Month: November 2017

I was sitting in the car in front of my house crying. For several days I had been thinking about a wedding our family had attended the previous weekend.  The wedding was such a testimony of God’s faithfulness to this bride and groom through multiple generations that I was moved to tears. Watching this ceremony had caused me to look at my past; the experiences, events, and life situations of my own doing and those that were thrust upon me. “God, why couldn’t I have had that life”?, was the question I had been dwelling on.

“Tony, you just don’t like scars”, was God’s response. I was stunned. He continued, “Look at your neighbor’s house”. Tom (not his real name) lived next door. We had been taking his kids to church with us for several years. Tom struggled with daily life. He was abused as a child and was raising young children as a single dad. His wife’s death to cancer many years before was a constant source of pain. Years of substance abuse and hard living had made Tom a hurt and angry man. He was destroying himself and his family. God continued, “What do you have to offer Tom if you have never had a struggle or difficulty to push through. The scars in your life are a testimony of my healing in you. You once were wounded and now you are whole. What do you have to offer Tom if your life had been perfect”?

I looked down at my leg and recalled the surgery I had several years before. The long scar on my knee was a testimony that I once was wounded, but God had healed me. Torn ligaments were now whole so that I could play with my kids. The scar is ugly, but God’s healing is beautiful. I could choose to see beauty in that scar. I could also choose to allow God to help my neighbor through the testimony of His healing in my personal struggles.

How I choose to see my visible and hidden scars is a decision I have to make regularly. Do I wish I never had them, or do I view them as a testimony of God’s work of grace and mercy in my life?  I need to allow God to work through the scars of my life so that others may know He is the healer of our wounds.

I love stories. They have the power to convey truth in a deep and meaningful way, many times when we are least expecting it. One of my favorites conveys the need to publicly commit to live life as a Christian.

Stuart Briscoe, the former pastor of Elmbrook Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, tells a story from his growing-up years in Great Britain. I first heard the story “Nail Your Colors to the Mast” through a radio broadcast, although this summary comes from the website www.godhungry.org.

Briscoe was raised as a Christian and joined the Royal Marines at the age of 17. A career soldier and mentor of Briscoe’s, Captain H.C. May, provided him with some challenging advice as Briscoe was getting ready to begin his military service:

Briscoe writes “… he told me, ‘You must nail your colours to the mast.  Right away!’  As I had never heard the expression before, he explained that in the old days when a ship of the Royal Navy sailed into battle, the colours of the sovereign were hoisted to the top of the mast and remained there throughout the conflict unless they were defeated or surrendered.  Then, of course, the colours were replaced either with the white flag of surrender or the colours of the conquering sovereign.  But with that in mind, some naval captains would order the colours to be nailed to the mast so that defeat and surrender were shown to be out of the question; they would rather ‘go down with all flags flying.’ 

‘You must show your fellow marines right away whose you are and whom you serve, Stuart,’ my military hero explained forcefully.  Too forcefully for my liking. ‘Did you do that?’  I asked timidly. ‘Yes, I did,’ he replied.  ‘The first night in the barrack room I knelt by my bed and prayed.’ ‘What happened?’ I ventured. ‘They threw boots at me,’ he replied casually, as if this were an everyday occurrence. ‘What did you do?’ I queried, hardly daring to ask. Looking at me as if the answer was so obvious he was surprised I should ask, he replied, ‘I cleaned them and returned them, of course!’”

I am publicly committed to follow Jesus. I am compelled to live my life as a believer because of the truth of the gospel. Surrender cannot be an option in the battle for my faith.

Knowledge is learning things. Wisdom is effectively applying what you know. Good judgement, common sense, and discernment all fall in the realm of Wisdom. It is a simple process to learn something. Being wise is more complex and at times elusive.

I want to be wise. God wants me to be wise. I desire to be a person that properly applies His truth in my life. How can I more readily allow God to cultivate wisdom in my life? I think I have a simple perspective that helps me understand God’s process of developing wisdom in me.

Creating wisdom in your life is similar to creating “compost”. Compost will transform a garden. It starts with making a pile of manure, straw, leaves, and any organic waste available. When my kids were younger my source for my compost pile was usually slime and straw that we scraped up from the floor of our chicken coop. What a mess. We would place it in a large pile near the garden. Fruit and vegetable scraps were added from our kitchen, leaves from the yard, and other weeds and grass. With time, water, worms, bacteria, and other processes doing their thing, this pile of waste and garbage would become a nutrient-rich soil conditioner that transformed our clay garden dirt into a plant paradise.

While our compost looked like a pile of trash sitting on the ground a trained eye realized the treasure that it truly was. Gaining wisdom in my life was much the same. It has often come from the knowledge and truth I have learned from the hardships of life. Painful experiences, broken relationships, false promises, and all sorts of what I sometimes perceived as the “waste and garbage” of life provided the basis for God to build wisdom into me. With time, life experience, spiritual insights, and biblical truth, God transformed that pile of garbage-like experiences into a “fertilizer for my life” that blesses me and hopefully those around me. The wisdom God desires to instill in me is a treasure beyond value.

It takes all the components to transform organic garbage into compost. It takes all the experiences of life, viewed through the eyes of heaven, to bring about wisdom. Time is of critical importance. It takes time to transform manure into fertilizer. It takes time for God to transform hardships into wisdom. It is His desire to grow wisdom in me and in you. I encourage you to begin to see the hardships of life as the foundation of future wisdom that God will give you.

Some scriptures to consider: Proverbs 4:5-9, Proverbs 8

I have ignored Jesus.  I have kept Him from working in some areas of struggle in my life, my baggage, by choosing to ignore that they exist.  I thought I had given Him the freedom to work on anything He desired. I was wrong.

This realization brings some personal crisis into my life. It is a bit like if I had been ignoring long-time symptoms of a sickness in my body and finding out I have a serious disease; I am relieved to finally know what is wrong, but discouraged by the diagnosis.

There have been seasons in my adult life when I would wake up in the middle of the night with things swirling around in my head. Struggles, regrets, wrong attitudes, and bad memories would occupy my mind. It was emotionally painful to dwell on these things, and I would seek to push them aside. I would read my Bible, read a book, check Facebook, and try to pray away the thoughts knocking on my brain at 3am. It worked temporarily but they would usually return. It never occurred to me that Jesus was allowing these things to surface as a “wake-up call” to the control these areas were influencing in my life.

Now that I am conscious to this situation how do I begin? How do I figure out what needs to be worked on? I have settled on one strategy. Any area in my life I don’t want to think about is an area that needs work. What I avoid Jesus wants to meet head-on. I don’t think I have to tackle them all at once. I am confident that Jesus will help me “unpack the baggage of my life as I trip over them”. But, avoidance is not an option anymore.

Most of the areas I write about in this blog are things that are more established in my life. This is not. I am entering into new territory. There is some fear and intimidation, as well as some embarrassment to just now coming to this place. There are also many questions and “wonderings” to moving forward with this plan. What will Jesus reveal to me in those areas from which I have chosen to hide? What will He bring back to memory that I have chosen to forget. How will He help me resolve those feelings of conflict that may still exist? How messy will it get? Am I willing to go through it so that my past doesn’t continue to hinder my future? What price am I willing to pay for being free of my emotional baggage?

I am committed to this path as far as I can see. It is what lies beyond the horizon that makes me nervous. Fortunately, my confidence is not in my resolve but in my Savior’s ability to always work for my good.