try to utterly destroy us, but when we are watching the world around us, and if we are paying attention, the traps might be revealed as more obvious. When the end comes for us all we will look back on our life and we will go over every good and bad decision we’ve ever made. When we get to the point of our own death it’s too late to consider our actions. We must try to better ourselves and work towards an end to every situation that would be pleasing to God. We won’t always succeed, and we will falter and make mistakes, but being a good Christian means owning up to them, and trying to make them right. It takes guts to stand up in front of others in the wake of our failings and admit to being wrong or falling short. To right our wrongs takes action, the true act of repentance. We must learn to embrace the now in order to ready ourselves for tomorrow. Just because tomorrow may not fit with what we want, or what we think we should have. Don’t allow our preconceived ideals blind us from reality. Sometimes people are mean and cruel, and sometimes they hurt us. It doesn’t always feel like a blessing, but in the end, it might turn out that way. Have patience to deal with the knocks and make sure your hands get dirty, and make sure your boots are on the ground, but never forget to pray. Praying is still always the best course.

Remember to always weigh your possibilities, and if the ends justify the means and they fall within biblical principles, anything worthwhile having is worth the effort to get there. If the juice is worth the squeeze then if you want the juice, start squeezing.

Taking a Chance On Love

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Taking a Chance On Love

Don’t pass judgment based on others because you never know what awaits you just around the corner. When we are hurt we often try to hide ourselves in a little cave afraid to go out into the day because something out there might try to hurt us again. I often hear people say phrases like, “oh I’ll never get married again.” Or “I’ve given up on men all together.” To me this is presumptuous. The Bible does say to Psalms 118:8 “[It is] better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man.” However this doesn’t mean we judge everyone based on one persons failings. Later in the book of Jeremiah 17:5 “Thus saith the LORD; Cursed [be] the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD.” Don’t misunderstand what the author is talking about. He’s not saying not to trust in man at all. What it’s saying is don’t build your foundation on the faith of man and mankind. Our foundation should be built on Christ. Without that foundation our homes would be washed out to sea when the first storm hits.

Have you ever eaten some place and gotten sick from it? Have you ever cooked something at home and gotten sick? What about going to the store and having a bad experience with one of the employee’s? Do we swear off an entire restaurant chain just because of one bad experience, do we stop shopping at a store just because of one rude employee? What if that employee was just having a really bad day? Or what if the food came to the restaurant tainted and everyone who had that particular meal got sick? We can never know the full story because all we see is one tiny piece of the puzzle and if that puzzle is incomplete we have no business, no right to judge the situation without all the facts.

I personally believe dating is very similar. In dating we put our heart out there on a platter and freely give it up to someone we believe cares for us. Even if they do at the time, people change and people’s motives and desires can lead them to a dark place and those dark places can wind up breaking your heart in the end. Out of roughly 16 billion people on the planet, and estimate half that for the opposite sex to what you are, you cannot within reason say that everyone in that giant lake are bad fish. I have a theory when it comes to dating or marriage that I’ve been wrestling with for a little while now. A friend told me recently that every guy she’s dated have been losers, or they’ve turned into losers by the end and she was tired of being hurt all the time. So, here’s my theory, stop fishing in the same pond. Think about it, we all have types don’t we? We all have a particular type of lady, or man we’re attracted to, but what if that’s the problem all along, what if it’s not the guy or the gale that is the problem. What if we’re the problem? If we continue to fish in the same pond and keep catching the same type of fish, then perhaps it’s time to make the change in ourselves, find within ourselves keeps leading us to the wrong type. We cannot blame the great white for being a blood thirsty hunter, it is what it is, but if we don’t want to catch a great white, don’t fish where they are known to be. If you want fresh water fish don’t fish in the ocean. Sure even some bad fish can come out of anywhere you want to go fishing, but that doesn’t stop, well, shouldn’t stop you from fishing. The only thing you absolutely should do is not stereotype because of a few bad experiences.

Furthermore if someone cheated on you, don’t go into the next relationship full of distrust and suspicion. Each relationship is a fresh start and every person is different. Don’t bring your baggage with you. Leave it buried out back with the other memories of your exes. Have faith each and every day that today can and will be different. When you bring your baggage with you every time you start something new you won’t be able to move forward. You are over encumbered and you are condemning someone else for the mistakes they didn’t make. It isn’t our place to judge so leave that up to the higher power. We often look through our own pain, and that’s like wearing beer goggles, our vision will always be distorted so long as we keep putting our pain up in front of us. So take a chance on love, and let go of the baggage that’s holding you down. That distrust, that anger, that sorrow will only torpedo your new relationship because no one wants to be treated with suspicion and distrust fresh out the gate.

 

 

Don’t Let Life Pass You By

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Don’t Let Life Pass You By

So many times in life we miss opportunities or chances to do things we want. When opportunities in life slip through our fingers the regrets that are left behind can be powerful. It’s hard to ‘live life’ without regrets. Sometimes we regret doing things, or regret not doing things. It’s tough though struggling with your decision one way or another. We can’t let ourselves be directed by fear, or controlled by indecision.

There are a vast number of things we regret not doing, we don’t kiss the girl, we don’t sky dive, we don’t ask out that boy we like, we don’t try out for the position or ask for the raise we want. What prevents us from reaching out is fear, fear of rejection, ridicule, or failure. There are a lot of sad truths out there but we rarely swing for the fence afraid of striking out. When we are too scared to try, we will never succeed.

James 4:14 “Whereas ye know not what [shall be] on the morrow. For what [is] your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”

 Do not be foolish with the gifts God has given to you, but don’t be afraid to take risks either. To be a leader takes courage and risks. As Captain Kirk said to Captain Harriman “Risk is part of the game, you want to sit in that chair.” We only know how far we can go if we take the risks to get there. We don’t know where the frontier is and the great things we can accomplish if we don’t step out of our comfort zone. One of my favorite songs ‘What if I gave everything; by Casting Crowns’ “So afraid of what it might cost to follow you. I’d walk by faith if I could get these feet to move.”

 2 Corinthians 5:7 7 “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” If we gave it our all, our best every day, if we learn to take risks, and learned to swim beyond what we felt was far enough, fear wouldn’t control us.

In this life we only get one shot sometimes to be great, to get the girl, to get the job, to have the experience of a lifetime. We must learn to fly. Romans 8:31 “What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?” If God is on our side the worst that can happen is failure, rejection. It’s in those times we learn the most. We cannot live in fear, we cannot live in doubt, so take a chance, and see how far you can get. Greatness starts with that first step outside your door, but you have to take that chance. No time like the present. Everything in this life takes work to get. Follow by faith.