Today, I'm taking time off from work to seek wise advice from a friend. I am anxious that perhaps a decision I've made is unachievably ambitious and I am asking him to look at it with his "fresh eyes" (an expression I learned while working for a Japanese company) and give me his unvarnished opinion. To even have such a friend is priceless to me.
You've read that e mail about people coming into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime? I did not seek to meet this guy, we just happen to share membership at the same church. Yet his very nature is open and available. I wonder if I am that way?
I encourage you today. If you have a problem, ask for advice from a wise friend. If you don't, then build friendships with wise people or seek to be available for those in need. My favorite Book is peppered with quotables about how plans succeed when wise counsel is sought, when many counsellors are employed, and when the Wonderful Counsellor is besought (beseached?)
Thank you for being a friend to me... I trust I can be one to you as well.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
A summary of parts 2-6
Hitchiker said he would love to see parts 2-6. I don't have the time or ambition to flesh those out retrospectively, but I can give you the outline:
1 be grateful see How to celebrate Christmas *properly* pt 1
2 be content. This flows naturally out of the first and sets you up for the rest. Contentment is not complacency. Contentment says 'God is good all the time and all the time God is good'. It is a wilful choice to accept what is yours. If you've ever been around a person that's content, you know what I mean. They're like a big comfy couch: welcoming, comforting, refreshing and encouraging all at the same time
3 be generous. If you haven't done 1 and 2, you're stuck. Go back. Like our words are the overflow of the content of our heart, so generosity is the overflow of our stuff... our material blessings. This is easy for a few of us whose love language is giving and receiving gifts, but for the rest of us it falls somewhere between almost like work and downright impossible.
4 be creative as a way of being generous with who you are instead of just what you have. These are the gifts you really remember. Like the time your kids gave you coupons for them to do things for you.
5 be thoughtful - the gift that is most desired or needed may be a couple hours of your time, your listening ear, a hug or the like
6 be patient and don't overschedule - it helps you savor the joys and gives you time to do the others without exhausting yourself
and 7 be extensive... don't stop celebrating just because the calendar says to. see How to Celebrate Christmas *properly* part 7
1 be grateful see How to celebrate Christmas *properly* pt 1
2 be content. This flows naturally out of the first and sets you up for the rest. Contentment is not complacency. Contentment says 'God is good all the time and all the time God is good'. It is a wilful choice to accept what is yours. If you've ever been around a person that's content, you know what I mean. They're like a big comfy couch: welcoming, comforting, refreshing and encouraging all at the same time
3 be generous. If you haven't done 1 and 2, you're stuck. Go back. Like our words are the overflow of the content of our heart, so generosity is the overflow of our stuff... our material blessings. This is easy for a few of us whose love language is giving and receiving gifts, but for the rest of us it falls somewhere between almost like work and downright impossible.
4 be creative as a way of being generous with who you are instead of just what you have. These are the gifts you really remember. Like the time your kids gave you coupons for them to do things for you.
5 be thoughtful - the gift that is most desired or needed may be a couple hours of your time, your listening ear, a hug or the like
6 be patient and don't overschedule - it helps you savor the joys and gives you time to do the others without exhausting yourself
and 7 be extensive... don't stop celebrating just because the calendar says to. see How to Celebrate Christmas *properly* part 7
A reason, a season, a lifetime
You've gotten that e mail, I'm sure stating that friends come for:
- a reason: either you have a need they can meet or they have one you can meet
- a season: a period of time which seems to start and end at the Lord's discretion
- a lifetime: obvious
We'll I've just had a ministry that left me. It seems it's season was over... at least for now. This ending has been bitter-sweet to me. Bitter in the sense that I hate to stop doing something I enjoy which also helps men and women get to know my Lord or get to know Him better. But sweet in the way it happened.
I have been asking for wisdom in the use of my time for a long time and a month or so ago, a friend said, "Maybe it's time to let something go..."
I talked to my wife Karen at length and she said "Maybe you should let it go..." Then there were my two accountability partners, Brent and Craig. Each of them counselled the same. Then there was my Thursday morning mens group: Dave, Rusty and Joe who said the same kinds of things.
Seems like sometimes the best thing I can "do" is to stop doing something that's season is past.
PS You know it's been too long since your last post when you forget your blogger password. my apologies.
- a reason: either you have a need they can meet or they have one you can meet
- a season: a period of time which seems to start and end at the Lord's discretion
- a lifetime: obvious
We'll I've just had a ministry that left me. It seems it's season was over... at least for now. This ending has been bitter-sweet to me. Bitter in the sense that I hate to stop doing something I enjoy which also helps men and women get to know my Lord or get to know Him better. But sweet in the way it happened.
I have been asking for wisdom in the use of my time for a long time and a month or so ago, a friend said, "Maybe it's time to let something go..."
I talked to my wife Karen at length and she said "Maybe you should let it go..." Then there were my two accountability partners, Brent and Craig. Each of them counselled the same. Then there was my Thursday morning mens group: Dave, Rusty and Joe who said the same kinds of things.
Seems like sometimes the best thing I can "do" is to stop doing something that's season is past.
PS You know it's been too long since your last post when you forget your blogger password. my apologies.
Friday, February 1, 2008
How to celebrate Christmas *properly* - Part 7
No, part 7 has nothing to do with Independence Day... There was a well planned series intended to occupy the space between part 1 and 7. None the less here is part 7: Extend your moderated celebrations (part 2) as long as possible.
You see I have the good fortune of having a January birthday. If you
don't, fret not as there is yet much hope for you. See, on average, one in twelve people has a January birthday. Therefore collect friends and acquaintences until you find one.
Here are photos of a birthday fondue celebration at the Melting Pot Restaurant in Independence Mall in Wilmington DE. with (clockwise from left) my wife Karen Kohler, Betsy Burton, Anita Rafetto, Rod Rafetto, Kevin Kohler and our host, Steven Kohler It just so happens that Rod's wife Anita's birthday and mine fall on the same day.
The point of Part 7 is plainly this: The most important thing about Christmas is that we celebrate Jesus Christ's birth. But we could do no worse dis-service to His mission and legacy than to end our celebrations there. His mission was most broadly seen as He walked among common folk and met needs. The coup d'etat of His mission is celebrated the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox, which a few of us call only Resurrection Day. Therefore, in my opinion, the more our celebrations focus on meeting the needs of people around us and remembering His death and resurrection, the more deeply satisfying they will be.
On the above pictured day, we met our own needs (and a whole lot more) and I suppose no one elses... but we did relish the Resurrection and what it meant to each of us and at least in part because of that, I really enjoyed myself.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
How to *properly* celebrate Christmas, Pt. 1
Step #1 Have all of your Christmas shopping completed before Halloween -- although admirable from many standpoints including stress, budgetting, and economy, few actually achieve this... aspire to it anyway!
Step #2 To prepare for Christmas, fast from all food and drink except water beginning
the day before thanksgiving until Thanksgiving dinner. It's amazing how
much time and brain power this frees up to count your blessings and to make you more aware of how great your blessings are. Attend a Thanksgiving Day Parade. This year, we attended the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia. Here are some photos:
Step #3 Celebrate Thanksgiving as the first feast of Christmas. No better gifts will come from you or to you than can be derived from a heart of gratitude.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Closing Time
One of my favorite films this time of year is nearly any version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. But today I am thinking of the Muppet one. Early in the film, after Scrooge has gone home on Christmas Eve, the shop staff and Bob Cratchet have a brief celebration of closing time before the impending holiday.
That is exactly how I feel tonight having crammed 40 hours of Engineering into this 3 day week and having kept the hounds at bay at the Financial Planning office to boot. I am brain weary for sure... but very aware that many would like to have a job let alone one with flexible hours as I have. Many would also like a family to go home to and a home to which to go. I am a man greatly blessed of God.
Some of those blessings are structural, like the freedoms and the general and disproportionate prosperity with which the West and most notably the US live by comparison to the rest of the world. Others are relational, deriving from the people I have known and to whom I am related and the many benefits they have showered on me, knowingly or not. But even so, there are some that cannot be satisfactorily explained to me any other way than the direct intervention of Almighty God into the fabric of time and space for my benefit.
The most noteworthy of these is that I am even aware that there is a God Who passionately desires a relationship with every individual that has ever lived on the face of this terrestrial ball for so much as a second, bar none. And the second is that He has wooed me into an eternal relationship with Him
If you are reading this, YOU are very likely one of the people I am grateful for. I cannot always tell how, but somehow, you have been used as the very fingertip of God to touch my life with blessing. And I pray I'll have opportunity to tell you face to face just exactly how I've seen God bless my family and me through you.
Happy Thanksgiving!
(Mother always told us not to eat food that talked)
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Fences
My men's accountability group meets each Thursday morning for breakfast at a nearby restaurant. We're reading and discussing Jerry Bridges Transforming Grace subtitled Living Confidently in God's Unfailing Love. It has been a great book thus far with about a 50-50 balance of encouragement and correction for me personally.
We were to have read Chapter 9 for last week titled "Called to be Free" in which Bridges lays out essentially the Christian's Magna Charta of basic freedoms from legalism and many of the common strictures of organized religion. It is not freedom from God, but rather freedom to worship God without first having to check a list of "do's and don't's" (Curiously, I knew very little about the Magna Charta until I read this and did some research -- interesting stuff)
To illustrate, he cites an example from his own life of a family vacation to the beach. Long story short, there were too many revealing bathing suits for him to really enjoy his time there. He knew that if he stayed, he would eventually look with lust, so he informed the family that he was going to the car. By so doing, he maintained a standard of visual purity for himself without imposing it on his family. Perhaps even more importantly, though, he resisted the naturally human temptation to say, "going to the beach will always lead to sin, therefore the beach is evil and we're not going there ever again."
I am certain that there are places for that kind of statement, mainly when God has made such a statement and we make it to obey Him. But he gained a credible teaching moment for his kids because he chose holiness to the Lord over the path of least resistance. Part of this is born out of Bridges own upbringing in which he was told "Don't go to pool halls." His parents could have initiated conversations to warn him about drug and alcohol abuse, smoking, carousing, unwise use of money, or gambling. Instead they simply equated Billiards with Sin in his mind. The comedy of which is that he had a mental struggle as an adult upon finding a pool table at a Christian conference center. Pool is not evil and the beach is not evil any more than the church or the christian conference center is all good. There are obedient and disobedient people at both places and they can influence you both places for good or ill.
An attractive girl in my growing up church who had parents in positions of respect and leadership is an example of the latter. On a youth retreat with her parents present, she organized a "long walk" that turned out to be a short walk and a long pot smoking (the parent's weren't present on the walk). That could easily have influenced me to go that way. Thank God it didn't... last I knew her life is a mess. Oh Father, please continue to draw her toward yourself.
Fences applied as Jerry Bridges describes here are the modern equivalent of eating meat offered to idols: not clearly right or wrong in itself, but a precipitous place to walk because: applied heavy-handedly we risk treading on someone else's tender conscience yet applied imprudently, too little, too late or not at all, we risk destroying our credibility as a witness for our Lord.
So am I saying build a fence? I don't know. Do you need one? ...then build it. Talk about it with others? Yes, with tenderness of heart so that they can be built up and encouraged in much the same way as our conversations encourage me.
THANK YOU! I am sorry it has been so long since my last post and that there hasn't been much human interest here recently. I'll upload some pictures and write you some balance, Daniel-san!
We were to have read Chapter 9 for last week titled "Called to be Free" in which Bridges lays out essentially the Christian's Magna Charta of basic freedoms from legalism and many of the common strictures of organized religion. It is not freedom from God, but rather freedom to worship God without first having to check a list of "do's and don't's" (Curiously, I knew very little about the Magna Charta until I read this and did some research -- interesting stuff)
To illustrate, he cites an example from his own life of a family vacation to the beach. Long story short, there were too many revealing bathing suits for him to really enjoy his time there. He knew that if he stayed, he would eventually look with lust, so he informed the family that he was going to the car. By so doing, he maintained a standard of visual purity for himself without imposing it on his family. Perhaps even more importantly, though, he resisted the naturally human temptation to say, "going to the beach will always lead to sin, therefore the beach is evil and we're not going there ever again."
I am certain that there are places for that kind of statement, mainly when God has made such a statement and we make it to obey Him. But he gained a credible teaching moment for his kids because he chose holiness to the Lord over the path of least resistance. Part of this is born out of Bridges own upbringing in which he was told "Don't go to pool halls." His parents could have initiated conversations to warn him about drug and alcohol abuse, smoking, carousing, unwise use of money, or gambling. Instead they simply equated Billiards with Sin in his mind. The comedy of which is that he had a mental struggle as an adult upon finding a pool table at a Christian conference center. Pool is not evil and the beach is not evil any more than the church or the christian conference center is all good. There are obedient and disobedient people at both places and they can influence you both places for good or ill.
An attractive girl in my growing up church who had parents in positions of respect and leadership is an example of the latter. On a youth retreat with her parents present, she organized a "long walk" that turned out to be a short walk and a long pot smoking (the parent's weren't present on the walk). That could easily have influenced me to go that way. Thank God it didn't... last I knew her life is a mess. Oh Father, please continue to draw her toward yourself.
Fences applied as Jerry Bridges describes here are the modern equivalent of eating meat offered to idols: not clearly right or wrong in itself, but a precipitous place to walk because: applied heavy-handedly we risk treading on someone else's tender conscience yet applied imprudently, too little, too late or not at all, we risk destroying our credibility as a witness for our Lord.
So am I saying build a fence? I don't know. Do you need one? ...then build it. Talk about it with others? Yes, with tenderness of heart so that they can be built up and encouraged in much the same way as our conversations encourage me.
THANK YOU! I am sorry it has been so long since my last post and that there hasn't been much human interest here recently. I'll upload some pictures and write you some balance, Daniel-san!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)