Titles

As humans we strive to have recognition in our lives and often that comes from being given or having achieved a status to have gained a title. A title is just what it is a title. It is not our identity, it is not our existence and it is not always fitting and proper to whom we really are in this world. If we can learn to accept, that we are what we are and not rely on names or titles to define us. then we will surely be open to understand that which God has placed in us. Titles place both expectations and limitations on people. God does not have titles for his children. There are no distinctions in His love for us based on names or titles; there is no less an expectation for all His children to do His will because of a title.

The evidence is quit clear, once you understand the base concept. Look at the world around you and observe the actions of all the people you meet or know. Does one need to have the title of “Leader” to be a leader of people? Does one need to have the title of Stephen Minister to care for people in need? Does one need to have the title of Teacher to train and be a mentor to people? Does one need the title of Pastor to minister and share God’s love and hope for His creation?

Some times those who have earned and have been granted a title feel a burden to live up to the expectations of that title. Often times, those expectations are either self imposed or have been planted by others who have defined the role and responsibility on their terms or at least on earthly terms for those who carry that title. This then can limit and this then create boundaries for those who God has chosen to be what He created them to be.

Earthly definitions of who we are and how we are to respond by designation of our title can lead us to hide and to hold ourselves back from who we are to be by His design. I have been blessed to have been taught by those who are not “Teachers”, I have been blessed to have been cared for by people who are not “Ministers”, and I have been fortunate to have been counseled by those who are not “Counselors”.

We are who we are because that is who God made us to be. When we can open ourselves up to accept that earthly titles mean nothing in God’s kingdom, then and only then can we be free to be His creation.

Could we start again, please?

I’ve been living to see you,
Dying to see you, but it shouldn’t be like this.
This was unexpected, what do I do now?
Could we start again please?

These are the words from a song in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. In the production the song is presented by Mary, Peter and James shortly after the arrest of Jesus.

Put yourself in those days and you are a direct witness and follower of Christ. From the religious teachings of your youth, you know that God will send the Messiah and yet while you were with Him, you doubt and do not yet see Jesus as the Son of God. Then upon His capture your mind suddenly races and you recall all that He has done, all that you have witnessed and you begin to see that things add up differently then you expected. Now you begin to realize that He had been with you along.

Can you image the emptiness and the sorrow that you would feel to have learned that Christ was right in front of you the whole time and you never saw Him for who He is? How unexpected. Could He really have been standing next to me? How could He ever forgive me now? So, now that you see and now that you know, you ask, could we start again, please? A sincere and honest request yet how great the fear and how vast the emptiness they must have felt. A simple request and a simple prayer, could we start again, please? How many times have each of us felt this way and in the same way petitioned God to make it so.

Journey ahead 2,000 years and what do we see today? Do we see God’s presence in the world? Christ is with us today. Do we see Him? Or better yet would we know Him if you saw Him? He is among us. He is living with us and He is presenting Himself to us. But, for us to see Him, we have to open our hearts, open our minds and open ourselves and enter into a relationship with Him. When we cleanse ourselves from the distractions of the world and when we use the tools of our faith, then we will be able to enter in to that relationship. This opens our eyes and ears and will allow us to see Him in our daily lives, as He walks among us. We will see the glory of His grace, receive the beauty of His mercy and feel the calm of His forgiveness.

We all have been living to see Him and perhaps also we have look right passed Him. We know that by His redemptive love and through our faith that we will see Him when we pass. Let us not wait for that moment. Let us look for Him and experience His presence today. He lives within the hearts and minds of all His children. Open your eyes and see His love, His healing strength and His will being done through those He has chosen. Live to be with Him, live to do His will and live to experience the glorious gift of His presence that He freely gives to you.

Could we start again, please?

God answers this prayer with every day He gives to us. Because of the gift of His son and through His resurrection He is alive and with us today. We are given the opportunity to discover His presence every morning we wake and we are given the opportunity to start again.

Jesus is the Son of God

In order for man to understand who the Son of God is, He gave a brief encounter to a few of the chosen so that they may comprehend the gift that He was about to give, the life, death and the resurrection of His only Son. On the day of the Transfiguration of Jesus, God shows to us His full understanding of what He created in us. Through our imperfections and our sins He knows our short comings. He knows that man can not absorb the magnificence and the meaning of this gift. So, He chose to provide a clear picture so that man can see the truth. That Jesus is the Son of God, our future and our Savior. He knew the difficulties we have in understanding the Spirits call and our inability to accept fully the teachings that come from the Spirit. So He chose a visual process to gain our attention to show us the truth. As humans, our nature is to only believe in what we see. Until our eyes actually see and or our hands actually touch we choose to be skeptics. God knows this is about His creation and that is why He provides a visual for those He has chosen to carry the message forward for all to hear and for all to accept. Jesus is the Son of God the Father, Jesus is our Savior, the gift of light, our salvation and the example of the life that is to come.

Today, we can still see that which the apostles saw. We first need to shed ourselves from the trappings of traditional worldly views and open our hearts and minds to see the glory of His gift in each of us. Jesus is with us. Each day He brings a visual and physical presence of His life. We just don’t see it for what it is. We give credit to those things that are more tangible, more accepted and easily explained as being from the world. But, they are not. In every action of love, every action of care and every action of forgiveness, God shows us His Son. It is hard to believe and it is harder to accept that Christ resides inside each of us in both a spiritual and physical sense. We are afraid of the truth. We, with our worldly view refuse to see it as such. For if this is true, our accountability for our actions, decisions and life may be unbearable for us to reconcile. But if we have true faith, then we know that His love, grace and forgiveness will save us from ourselves. If we have the courage and strength to look beyond this world then we will see the light of the Son of God in those around us.

A simple issue

It really is a simple issue. When you eliminate all the baggage, all of the worldly circumstances and teachings that cloud our judgment, it really is easy and it really is simple. Placed in each of us is His love, His mercy, His grace and forgiveness. We are our own worse enemy. We, by our logical and earthly perspective, in a way become a vehicle for evil to escape. We allow that which is pure to be contaminated by our own pursuit to quantify, categorize and control events, people and things around us so we can understand. Yet, in our essence there is purity and only when we shed ourselves of the logic, the teaching and the earthly perspective can we feel that which God has created.

It is pure. It is simple and it is Love. Love forgives all, love soothes pain and love is the basis for growth. When spiritual growth comes from love it can never be taken away. It will be with you always and it is something that you will share.

Christ is whole when we share His love with one another. He is risen when we extend our hand in support of someone in need. He is merciful and ever present with those who have opened their hearts and minds to what has been given to them. We are all called to seek the freedom that has been placed in all of us, the freedom to love. We are called to be His children.

However, in our humanness we have built shields to protect us from the fallen world around us. But in those shields we often hide ourselves from God’s will and desire for us to serve in this world. Yet, there is no shield that we can build to save ourselves. Thankfully, there is no shield that we can raise to keep Him from loving us. But it is by His grace alone, that we are to be saved from our sins and from our own mortal shame.

He will guide us, if we only have the courage to follow that which He has placed deep in our hearts, His love. For some, this comes easy to understand, yet for others, it is a difficult reality to accept and then it may even be harder to embrace and to follow. But still, it is very basic and very simple, He is among us and He is in us. How much easier can it be? By our nature, we are suspect of that which we don’t understand. But it is as simple as a newborn’s cry and it is as pure as a new mother’s tear. If only we can remember this and keep it alive in our hearts each and every day so that we may experience His hand in everything that we do. What a blessing we will have. Amen.

A magical moment

A magical moment. That is what it is like when you experience the presence of Christ in you as you come face to face with another person who is in need of His love. It really isn’t magic but is in fact the spark of the Holy Spirit working in you and at that moment in time and at that exact point in space where you touch and hold that person’s hand you feel and have within you the Love of Christ. It is by your touch that you bring His life forward as a gift. A gift of comfort, a gift of safety, and a gift of freedom, that can only come from God himself. By that touch the hand that you extend is not yours but Christ’s. You are chosen. You are the one who brings His face to the world and to guide others unto the pathway of His grace, His mercy and His forgiveness. If not for you, then who else? You have been called, you have been given the strength of the Spirit, you have been shown the glory of His presence in that which you do. Have faith and have confidence that He is right beside you now, just as you have always known and as He always will be. This is just the beginning. There is more that He has in store for you. Be patient, be strong, and be confident in all that you are doing. God is with you. God is with us and God will shine his light for us to follow in His will and in His time.

Where to begin

Where to begin? How about, why am I here? That seems simple enough. But the fact is I don’t know why I am here, only that I am, and that I am beginning to understand that it is my role, my function, my time to be present and to speak about the things that God has put forth in my mind, in my heart and in my voice. I have no justification for why He chose for me to say these things. Certainly, I have not lived the purified life of one who you would regard as someone to follow and or to imitate. I have tried for many years to find validation for my thoughts on spiritual matters and I have yet to find the answer. I am not a biblical scholar nor am I a trained and educated minister. By all earthly measurement, I have no qualifications at all to be speaking to you or anyone through this document about the things that I write. What I am beginning to understand, is that God is working in me, through the Holy Spirit, to compel me to action on some level for what he has equipped me to do for Him. I am starting to see that it is the Spirit that gives what God designates for each of us to have and then places it in front of us to act on or to use in our lives. Who am I and why am I here? Is it even a question that I can answer? The reality is that I don’t know. I have fear that my materialistic and humanistic perspective is providing me with ambition of self determination and promises of achieving something that I am not designated to attain. If I respond on what it is I feel, how do I know that it is God’s calling for me? Perhaps the truth is that no human can ever know what God actually wants and is doing inside of him. Perhaps the best you can do as a person is to simply UNDERSTAND. How foolish is it to think, I or any of us really can lay claim to God’s desire for his individual creations. The best we can do is to open the shells that we have acquired throurgh the preparation of worldly institutions and self proclaimed teachers and simply listen, UNDERSTAND and respond to what God has placed in each of us. His desire for what we are to do, our talent, our uniqueness, that which makes us different and allows for the greater whole to grow and to survive. We prevent ourselves to be who we truly are. We give in to either societal definitions or suppress our own value because we are not worthy to be who God has design and created us to be. We must work to discover the joy, freedom and the love that abounds when we open ourselves to be people of God’s calling. Acting through the true power of the Holy Spirit and guided by the Love of Christ in our hearts, we must work to break the boundaries that prevent us from being what we are created to be. A child of God.

God's will be done

Everything that happens, happens for a reason. This has been said by many people to many people as a way to console or as an easy way to find acceptance to that which we have done or that which we could not control.

God is with us. He is with us as we do His will and He is with us when we make mistakes. He has granted us free will and He knows that we are capable and but also likely to fail in meeting His desires for our actions in this world. God also has a sense of humor about Him. He is amused by our belief, that we can control our destiny.

Our destiny is in His hands not ours. It is not for us to control but for us to openly obey His will and direction for our lives. God has created us in His image. He has given us a purity of spirit that we must continue to discover. The world around us is troublesome and it is hard at work attempting to pull us from Him. We can not allow ourselves to be caught up in the turmoil and the derisive actions of those who believe that they have control over the destiny of people. We are His and because we are His, no one, no nation and no other entity can take us from Him. He is and will be forever with us. We are His. We only need to let go of ourselves and to trust His will, to discover the grace and peace that He desires for all to experience. When we open our hearts and open our minds in prayer, He will guide us.

He has also given us free will so that we can experience the world around us through His eyes. When we use the tools of His creation, the talents and the abilities that He has blessed us with, we will then feel His presence. The gift of free will is given to us so that we can contrast and compare a world that is at one with Him versus a world that is alone and devoid of His presence. He has done this so that we can understand who we are and that which we are to be. Through this comparison, we can see the blessing of His work in us and in those He has chosen. As we look for theses examples we will see that His mercy and His love shines like a sun itself. The emotional and physical experience of His presence in the world strikes us with a clear understanding of who we are and how we are to conduct our lives. Without this comparison, we would not be able to fully grasp the magnitude of His glory and accept the gift of His forgiveness.
God chooses those He wants to be the examples of His presence. He guides those that He selects to be His messengers and to carry out His will. The glory comes when we learn that we are all chosen. What we don’t know yet is how He plans to use us or when we are to be called upon to do His work.