The Dark Side of Being Dependable

Faithful. Dependable. Hard-working. Servant-hearted. That’s what comes with the name Reinagel; that’s what we as a family do. All of those things in themselves are great, but there is a bit of a dark side that comes with it. And it’s unlike a drinking or gambling addiction; the people around us benefit from our darkness so they are rarely interested in changing it or helping us get free.

Dependable - this one is probably the easiest to see. If you give something to me, it gets done, period. Even if I’m up to 3 am. We are all the same way. But there are a lot of ungodly attitudes and thoughts that end up coming along with this:

• A massive level of stress. We confuse leadership and care-taking as worry; if anything is going on in our sphere of influence, it’s our responsibility to make right. We take burdens that were never meant for us and instead meant for God.
• An over-reliance on ourselves. I don’t mind working till 3 am but I really hesitate to ask others to make the same level of commitment, even if it’s their project. We forget how many people God has placed in our lives to help. The biggest issue is this is a stumbling block to true discipleship - we are called to teach people our way of life, not just doctrine. As such, if we are not inviting them into the same level of commitment and sacrifice we have, we are not giving them the opportunities to have the same level of faith we have. Yes, we need to model it, but we need to ask others to make the same kind of decisions.
• Slackers around us thrive. Sadly, when people find out we will pick up the slack for them, this often means slackers thrive and others aren’t held accountable for their actions because we’ll make sure it gets done anyway. We don’t realize our behavior feeds this and it’s one more thing we need to give to God.

While dependability is an amazing trait, there are attitudes and hang-ons when we treat it as one of the most important things in our lives or as part of our identity. Solutions:

• Give it to Jesus first, not only if we can’t handle it. Putting a task or situation in God’s hands needs to be the first thing we do, not what we do at 4 am if we are literally unable to fulfill the task. After we give it to Him, we can only take responsibility for what He gives back to us. Remember the team God has called around us, and that God may be calling us to things even more difficult than staying up all night; He may be calling us to confront someone about how their actions are affecting us or the team!
• Take work as a fraction of our God-given responsibilities. Yes, we are called to work. But we are also called to our families, friends, personal time with Jesus, and community. We need to make work decisions in the perspective of the greater call on our life.
• Do not walk into a situation assuming the job needs to get done. There are worse things than deadlines not being completed; if the deadlines are unrealistic and you need more people on the team, you are doing your team a disservice by hiding that fact and agreeing to work forever on it at home. At the university, when I was hired the department was saying we all need to work extra hard because there was a staff shortage. So I did; I worked and worked and there were months I left home before the kids woke up and got back after they went to bed. I kept giving my all; years passed and the same story kept happening. Finally, my last year there I realized that the department was perpetually understaffed and would stay that way as long as I was putting in 1.5 people of work. The department had the money, but why spend it when they could spend me without any consequences?
• Don’t over-elevate personal growth or holiness. Yes, we are all called to grow in Christ and in our own professions. However, we are also called to disciple others. In some of the cases we take as personal growth opportunities, God is really trying to grow the people around us; if we don’t see it, we can rob them of opportunities to buy in, sacrifice, or give their lives to a greater calling. Yes, we often secretly complain about the level of commitment of the people around us, but are we at fault for that? Just another thing to give to Jesus.

So yes, all of these traits are good but they shouldn’t make up our identity. In fact, elevating them to positions they shouldn’t be in can be limiting our more core callings in life: our freedom in Christ and our greater mandate to make disciples. If you’re reading this and identify with it, I urge you not to just add it to ‘the list’ of things to improve, but to deal with it now. It’s so ingrained in our identity that it won’t go away without dedicated focus and a willingness to give everything up to Jesus.

 

Multiplication

 “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.” -Genesis 1:28

We were made to manage and govern. What starts with control of our own lives grows to governing a family, a small group, various projects, then employees, departments, and organizations… The more faithful you are, the more God puts you in charge of. I’ve seen this happen even with stay-at-home moms; when they govern their kids wisely, other parents flock to them to hear their advice. While their domain may appear small to our eyes, the reality is a much larger impact.

The results of good governance can be seen in these verses: fruitfulness and multiplication. Whenever something is being managed well, it will multiply. While I have usually only looked at these verses from a people perspective (that we are supposed to multiply people) I actually think it goes much deeper, talking about all aspects of our lives like the rest of the passage is saying. Multiplication:

• Deals with a geometric increase, and has a compound interest-like growth curve. Addition can be seductive because you get results faster and quicker. In multiplication if you do the right thing for 20 years, you may see little to no fruit for the first 10, then the growth starts and the impact is way more than addition.
• Multiplication implies the fruitfulness of the fruit. For example, in finances getting a salary is addition; every month the amount goes up. But that money isn’t producing more money, whereas in an investment it would be. Addition to the church is where we are adding people to the pews but not training them. Full discipleship is multiplication, and each disciple in turn creates other disciples. Even though the process is painful and slow, when the compounding effect kicks in there is great fruit.
• Multiplication can work in positive and negative directions. 10 x 5 is 50, but -10 times the same number is -50. We need to be careful when we have been elevated in governance because both our strengths and weaknesses are multiplied.

We spend so much time in management setting goals and talking about what are positive results, and it drastically changes depending on what you are managing. However, in one word, God sums up all of his expectations and the results of good management: multiplication. It’s absolutely true… In the library I want people who can multiply the attendance and impact of the books, in the sewing school I want people who can multiply their teaching and products, in the IT sector I want people who can multiply my investment in them.

I am also amazed at how different from accepted reality this one word is… Most people think good management is stability; things will look just like when you left them, but we need to know God expects more and to the people under us we need to give them the freedom and expectation of multiplication.

 

Give to Those Who Ask

Fair warning: today isn’t about a great revelation but a great struggle.

“Give to those who ask, and don’t turn away from those who want to borrow.” -Matthew 5:42

I can say I have never hated a verse so much as this one. Carla and I have always tried to do what the Bible says, but this one almost killed us. When we were in Dondo we were trying to do this, but we were surrounded by need and people asking! Even worse, the people who kept asking were exactly the ‘evil people’ it mentions in verse 39. I knew what we were doing wasn’t helpful long-term to the culture and I was angry at God for putting such a stupid command in the Bible. To make matters worse, this was consistently preached in our organization. We were surrounded by people who had given up cars, houses, and businesses to be on the mission field - the missionaries themselves were extremely generous and good people but the people around us were greedy and backbiting, and I couldn’t help but think it was our attitude that made them that way.

If we had anything, we gave it away to others. It was sobering when we realized some of the Mozambicans had more than we did but were still begging. One year, all the pastors were asking for bikes. We were able to get hundreds of bikes in a container to them and distribute the bikes throughout the province. The next year, people were asking for motorcycles. To put it in perspective, Carla and I had our clothes and a computer - no transportation, no home, etc at that time. I was extremely discouraged at the ungrateful attitude but they laughed it off as "development." I don’t know whether they meant to drive us into the ground with their constant requests but we left hurting and broken and they walked away with their faith in the ability of Americans instead of God.

Anyway, I still don’t like this verse. I don’t think it’s in the character of God. I still don’t really understand it. I have essentially survived by surrounding myself with givers. My receptionist is a great blessing because of the number of people she fends off. What got me thinking of this verse again was a conversation I had on Friday - I brought this up and Bernardo brought up the scriptural command for multiplication; which one is more forcefully commanded by scripture? I had rarely connected multiplication to finances, just to discipleship and talents and abilities.

I have lost friends over this verse. I have seen people leave the church because they didn’t want to pay me back… I don’t know another verse that I have seen so much pain from. Here are my thoughts on this verse as it stands: 

 

• If I’m living this out but the outcome is not consistent with the godly outcomes in scripture, I may not be practicing this verse appropriately.
• “Do not resist an evil person” - um, there are clearly many places in scripture where we ARE supposed to resist an evil person! At least in the soldier example, resistance is talking about unjust people who have authority over you, not in situations where your resistance will actually change the situation. Also, verse 47 & 48 make it clear that Jesus is more concerned for our hearts than the situation. In really digging into verse 42, we have to keep the rest of this in context.
• I don’t live in the setting where Jesus is talking… While this is a dangerous way to describe a Bible verse, consistently in scripture there are differences in the way you treat brothers and the way you treat foreigners. In Mozambique, people can run away from me and I don’t have the same securities I do with people of my own culture. I am not in the same culture and the attitude towards money is different. As shocking as it is, I don’t actually understand real need here: I used to give money to people who were starving all the time, but when I appointed a committee of people to handle my giving for me, they just laughed and started sharing stories of the number of days they had gone without food! No, the real emergencies here were medical emergencies and houses without any covering on them during the rainy season.
• As a foreigner, I am not going to know the character of the people around me as much as the local people. At the Dondo base, the Mozambicans who could speak English were the more well-off and consistently received the most donations; even when we asked the visitors to talk with us before giving something, that seemed to be the one rule no one obeyed. Now I wait for my team to come with someone else in need; that way I truly know there is a great need.
• Though it has taken a long time to get here, I also believe these verses are not superseding the importance of our other responsibilities; our family or our ministry.
• I think this has something to do with the way I was taught to say no also. How do you say “I can’t” when you can? It’s 1,000 times harder to say “I choose not to”.

In essence, the will of God is multiplication His way towards His ends. It’s a delicate balance of multiplying what we’ve been given, looking after God’s interests like the poor, and doing it all His way. It takes a deep relationship with God to know what areas I need to improve on right now.

 

Measured According to Faith

“Don’t think you are better than you really are. Be honest in your evaluation of yourselves, measuring yourselves by the faith God has given us.” -Romans 12:3

It’s not really clear whether we are measuring ourselves by the faith we are given, or measuring our actions in accordance with our faith, but because I believe God is just and we have free will, I think it’s the latter. The former, you can’t change your score - you are measured BY how much faith you have. The latter, you can change it; you are measured ACCORDING to your faith. 

After following God into crazy circumstances for so long, I have found Carla and I have a deeper level of latent faith. I know people who are hugely stressed out if they don’t have money after 6 months. Others are constantly stressed over retirement. If we are judging according to faith, then my act of obedience and faith in trusting God over thousands in a week can be equivalent of someone else’s faith of trusting Him when they don’t know where the money will come from in 6 months. Everyone has a different threshold, their limit of when they freak out into anxiety--and what they freak out over. 

I have, time and again, seen God pull through in bringing the right people, dealing with documents and licenses, resolving intense disputes, and uniting the church. Someone without the same experiences is judged at a lower level because they haven’t seen the things I have.

There is an expectation God has for us that when we see a miracle or His provision in a powerful way that we are changed. Think of Jesus in the boat and the disciples were worried about bread. Jesus’s questioning brought them back to the 2 instances where he multiplied bread then said they didn’t understand. If they had really understood the miracle, they would no longer have been worried about bread!

How about Chorazon and Besaida? “If the miracles performed in you were done in Sodom and Gammorah, they would have repented in sackcloth and ashes” (Matt 11:21). They would be judged harsher because they saw the hand of God and didn’t believe. To really understand a miracle means understanding it’s a revelation of an aspect of God, and that our faith grows in that situation.

There are a couple interesting points about faith to pull out here:

• Faith should be continuously growing. Just like in weight lifting, if you are not able to lift more this month than last, you’re doing something wrong. In the same way, if our circumstances aren’t building and growing our faith muscles, we are doing something wrong and have an opportunity to live differently.
• We need to be kind and gracious to the people who have less faith than us. Make a point to see where your friend’s faith is at and encourage and support them to take the next step.
• The measure of heaven is faith. It’s not money or power or programs or numbers, but how we make decisions based on what God says and not on what our eyes see. Sadly for those of us who like numbers, that is difficult to quantify, but we always need to keep this in mind.
• Don’t judge others too harshly, especially if they came from a more difficult background - after all, we need to look through heaven’s eyes. However, we can expect everyone following Christ to be growing in faith.

 

Walking on Water

This whole weekend God was talking to me about faith and stepping out. Friday was a humbling time of realizing how much faith I used to work in, and realizing that I probably wouldn’t make the same insane decisions now. Saturday was reflection on how important faith was to a relationship with God, and Sunday was about walking on water.

In Matthew 14:22-31, Peter saw something Jesus was doing and understood something about discipleship that we often miss. If Jesus is doing it, it’s accessible to us - he is inviting us into it. Often we sit and wait to be called. Peter asked - “Lord, can I do the same thing?” He looked for it and understood that, as a disciple, he was called to live exactly as his master lived. What I find super interesting is that he was still chided for having little faith.

He started out okay, walking on the water and having his eyes fixed on Jesus. But when he started seeing what he was doing and seeing the issues around him, he started to sink.

What about the 11 other disciples that were still left in the boat? Yes, they joked with Peter afterwards, teasing him for almost drowning and having to have Jesus rescue him. But Jesus didn’t seem to mind, and Peter experienced the miracle of walking on water. If Peter had little faith, how much did the other disciples have?

We fit into these two categories as well. Some people are like Peter, able to jump out in faith but sustaining their initial passion and commitment is incredibly difficult. Others are like the 11, where their difficulty is getting started and understanding what their lives could be like in Christ. They are waiting for explicit orders from God before moving, even though there is a world of possibilities open for those who ask.

If you are a Peter, understand that walking on the water is not an instantaneous action but a commitment - you have to start strong and keep going strong. It’s not enough to have an outburst of faith but you have to live it out. And whatever you do, don’t look down! Keep your eyes focused on Jesus and walk toward Him. Let His words carry more weight than your own experiences, understanding, and even the laws of physics. If this is you, understand your weakness and know that your biggest battle won’t be in the getting started but the continuing in faith.

If you are one of the 11, don’t let life pass you by. You don’t want to live your life thinking “what would have happened if I had stepped out, or even just asked?” Don’t just be satisfied with miracles happening around you in others’ lives, but look for what God wants to do in yours. God is always at work - He is working in the poor, the rich, in systems and in homes. In fact, He’s doing so many things that sometimes He is just looking for the one part of the kingdom that you want to participate in. There is not a single thing Jesus did that He didn’t invite his disciples to participate in. Raising the dead, meetings with Moses and Elijah, baptizing, feeding thousands… Everything He did was open for his disciples to join and do the same thing. All you have to do is ask.

 

Reflection on Romans 12:2

 

Romans 12:2 “To not be conformed to the ways of this world; rather be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Nothing works the way the world thinks it does. Relationships ala a world don’t work. Finances don’t work. Families don’t work. We grow up understanding so many things wrong.

The good news is there’s an opportunity to change it all. The Bible is full of wisdom for every aspect of life, and every time we read it we have the opportunity to either stick with our old way of doing things or take the Bible route. The struggle is that, often times, we see few people doing it the right way, and it’s difficult to see that it works if you’ve never seen it done well. It takes faith.

Even with my family who loved and served God, there was a lot to faith that I had never understood and hadn’t seen modeled. The level of trust God asks us to have in him, the often extreme ways He provides for us, and the whole concept of adventure was absent in how I grew up. We served God but our lives looked fairly normal.  

Compare that to our lives now… I had no experience and no training in how to serve God off the grid - how to serve outside of the traditional church or missions environment. I found myself searching the scriptures for answers to the problems I was having. Often God would bring others around me to more clearly explain a biblical way of doing something. But in everything God was moving.

In a major way, I was really lucky. I knew our call was different and I didn’t have anything to compare it to, so I looked for the answer in scripture. Would I have done the same thing if I had been called to a more traditional position? Would I have chosen transformation and renewal as opposed to tradition and the way we’ve always done it? Maybe that’s the very reason God often calls people outside of the traditional church / Bible school structure.

 

Love is Having Difficult Conversations

Be on guard. Stand firm in the faith. Be courageous. Be strong. And do everything in love. -1 Corinthians 16:13-14

The thing that immediately hits me is that you need to be firm in your faith, courageous, and strong in order to love. It’s like the first part is preparing you for the second. Once you are grounded and strong, you can love more.

Love is risk. Love is having difficult conversations with people when they don’t want to hear it. Love is courageous because you don’t know if you’ll be loved back. You are sticking your emotions out there and don’t know if it will be returned.

As the boss, love is having those difficult conversations when the situation is small and before it gets out of hand and their job is on the line. I have to meet with a team member this week because he is showing too many signs of pride and isn’t getting along with the rest of the team. I don’t want to, but love is pointing out what I see now and giving him the opportunity to change rather than waiting for it to get bad enough to fire him.

As a ministry partner, love is standing in the gap and speaking the truth even when I don’t want to. To really show love, I have to stand up, against the other missionaries and on behalf of the Mozambicans. We have a train-wreck of a situation that’s about to happen with the school we are starting - there is a high possibility we’ll start in January with just 8 kids unless a massive shift happens in the core team’s thinking. I don’t want to fight the rest of the team, but in this situation, love looks like calling out the situation for what it is and fighting for the poorest before the problem metastasizes. Running away or staying silent is easy and it won’t work. What is difficult is prayerfully building relationships and finding what I can say to each person to make them realize the situation.

God, give me strength today. Teach me courage, for I want to show real love.

 

Be Ready

 Be dressed for service and keep your lamps burning, as though you were waiting for your master to return from the wedding feast. Then you will be ready to open the door and let him in the moment he arrives and knocks. The servants who are ready and waiting for his return will be rewarded. I tell you the truth, he himself will seat them, put on an apron, and serve them as they sit and eat! He may come in the middle of the night or just before dawn. But whenever he comes, he will reward the servants who are ready. -Luke 12:35-38

The servants who are ready will be rewarded… This is such an interesting passage. How would the people at the time have taken it? Servants, when their master isn’t around, typically act like the house is theirs… They watch TV, hang out, sometimes eat food from the kitchen or generally do what they want when they don’t have any specific task to do. But Jesus is saying there is a reward for those who are attentive, who are always looking for when Jesus will come back.

I think this applies to our daily life as well, not just when Jesus comes back. It’s important to be ready and waiting for God, whenever He wants to give us orders. God shouldn’t need to wait for us to be prepared - we need to already be prepared and waiting to follow His lead at a moment’s notice.

“He may come in the middle of the night or just before dawn” - I have rarely had God speak to me about doing something when it was the ideal time for me. Often when God places a burden in my heart, I am in the grocery store and it’s for another person, or I am really tired. Other times I just don’t feel like it. But that doesn’t stop the call of God - we always need to be ready to respond to His calling.

 

Faith

 And it is impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who wants to come to him must believe that God exists and that he rewards those who sincerely seek him. -Hebrews 11:6

I think every big concept in Christianity can be simplified looking through the lenses of relationship. Many concepts that make no sense when looking doctrinally seem simple when applied to relationships. Jesus taught like that, constantly using imagery of fathers, sons, brides, bridegrooms, mothers etc. I think we in the west prefer Paul’s theology because it fits better with our way of thinking but the beauty of how Jesus taught is its universalness - it transcends culture because we all have fathers and mothers and brothers. Logic varies by location and mindset but there are always relationships, and in each other them God has baked in golden nuggets of truth.

“Without faith”... What would a relationship without faith look like? Where your spouse says something but because you don’t see it you don’t believe it? When they say “trust me” and you don’t? I would think you can make a corollary - “without faith, it’s impossible to please your spouse!”

You can just as easily tie trust in - trust is the unseen, the belief where faith is action based on that faith. When I say I’ll be home at 5:30, trust is Carla believing it and faith is her prepping dinner for then and telling the kids to wait by the gate. When she says she’ll pay the electric bill, trust is not worrying about it. If I don’t have trust, I still very much feel the weight of the unpaid electric bill until I have proof that it’s taken care of.

Faith gives us the ability to live in the future now. Like with the electric bill, I have the opportunity to live as if my concerns are already resolved and if God has already come through. Actually, thinking about this some of the more insane aspects of Pentecostal faith are starting to come into focus for me. The declaring something as if it already happened, for me, smacked of a lack of integrity and was used as such, saying you’re healed when you are clearly not. However, I can see the original sentiment before the doublespeak crept in.

What kind of things can I do today to show my faith in God? How can I act in complete confidence that God will do what He has promised?  

Lord, show me today my weaknesses and the places I don’t trust in you. Help my unbelief and guide me into a life of even more faith.

 

Faith

Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen. It gives us assurance about things we cannot see. Through faith, the people in the days of old earned a good reputation. -Hebrews 11:1-2

Faith. One of Jesus’s favorite topics and something I think is often misused. In the evangelical community it is often ephemeral, fleeting, and more akin to hope. Faith is in the Bible, in the creation, and in doctrine, but it has little to no impact on your daily walk. The Bible is clear it means more:

• Faith is never talked about when discussing whether the Bible is true or not. Rather faith is something much deeper - believing that the God of the Bible is true and that He can act in your situation.
• Faith is always expressed as action. Journeying to see Jesus or yelling for him against his disciple’s orders. The model of everything written in Hebrews is, “By faith, ____ did _____”.
• Often the difficulty in the Evangelical community doesn’t come at whether God can but whether He wants to. The community echoes the leper saying “If you are willing, you can make me whole.” He knew God could, but he wasn’t sure if God was willing.
• This kind of belief can look weak, especially in cultures accustomed to displays of power accompanying their belief. Also, you don’t need a relationship with God for it to work, which is what I would consider the main flaw.
• The promises in the Bible are to be taken in context but are not for you personally unless God says they are.

In the Pentecostal community it’s seen as a way to get God to do your bidding. “I have faith so it must happen” is the general attitude. Promises are seen as binding no matter who they were given to or the context. There are a couple problems with this:

• We were never supposed to do miracles outside of relationship with God, but it’s clear in the scriptures this can happen. Such as with the 7 sons of Sceva or Matt 7:22-23 where Jesus says you can do miracles in His name but not enter heaven.
• There is an unhealthy focus on the external gifts of the Spirit verses the internal fruits of the Spirit. Gifts of the Spirit are taken as signs that you are approved by God, which is not consistent with the rest of scripture.
• Faith is 1 dimensional - in victory alone. The faith in difficult times - of Job or Hebrews 11:35-38 are discounted or seen as less than the faith of the powerful and victorious.
• This look on faith again, doesn’t need God.

When you read the Bible, it takes faith. You are reading something that looks nothing like your everyday life. The world has different rules - often times Jesus says something the complete opposite of what you know from your experiences. Lead by serving? Treat your enemies kindly? Forgiveness in a world that says never forget? Each of these is a choice - either your life and experiences are true or the Bible is true. Belief is choosing to believe the Bible over your circumstances, and faith is acting on that belief.

I believe faith was never meant to be a siloed experience; it is always meant to draw you into a relationship with God. Every time you see something in the Bible that you don’t see in your life, God is asking, “Do you want to do this with me?” It’s an invitation to a deeper level of relationship and understanding. When you read something in the Bible and the Spirit within you burns, it’s time for a personal change.

God, show me your ways. Help me walk in faith, and let me see every disconnect between my life and the Bible as an opportunity for growth.