Let God teach you.

Take a minute and read, Psalm 25:4-14. It's okay, I'll wait......

             Almost every other verse says that God will teach you. My mom always says, "If it's in the Bible more than two times, it must be really important." Now, I don't claim to know all the ways God teaches us and how all of that works. I do know this one, little way.

             "Before anything else and above everything else, humans are relational creatures."

-John Fuller

            God created us to be in relationships with each other. It's through those relationships that we can learn about our relationship with him. Throughout your life there will be moments when a verse or situation from scripture comes to mind at a critical moment in your life when your circumstances directly parallel the scripture. Those are the moments to look for and learn from.

             My oldest son was only a day old and I'm changing what was probably my fifth diaper. I'm an expert at this point and still can't figure out how to properly wrestle with a kicking newborn. They have a way of pulling their heels to their butt, get poop on them, then kick out and spread poop everywhere. He keeps kicking and all I can think to say to him is, "BE STILL!" and my brain finishes, "and know that I am God." When we struggle, sometimes we just get poop everywhere and we make it more difficult for God to help us. It's when we relax and let God lead that the best things happen. 

            That's my favorite learning anecdote, what's a time in your life when God taught you something through life?

A Love so Profound...

                   So, my wife and I were at our local hardware store the other night when the sales associate, an older man named John, came over to see if we were "finding everything okay?" I was busy agonizing over which drill bit to buy when she strikes up a conversation with him.

                   Now, my wife, Ebony, has always had this God given ability to open up complete strangers. She tells him that we've been married for 8 years and he kind of chuckles to himself, as if to say, "That's nothing." I know this because it's the same chuckle I get when someone proudly says they've been married for 6 months, or even a year.

                   Well, now we're curious. My wife then asks the obvious question, how long have you been married? John gets this blank look on his face while he does the math. Slowly and deliberately he says, "43 years." That's awesome, and my wife and I are quick to tell him so. That's such a long time to be married. It's less and less common for marriages to last that long these days. Here's the most interesting part: when Ebony asks about John's wife and what she's like, he gets silent and just looks.

                   He had no words. He had been married so long and loved her so much, he didn't have words to describe it. She was just his wife, that's all he could articulate. He then went on to explain that he couldn't even explain how or why they got married. "We just fit," John said, "We just seemed to go together and it felt right." I can only hope right now that one day I might experience a love for my wife so profound it very literally defies explanation.

Father's Day

I wrote this for a Father's day contest at my Church.

       Psalm 127 is possibly the greatest passage about family in the Bible. It cuts right to the heart of a successful life, and a successful family. "Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain." Which is to say that if God is building the house, those who build it need only calmly continue to work and God will make progress happen. 

        In Japan the way they teach children to play the violin at age 5 is to teach the mother violin in front of them starting at age 3. On page 29 of Men of Integrity July/August 2016 There is a devotional about praying with your family as a way of modeling Godly behavior and establishing His authority over your household. I feel that the author didn't use the best verses he could have, and falls short of explaining how powerful modeling really is (I know these are really excerpts from books and not originally written as standalone devotions).

         Modeling is so powerful it could be successfully used as your only parenting strategy. Deuteronomy 6:9 speaks of God's commandments,  "You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise." Teach with your life, all day every day. This is so important that God repeats himself in 11:19. When you sit, when you walk, when you lay down, and when you rise. Teach by living.

         I learned the heart of modeling in my first year of marriage while my wife was pregnant with our firstborn son. I'll start by describing what my dad was like when I was ages 5-7. He had a beard, long hair, wore a bandanna to hold his hair back while he worked, he worked third shift, and had a wretched short temper. I was married in the Spring of '08. By that summer I had grown a pony tail, grown out my beard, was working third shift at a factory, started wearing bandanna's to hold my hair out of my face and struggling with a lifelong short temper. I stopped one day and realized how effortlessly and unintentionally I became my father. It dawned on me that the man I am, is the man my son will most easily become. The man my daughters will be drawn to, for better or worse.

        I could use this, learn to overcome my temper so I could help my son overcome his. The easiest and the hardest way to parent is this: Be the man you want your son to be, be the man you want your daughter to marry. God will work everything else out.