We Ain't Poor

Here's a story I ran into from Florence Ferrier that really hit me:

The Sheldons were a large family in severe financial distress after a series of misfortunes. The help they received was not adequate, yet they managed their meager income with ingenuity -- and without complaint.

One fall day I visited the Sheldons in the ramshackle rented house they lived in at the edge of the woods. Despite a painful physical handicap, Mr. Sheldon had shot and butchered a bear which strayed into their yard once too often. The meat had been processed into all the big canning jars they could find or swap for. There would be meat in their diet even during the worst of the winter when their fuel costs were high.

Mr. Sheldon offered me a jar of bear meat. I hesitated to accept it, but the giver met my unspoken resistance firmly. "Now you just have to take this. We want you to have it. We don't have much, that's a fact; but we ain't poor!"

I couldn't resist asking, "What's the difference?" His answer proved unforgettable.
"When you can give something away, even when you don't have much, then you ain't poor. When you don't feel easy giving something away even if you got more'n you need, then you're poor, whether you know it or not."

I accepted and enjoyed their gift and treasured that lesson in living. In time, I saw it as a spiritual lesson, too. Knowing that all we have is provided by the Father, it seems ungracious to doubt that our needs will be met without our clinging to every morsel. 

When I feel myself resisting an urge to share what's mine -- or when I see someone sharing freely from the little he has -- I remember Mr. Sheldon saying, "We ain't poor!"

I have found that so true... Some of the poorest people people I know are also the richest, and some of the richest are actually the poorest-minded. It's something I need to keep in mind for the coming year.

Disturb Us

Disturb us, Lord, whenWe are too pleased with ourselves,When our dreams have come trueBecause we dreamed too little,When we arrived safelyBecause we sailed too close to the shore. 

Disturb us, Lord, whenwith the abundance of things we possessWe have lost our thirstFor the waters of life;Having fallen in love with life,We have ceased to dream of eternityAnd in our efforts to build a new earth,We have allowed our visionOf the new Heaven to dim. 

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,To venture on wilder seasWhere storms will show Your mastery;Where losing sight of land,We shall find the stars.
We ask you to push backThe horizons of our hopes;And to push back the futureIn strength, courage, hope, and love. 

This we ask in the name of our Captain,Who is Jesus Christ.

~ Sir Francis Drake

Dipoles, Neurons, and Us

Neurons - Your brain isn't made up of individual
thoughts but rather a web of connections.

What is a magnetic field? Truth is, you can’t make a magnetic field with just one object. You need at least two (a dipole), and the interaction between them can cause a magnetic field.

Think about neurons and thoughts for a moment. A thought isn’t an individual neuron firing; rather, a thought happens when two neurons connect. In fact, the strongest neurons aren’t the ones that are the biggest; rather, it’s the ones with the most connections. Just like magnets, it’s not the individual that really matters but the connections they make.

I think the most important things in life are like that. For instance, love. It, by definition, can’t live alone or just in one person. It must be shared to really be love. It lives in the connection between people more than the individual people.

We are also like that. When we think about who we are, we think on an individual level. However, maybe we should think of ourselves more in terms of our relationships and the influence we are on others. After all, isn’t that how wiser people define themselves? It seems like the course of human thinking (at least in America) is to define yourself by what you do when you’re young, what you’ve done when you’re older, and by your friends and family when you’re old. Also, when you think of the impact you have, it’s almost universally defined as relationships instead of individual actions or accomplishments.

So what about you? If the connections you made and the impact you had in others was more important than what you did, would you behave any differently?

Faith and Obedience

So, this is going to be one of the most ironic blog posts of all time… I’m sitting here writing about obedience. That in itself isn’t too bad, but God prompted me to write it 3 years ago and I’m just now doing it. I’ve followed God in plenty other areas of my life, but I’ve always found an excuse not to pick up writing like He’s told me I should. Anyway, here it is out of Luke 17…

5 The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”
6 He replied, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.

So Jesus rarely responds to the stated question. He often takes that question and looks at the asker’s heart question. Here for instance, the disciples don’t necessarily want faith. They were probably actually asking any of the following questions:

Lord, how can we see more miracles in our lives? (Matt 9:29, Mark 10:52)
How can we please God more? (Heb 11:6)
How can we live more like you want us to live? (Mark 4:40, Matt 17:20)

As is typical with Jesus, His answer is at first confusing, especially if you’re not looking at the underlying questions the disciples are asking. But also typically Jesus, His answer is truly brilliant and answers more than just the first question. There has been a lot written on this particular passage, but I think most of it misses the main point: it’s not about faith. You only need a mustard seed of that.

Hang in there with me as we read the next part:

7 “Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? 8 Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? 9 Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? 10 So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”

- Luke 17:7-10

No, Jesus didn’t just change the topic of conversation from faith to obedience and service… He is actually responding to every one of the questions the disciples may be asking. Did you know faith is a natural response to obedience? What if the most direct way for the disciples to increase their faith (v5) was to have the attitude Jesus was describing later on?

When I was in college, I was a Resident Assistant. During the spring break, I stayed in the halls and looked after them while everyone else was on break, and they gave me a key that opened most of the doors in my complex. Now, that was a lot of doors, and I happened to lose the key. The office had called me up and told me that I had until Friday at 4 pm to bring back the key or they were going to charge it to my student account.

I was in my last semester, and while I had the money in my account, I was planning a wedding and preparing to go on the mission field after I graduated – the last thing I needed was another bill. To top it off, the entire semester God had been pushing me to give extravagantly to others; the homeless, other college students, other people going on missions, the church… if you could name it God had probably prompted me to give to them and I had obeyed every leading. And every time He would prompt me, He would also say that He was in control of my finances. That season in my life wasn’t necessarily unusual, but its effect on my prayer life was.

I can remember my prayers from that Friday. That afternoon, I locked my door and started praying in a way that was quite unusual for me. “God, you said my finances were in your control” and “I thought you were going to take care of situations like this” – I was actually angry with Him and felt betrayed by Him. I had so much faith in God coming through in times of economic crisis that I was seriously bothered when it looked like it wasn’t going to happen.

What would my prayers have looked like if I hadn’t obeyed the other promptings He gave me? I know exactly what they would have looked like… No matter the words I used, deep in my heart I would have approached the situation resigned to my fate and knowing that it was probably punishment for the earlier times when God asked me to obey in my finances and I didn’t.

It’s just like a little kid who wants to go to the park but you tell them they need to clean their room first. If they haven’t cleaned their room, they’ll still ask you to go to the park, but the asking is half-hearted and just hopeful. However, the asking naturally changes when they’ve already obeyed; now they expect to go to the park and there is a persistence to their asking. The only thing that changed was the level of obedience shown.

Well, what happened to my situation with the key? I was praying and still quite mad at God when I happened to fall asleep. While I was sleeping, I dreamt that the key I was looking for had been stuck in a particular place in wood framework in my couch. I hadn’t seen it because it hadn’t fallen to the ground and you couldn’t see it just by taking the cushions out. As soon as I woke up, I tipped the couch over on its side and heard the key go ‘clunk’, falling from the exact place I had seen it in my dream. Embarrassed at my earlier forceful prayers, I quickly said thanks and apologized, then ran to the Res Life office to give back the key. I left there at 3:45 and none of the ladies in the office knew of the drama that had just happened in my dorm room.

Though I didn’t learn it at the time, it was through reflecting on this experience that made me realize just how interconnected faith and obedience were. Your obedience changes your prayers; when you do what He asks of you it’s the most natural thing in the world to know He’s going to look out for you. The opposite is also true; when you know you haven’t obeyed, it’s the most natural thing in the world to doubt He’s going to look after you. And while you can’t change the amount of faith you start out with, you can certainly change the amount of obedience you show.