NEVER GIVE UP

When I graduated from college the job market in Kansas City was...soft. I applied for a lot of different jobs in the area and the only place I heard back from was Caribou Coffee. It was March and I had graduated in January, so i took the job. I typically went in to work between 5-6 in the morning. This shift had a regular group of employees who worked it and we all got to know each other pretty well. A couple of the girls who worked this shift with me had attended a Christian college just outside Chicago and there were a lot of stories that were exchanged about different experiences we had either had personally, or knew about from someone else...this is one of those stories:

A missionary in Central Asia was just getting through his last phase of culture shock. He was becoming accustomed to his new neighbors, the new food, the new smells, and most of all the new people that had become a part of his everyday life. Part of his new life included daily trips to the market to get his food for the day. His route to the market would take him past the same house everyday and as time went on-and-on he began to feel the Lord pushing him to talk to the gentleman who live at the house. He put it off for awhile, but in time the push became too overwhelming and he decided he would step out in faith.

As he approached the house he was feeling extremely nervous. He didn’t know exactly what he was going to say or how he was going to approach the man so he decided to pray for words. As he knocked on the door he still didn’t know what was going to come out. Suddenly, the door opened and there stood the man right in front of him. He opened his mouth and the only thing that came out initially was air, until he finally found his voice, “I walk past your house everyday and I have felt God telling me to share who Jesus is with you.” The man stood there and finally said back to him, “You need to get off my property.” and slammed the door. The missionary turned and walked away. Determined not to give up, he thought he would try again the next day. The next morning he once again walked up and knocked on the door. “I really want to share with you what Jesus has done in my life and what He could do for you.” This time the man was not so hospitable, “I told you yesterday that you need to get off my property, if you come back tomorrow I will kill you.” The missionary turned and and fled the property. He spent that night praying, asking God to give him strength to try one more time.

As morning broke the next day the missionary knew what he had to do. He got up and walked to the front door of the man’s house. With a huge lump in his throat and mustering every bit of courage he had he knocked...and knocked again. This time, though, the door crept open and instead of a grown man’s face, he was met by the face of a little girl. Staring at each other momentarily the missionary decided this was his one opportunity to share the Gospel with this household. “I have felt God pushing me to share about Jesus Christ with you. Jesus was the Son of God and came to earth and died for our sins. He loves you and wants to have a relationship with you...” at this moment the door flung open and there stood the man, this girl’s father, from the previous two days. “I told you I would kill you if you came back!” he yelled. As he went to grab the missionary the little girl shouted, “No daddy, he’s telling the truth!” The man stopped in his tracks, looked at the little girl, and fell to his knees weeping. He hugged his little and then looked at the missionary, who was in a bit of shock, and said, “My daughter had never said a word in her life until this moment. I want to know more about this Jesus.” That day the man, his daughter, and the rest of his family gave their lives over to Christ and were baptized.

This story brought tears to my eyes when I heard it for the first time. How many opportunities do we have each day to share the love of Christ with those around us? It doesn’t necessarily have to be as blunt and straightforward as this missionary was, but be perceptive tomorrow. How many times do you drive or walk by the same homeless man or woman begging for change? How often do you buy coffee or a soda from the same person each day and ask how they are doing? Trust me, people certainly do know us by our love, or lack their of. Be brave, be bold, and share that love with others!

TRAINING SCHEDULE

Printed my training schedule for my half in April...



Man with a plan...

PERSONAL ACCOMPLISHMENT / TOOLS OF THE TRADE

I have some exciting news to share (exciting for me at least): This morning was the first time in about a month-and-a-half that I was able to run over a mile with no pain in my knee! I ran 2 miles at Macken Park in North Kansas City. I split the run into two separate runs with stretching in-between, but it was still an accomplishment! I am glad to know that the treatments I have been using are beginning to produce some results. There is still a long way to go, but so long as progress is being made.

As I talk with people about what I am doing to get better I thought it might be interesting to put up some pictures and explain some of the treatments that I have been using to help others. What I have learned is that ITBS can strike any runner, so getting out in front of it might help some of my runner friends out there.

These are the tools I have been using for the past two weeks in order to get relief.



Foam Roller- This is my biggest weapon to fight off the pain. The basic idea is this; lay the roller on the floor, lay my leg on its side on top of the roller and roll my leg up and down the outside part (where the IT Band is located). Depending on how tight the band is at the time this can be excruciatingly painful, but as it loosens relief comes.

IT Band Support- This elastic band wraps around my leg right above my knee when I run. The basic idea is that it keeps things in place and helps prevents the band from rubbing on the bones in my knee.

Voltaren Gel- This is an anti-inflammatory cream used by arthritis patients. It helps keeps the swelling down during and after the run. Very helpful.

Frozen Peas- Once again, this keeps the swelling down.

Like I said, the idea came to me that since this can flare up at any time with anyone I wanted to give some tips that you can use to stay out in front of this kind of injury. Stay tuned for more updates.

PS- Don’t worry, this blog is not just going to become a running update type blog...I’m just pretty pumped about the progress I am making!

ANNOUNCEMENT : HALF-MARATHON IN APRIL

If you read my post from a few weeks ago then you know I love running. Today, I finally took the plunge...I registered for my first half-marathon.

I have been nursing my injury and am confident that I will be in the proper shape by April to participate in and finish this race and have a blast doing it! The race is called the “Rock the Parkway Half-Marathon”. The course looks so awesome and it looks like an awesome race to participate in!

Here’s a link to the race:
http://www.rocktheparkway.com/index.php

Keep checking back as I update on my preparation!

SO EXCITED!

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY...MOOONNNEY!

Last week I finished the book Radical. If I haven’t said this yet, I would 100% recommend every Christian read this book. Dr. Platt emphasizes the challenge we have from Christ to live “radically” in his name, casting off the world and taking on him as what we live for. Shameless plug = over.

As I had my quiet time this morning I finished up reading through Ephesians and moved on to 1 John. It had been awhile since I had read from 1 John so what I reading was refreshing and rejuvenating, for sure. It further convicted me, however, about what I do with the gifts God has given me.

My wife and I went through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University class back in our first year of marriage. We went in to the class thinking we were probably in an average amount of debt, but wanted to work towards getting out from under that burden so we would be free from debt when we left for the mission field. The class completely changed the way we budgeted and managed our finances and through the Biblical principles taught in the class, and the provisions of God, we managed to pay off all of our debt. But that is not the point I am getting at, I say all that because part of the budgeting system that Dave Ramsey lays out includes a certain amount of “personal money” each person gets a month to spend on whatever they choose. The number can vary depending on your income level, but it is something that, if you’re married, your spouse can have no say over what you do with it...it is YOUR money. Most of what I have spent my personal money on could be summed up in two different categories: Starbucks and Diet Coke. I wish I was joking, but probably 75%-80% of MY money goes to satisfy my caffeine problem. Over the past few months, though, I have been convicted about my view on this money. As you see from the previous sentences I viewed this money as if it were MINE and not his. I’m not trying to be cheesy in saying that, but honestly, if we are called to honor God with how we handle the provisions he gives us, where is the honor in Diet Coke and lattes? In his letter, John says:

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world— the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. 1 John 2:15-17

Wow...that hits like a ton of bricks. After taking a hard look at where my heart was, it was obvious it needed some refocusing.

Money is such a touchy issue, isn’t it? How many of you are cringing reading this? I know I’m cringing over-and-over as I write it. I think that’s why God’s Word spends so much time talking about it. He knew it would be easy for us to create an idol of it. It is truly fascinating, though, what God will do to your heart once you completely give all things over to him. Think of what could be done for the Kingdom if we laid all our money before God as a sacrifice to use as he see’s fit.

It Just Makes Sense

From February 2010 until June 2011 I worked as the Director of Recruitment for Avant Ministries. Most of you who read my blog already know this, so it really must seem redundant to post in a blog almost two years after the fact. But, working as a recruiter could be compared to working in sales in other industries, and with good reason. You have to really understand and buy into whatever it is you are recruiting for, whether it’s a college sports team or a mission agency. Your job is to get the right people through the door. Part of what makes a good recruiter is knowing the most they can about whatever it is they are recruiting for because who knows what someone will ask you about your organization!

One day, while speaking to a class of freshman in an Urban Ministries class at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, I realized I was being completely hypocritical in my pitch to the students giving me their, almost, undivided attention. One of the biggest plugs I made when I talked about doing ministry beyond the walls of Moody was developing relationships while they spent four years with the same people and going out into the world with these relationships already established and doing ministry together! It makes sense, right? One of the biggest keys to ministry is developing community and utilizing the gifts of others to accomplish a certain goal, and an easy way to develop gifts and establish community is spending four years in one place training together. What I realized as I was talking with these students was that I was not even practicing what I was asking them to do!

Today, as I was reading through There Is No Time by Dr. Paul Nyquist I was given a glimmer of hope, though. TINT is a fictional story that explains the principles behind Avant’s Short-Cycle Church Planting method (I’m pretty sure they trademarked that phrase so...act accordingly). One chapter in the story documents the reconnection four classmates go through after spending years apart doing completely different things with their lives. The thing that reconnects them is their passion to do ministry together. Like I said, I had renewed hope!

In the past few months I have been thinking a lot about friends I have all over the country and world serving the Lord in one sense or another. Whether pastoring in a community in Oklahoma, planting churches in Mexico, working with street kids in Kansas City, or serving their family in Indiana there are people all over this world who we have grown to love and know and who it would be a pleasure to serve with.

This is definitely not to say that you cannot meet others beyond your time in school and graft them in, if you will, but it does make sense to be looking for those who you can serve with while you are training and preparing to go out and reach the world for Christ. I’m not sure what God holds for Meghan and I in the future, but I am praying that we would get to serve and be a light for this world with people we love and care for because...it just makes sense.

Running -- Where am I finding my identity?

For about a month-and-a-half I have been working through a running injury. The injury has proven to be one of persistence and, at times, very painful. The official name of the injury is “Illiotibial Band Syndrome” or ITBS. It is an injury that is caused when the IT Band that runs from your hip to our knee becomes inflamed and rubs over a bone in the knee causing it to become twisted and scarred. It is a fairly common running injury and is not “serious” in the sense that it will require surgery. However, what it does require is patience...I tend to struggle in this area.

Even more than this, though, I find myself struggling with something much deeper than the itch to go out for a run. In order to explain I need to tell a bit of backstory.

When I left for home from school following the 2005-2006 school year I weighed between 275 and 280 pounds at my heaviest. The final twenty-five to thirty of those pounds came in the previous school year when I decided to stay home and enroll in classes at a local community college in Kansas City. The story goes that my brother and I had a coupon for Pizza Hut that gave you a medium pizza and 16 chicken wings for $10. We had one copy of this coupon, however our delivery driver never took the coupon so about 3 times a week we would order a pizza and chicken wings. Weight gain quickly followed. Well, one day while watching an episode of The Simpsons, in which, Homer was trying to get on disability by being “morbidly obese” I realized I had a problem. The weight that Homer needed to reach in order to be considered morbidly obese was 300 pounds. I realized that even if this was a made up number, I had no business being so close to that weight. I made the decision that night that I would do something about my weight.

The next day I drove out to the track at the high school I graduated from, dug the closest shoes I had to running shoes out of my trunk, and started running. I didn’t have a plan, a goal, a coach, or really even much motivation beyond not wanting to be considered morbidly obese. That day I ran one mile...and it sucked! I remember rounding the last turn on the track thinking my chest felt like it was on fire, my legs felt like they were jello, and that I would be puking my guts out as soon as I stopped, but I pressed on to finish that fourth lap. After I had walked a lap, caught my breath, and stabilized my wobbly legs I felt an overwhelming sense of accomplishment. I returned to that track everyday that summer. I eventually increased my distance to two miles, then to three, then started running a trail after finishing my two miles on the track! Nothing would stop me from running that summer. By the time I was ready to head back to school in the Fall of 2006 I had lost 50 pounds in three months! The sense of accomplishment was insane!

Eventually, a funny thing happened. Instead of making myself get out and go running, I began to want to be out doing it. I began to love it! I couldn’t get enough! Running became my time to relieve stress from the day (or previous day) and where I would spend time with the Lord. When my dad passed away in the summer of 2007 it was my way to cope when things felt too heavy to bear. Running became part of my life, my identity. By the fall of 2007 I had lost 100 pounds. For the first time in my life I truly felt confident in my own skin. It was a great feeling.

Now that you know more about the backstory of how running has become a part of my life, it should make understanding this next part a little easier.

When this injury first appeared I thought it was something that would require me to be off for a week or so and then could go back to business as usual. As I began to find out more about it I realized that it was not going to be that easy...not even close. As time went on I began to feel myself slipping into a sort of depression. You see, I had wrapped up so much of my identity and different aspects of my life into this one activity that not being able to go out and do it drove me crazy. The only thing that was going to fix my knee was treatment and rest...a lot of rest. As I started to think more about the time when this injury sprang up I remembered it was at about this time that I had asked God to break me down completely. I asked that He take control of my life. Bare with me here, but I feel that this is part of His process. Taking away the area of my life that I was putting so much of my identity made me put my attention on Him. It was during this time that I began to feel God move in me stronger than ever before. Don’t get me wrong, I still hate that I can’t run and am probably overly self-conscience about gaining weight because I can’t run, but knowing what God is currently doing in my life outweighs all those feelings!

Romans 10

This morning I found myself looking through the movies available to watch on Netflix instant watch and was not really expecting to find anything great to watch. They do a pretty good job of putting new titles up, but for the most part, I don’t typically find all that much. Well, this morning I noticed they had just put up a movie called Beyond the Gates of Splendor. This film is a documentary that catalogs the ministry of five missionaries (Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, and Pete Fleming) who were killed by the Waodani Indians in the jungle of Ecuador in 1956. I wont go into much more detail on this post so if you have never heard the story of these five missionaries I would encourage you to watch this movie or the movie The End of the Spear.

As I watched and heard the stories that each of the wives told of their husbands I kept thinking back to some Scripture I have been continually reading lately.

Romans 10:13-15

For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!

This passage has been playing over-and-over in my head lately. One thing that stuck out to me as I listened to the interviews in the movie with the families of each of the martyred missionaries was that there was no anger toward the people that killed their loved ones in cold blood. Instead, there was love...a love rooted in Jesus Christ. You see the Waodani indians, at that time, were probably the most violent culture that lived on this earth. They had two laws they lived their lives by; autonomy and vengeance. If someone made you feel that you could not live your life the way you wanted, they would kill that person, no questions asked. Even knowing this, five families believed that the Waodani still deserved to hear the Gospel and about the love of Jesus Christ. What many would view as a defeat proved to be quite the opposite. The families of each missionary continued to minister to the Waodani tribe and eventually saw most of them come to accept Christ. A people who once knew absolutely nothing of love in any sense came to know the truest form of love through those who were willing to pay the ultimate price for the Gospel. I’m sure if you were to ask them they would not view their martyrdom as anything but what they were expected to do. I’m sure if you were to ask them, they would say that Christ dying on the cross set the bar as to what we should give up in order that others may know the message of the Gospel.

God has been asking me to think about what it truly means to sacrifice for Him lately. If we truly want to pursue the heart of God we must make Him our only desire. In that, we must be willing to give up everything...including our lives for His sake. Being willing doesn’t always mean that we will be asked to do so, but that’s not the point. The point is that we are all called to live a life that desires to be His. In one of his journals, Jim Elliot wrote this before he was killed:

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

Paul says it this way in Philippians:

“For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”

4.5 billion people in the world have no idea what it is to have a Savior that loves them enough to die for them. They don’t know because no one has told them! As Paul said in Romans, how could they know if no one is willing to go tell them? Yes, you could lose everything...but take comfort in knowing that what stands to be gained is so much greater than that which can be taken away!

Impacting the World

This summer I started reading the book Radical by David Platt.  Most of you who know me also know that reading a book is a marathon not a sprint for me...on second thought it's probably more of an Ironman.  When I opened the book back up to where I had last left off (around page 90 or so) I decided it would be best to regain some context on what I would begin reading during this day's time.  In doing this, I came across this:

that still leaves 4.5 billion people who at this moment are separated from God in their sin and will spend an eternity in hell

In a world where McDonald's serves "billions-and-billions" of their cheeseburgers all over the world the gravity of that statistic can be lost.

I want so much to make an impact on this number.  I am beginning to realize that this does not mean that i have to remove myself from where I am to make that impact.  I'm not saying that i do not desire to go to another country and bring the gospel to a lost people, but it is foolish to think I would do that if I am not even doing that where I currently am.  How many opportunities have I overlooked all in the name of pursuing a degree or pursuing a "future ministry"?  I'm not saying that working towards something is incorrect or wrong, but I feel as if I have let that goal take my focus off the bigger picture.

Plans can change, whether by your choosing or the choices of others.  What you think you are working towards or building up to can become afterthoughts so quickly.  Plans and goals are not wrong, but we should not let them get in the way of something we can be doing right now.

I will always have a passion and desire to do missions overseas, but am convicted in the fact that I have probably missed out on doing ministry here and now because I have been focused on the "if and when".  No more excuses.