When people start burning bridges in your wake, your brain starts to play tricks on you. When you find yourself trying to claw back up the burning planks, splinters under your finger nails, you can’t help but feel weak and awkward, like the weight is too much to keep fighting for. That arsonist turned on you, jumped into the icy blue, fleeing away from you.

You look down. There it is, that swirling cesspool, licking at your toes. You think people want you to fall, to jump, to join them there in the sea of bitter, of burned out, of broken. You know your reputation is tarnished already, what with the way you can’t even fix a friendship, help another to see your heart. You are a joke. You feel chopped down, diminished, small. You feel helpless and betrayed and worst of all your very sense of self corrupts, you’ve let too much of your identity exist in the mind of another.

You feel it, don’t you? The waterfalls forming in your eyes, old wounds made new, healing weaknesses exposed, insecurities rebirthed.

And you want to join you in the bitter torrents. You want to wish the worst for them. To wish bad luck on them, to make them a cartoon or a secondary storyline in your own story. You want to succumb to the dark water beneath, let all your wounds fester and grow, to breed and spread to other relationships, to build up higher fences, stronger boundaries. But you can’t. I won’t.

Because the truth is, when we reach that distant shore, and the sea of our lives has tossed us and we are again reduced to fine dust. When we crawl back up into that sand and we lay there panting,  I actually hope you will still indict me for my foolish hope, my senseless joy, the idiocy of my unconditional love, my irrational peace. The way I laugh at the days to come, how insane is that?

I’m not just living for some far off kingdom, some far-and-away from now. No.  Today I am choosing the heights, depths and breadth of my life…To always choose joy over bitterness, hope over dispair, peace over war. May every day be the best day for you too.

HERE in the epic mundane of this place. My choice, this year to be fully and completely here, noticing the ordinary graces the everyday miracles. To be HERE.

Let me be HERE, where you have placed me Lord. Let me hear your voice, let me sense your direction. Let me know that you’ve appointed me for such a time as this, for such a place as HERE.

Let me be HERE, in this congregation before me. I have grieved the ones I wish were here with me, I’ve done my best by them. This year, let me fix my gaze squarely HERE…those here now…let me do right by them today. Here now, let us build on this sacred ground between us.

Let me be here. The person before me, let me see them, hear them. Keep me from peeking over their shoulder, down to my phone, do not let me be intimidated by their gaze. Let me hold their eyes, let me speak love with mine.

Here. Let me notice the beauty, let me feel the sun on my face, the wind at my back, the rain on my neck. Do not let me miss it. Let me see and experience all of it. Let me write it down, let me find my words. Let me not be distracted by any of my escapist tendencies….let me instead fix my eyes on the miraculous here.

Here in this home. Let me be all here. Don’t let me be distracted by the future ‘to dos’ or the past ‘should have done’. Let me be with these children growing so fast, this man giving all of himself. Let me find myself HERE and not ache for any aways. With these children, focus my eyes and ears to the why of behaviour and not the error itself. Let me be attentive to them, to all the stories they want to tell me, all the dreams they have to share. Let me see them every moment we share.

This man, let me love him well. Let me count the blessings, seek the best. Let me not take the tragically short HERE for granted. The things we are building together, those that I could build with no other match. Let me laugh here and now and bless his life with my own.

This job. Let me not be restless but instead let me see the gift of the HERE. Let me see the ministry I could have in it. Let me find my purpose in each moment. Let me not seek anything; not reputation, not career, let me seek only to find subtle glory in the HERE.

If last year was marked by the NOW and the YES, and the newly appointed freedom to chase and to do, may this year be marked by the stay and the build. May this year be about HERE…

THIS PLACE.

THIS TIME.

I am tied to it, bound to it. I will not look back with anything but praise I will not look forward with anything but prayer.

I will look at today, the beauty to be found in it, the mission to be lived in it, the people to be loved in it.

Here. Find me Here.

Linking with Christmas tour of Homes! SO FUN!

When you serve in the upside down kingdom, sometimes it is hard to know which way is up. When the metrics of man; bigger, better, faster, stronger, do not make sense with Spirit truth, sometimes it is impossible to know what success looks like. Sometimes men speak ill and abandon us. Sometimes friendships are not what they seem and sometimes people evaluate a church with the measuring systems of a corporation. Sometimes we fail, and we flail and we get pushed out to the margins and the borderlands.

Guess what? That is where Jesus wants you. There in the margins, the borders. There, among the broken and down trodden.

There, making the religious uncomfortable, making the hopeless hopeful. Right where you are.

It is about the Peace of Christ; how it rules your heart more and more.

It is about the mourners, the  meek, those who hunger for the righteousness. It is about being a peacemaker and letting it fall clean off your back when men speak falsely.

Does your heart beat faster at the things that confound the world? Does your bank account, the way the money leaves, express the ways of Christ?

Is your heart softening, breaking, for the wandering and lost?

Is my identity found squarely at the foot of the cross or do I let your opinion of me spin me around?

Yes these. I will evaluate my success by the ways it is marked by the backwards, the upside down.

Lord, let me finish dead last if that is required to find myself in you.

Just over there where the tide roles they light fires. The garbage from the day, the tourist trash. The glass bottles shatter on the bottom of the ocean here in the Gulf of Thailand. All of it dragged out to sea the burned up and the broken. We collect the treasure left behind, the sea glass and the shattered and dead shells. See that, how the sand of it runs through your fingers?

The days they just slip sometimes don’t they? Sqaundered on the small or discontent moments. The legacy we wished we were leaving or the things we wish to be to other people eclipsed because we just cannot quell the selfish…how it wants you to really see me. All the wish we hads or the too much pain or the heaviest heart.
But I won’t trade it.
I rise up…back arched in the breaking waves. I wonder how many times you can do that in a life? Bath in the salt water of tears pinned to the bottom by the crashing waves?
But then. There you are…the rock solid core smashed apart, shrunk down and tumbled. Only the core left, that place there right around your heart, the ‘made in the image piece’. Your failures are guaranteed, your flesh already failing you. So can’t we then stop forgetting our dim reflections? Please, can’t we have permission to do the next tiny and glory laden thing? Forget about the magnificient things…they are built from your daily work, one on top of the other. Faithful with sand, seeing the profound beauty in it.
You can burn me down, break me up, tumble me on the bottom…just as long as I find myself smooth in Your hands…