Category: My 2 cents

There is of course a big problem if your god is merely a sandcastle of experiences from your childhood, when in reality He is the creator of the tide.

At whatever time in your life, when you first profess a faith in God, why would you ever consideration that that declaration would be static?

I think we give god a name, we give him a compartment in our lives, and we tick that box off our list. God does not want a name, a cubbyhole or our autograph. It is simplistic to say he wants us, yet he does, as a disciple, as a follower, in an ever-expanding relationship of information, knowledge, understanding and wisdom.

Look at it this way.
We may have a lot of information entering our lives. Not all of it true real or useful. So rather than being a sandcastle against a tide, be the tide, be the beach, be the ocean.

If we do not bring new information into our lives, good or bad, useful or useless, obvious or vague, then our faith will become stagnant, this can lead to one’s faith atrophying.
As we acquire information, we will order it, knowingly or unknowingly, the information will become knowledge, and from that knowledge, we will continue to build our lives, build our faith. We are meant to examine this information and this knowledge, to refine it, test it, see if it holds up to the light of day, can stand the test of time, for it to become understanding. We will discard some information and reinforce other areas of information. As we practice our understanding of our knowledge from the information we have, so we build wisdom into our lives. Wisdom is the ability to tackle the contradicting buckets of information we receive, the differing understandings we glean from these processes and create a cohesive faith from realising we can hold two competing views simultaneously. Uniformity is not the goal of faith. God is so much bigger than this.

We do not need to be afraid of the information surrounding us. We do not need to stand in front of this wave of information as if we need to protect our sandcastle of God. That He is fragile and information and rationality might make Him go, poof. Rather stand next to the Creator of the Universe and let the two of you process information so that you gain knowledge, and from this knowledge understanding, so wisdom can flourish, and you can thrive.

How big is your God?

Is God Sovereign?
Is God in Control?
Does God know?

If you think these things are true, it does not remove the possibility that you will die a violent death.
Be it a car accident, a fall, a mugging, or a murder.

A quote I saw recently: I would rather take a very small risk of dying while FULL living my life, than risk nothing and live like I am already dead.

Our western society is obsessed with safety, of staying alive. Go to a hardware store and you will see the most ridiculous safety stickers on the most benign of things. Yet we are more obese than ever, intake insane abouts of sugar daily, super size everything and beginning to have a lower expected life span than the previous generation. It would seem as we live, we are no longer alive.

• However, life is dangerous.
• And our lives need to be lived.
• And to avoid all dangers is to never live.
• Try to mitigate dangers too much and you begin to mitigate living.
• To be foolish is more dangerous than many dangers.
• Today, if a young person dies, we now hold someone alive to blame. Now someone may be to blame, yet a young person, a young adult is responsible for their own lives.

Young people die from foolishness and folly and faithfulness. Older people do too.

This has been true for ever.
It is amazing that I am alive, since my grandfather, at the age of 20 was left for dead twice. He was in Gallipoli (WWI) and the first part of what happened was foolishness on his part. Putting his head above the parapet and saying, “Where are the Turks?” He got shot in the head. Being examined, and considered too critical he was put on the dead pile. His friend, last name of Wagg, saw that he was still alive, took them off the pile and back into the field hospital.
This I believe, happened twice.
Ernie was stabilized, transferred to the hospital ship, did a full recovery. He returned to New Zealand, married, ran a sheep farm for some 40 years, and had five children. Having retired, he lived to about 85. All that time carrying a bullet in his head.

A young person may seem to die from foolishness from our perspective, but from Gods it was faithfulness. Or we may see faithfulness in a person’s death, while God sees folly.

Who wants to have a conversation around God’s sovereignty, control and foreknowledge?

Did God know Judas was going to betray Jesus as an act of sovereign will or foreknowledge?

Continue reading “Life Sucks”

• We have a 40-hour workweek.
• We have our 2-hour church service.
• We exercise for 4 hours a week.
• We are in some community group 3 hours a week.
• We have broken up our lives into allotments of time and purpose and have become a fragmented people.

Can we live differently?

We work forty hours a week as that is the social norm, and from that, we create a degree of income that gives us a certain lifestyle. 

I want to live better.

Not just within my income. But with my time, land, strength, resources, friendships, and especially my family.

As followers of Jesus, we are about the great commission. If our reason for being is to give glory to Jesus, then the great commission is secondary, or even tertiary in our lives. Are you not a father or mother first before you are an Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Pastor, and Teacher, are not our roles as mothers and father eternal in the nature of God, unlike our earthly giftings?
Not to take away from our callings, but to recognize our temporary callings in the light of our eternal nature.

So how do we glorify God and carry out the activities of a disciple?

Have we segmented our lives into hours and activities, and in our fragmentation become less effective in all those segments? How do we live a life without guilt and condemnation that so easily makes a place in the mind of a driven person, even when driven by good visions?
I have often said that God has given us enough hours in every day to do everything that God has for us. This included time to relax, laugh, and blob out.
One of the things I am working on in my own life is to remove the 40-hour mentality from working. Whether for pay or for ministry. I want to remove this time-oriented presupposition from other areas of my life, from religious observance, social observance.

I think that this time of the double bad cold is an opportunity to rewrite our minds.

Many people have been talking about wanting to grow their own food, but our lives and locations do not lend themselves to this. Kamaaina Hale does not want us to have a garden.
And even if I was to have a garden, one that is more than just some herbs and a tomato plant, it would require about an hour a day, during a period of time when I am often being asked to be involved in ministry somewhere, or worse a meeting.
Yet think about what we want to do out there… Africa, Asia, Central & South America. We want to bring the fullness of life, the redemption of the heart, the mind, and the body. Education, business, and government. The arts, occupations, and food.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Train trainers in gardening and you transform communities. 

Their health improves.
Their social interactions improve.
Their reason for being comes into focus.
And we get opportunities to speak to the whole woman and the whole man.

If this is how we want to carry out the work of our calling in the great commission, why are we not doing this now, modeling this right here in Kona? If we want to become people who can do redemptive works of community development of the soul and the body, we need to be practices of what we preach.

There is an idea I am living with that if my food comes in a box, then it is not food, it is poison.
If there are more than three ingredients on the side of the box or can or package, it is poison.
If I have a hard time pronouncing the ingredients, then it must be poison.

About my only exception is bacon, I love bacon, but not with sugar in it.

So fast food is designed to be eatable, not healthy, but addictively tasty, thank you sugar.
Sugar is hidden from view in many of these boxes, in insidious hidden forms.

• Agave nectar
• Barley malt
• Caramel
• Carob syrup
• Maltodextrin
• Panocha

But I digress, this is not going to be a hit piece on sugar.

Continue reading “Food in a Box.”

a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability.

And I can add to this that a person with very little ability in a field overestimates your ability in that field, and so because you have greater knowledge in that field than them, you take their estimation of you as proof of a greater degree of knowledge that you really have. This has the danger of building a house of cards, where you become desperate to keep it intact a false degree of competency.

 

So a little knowledge can infer a lot of knowledge when others have no knowledge in that area. You may then become trapped by your little knowledge,  unable to ask questions, for that would reveal your actual lack of knowledge.

How do we foster friendships that creates “question asking”, without creating egos?   

How do we help people to perceive that mere knowledge does not indicate much knowledge?

How often have we perceived a question as being dumb out of an inability to really understanding what is being asked and possibly due to the asker not articulating what they really mean?

 

How often have you not asked a question because you think it is dumb or are having difficulty actually asking what it is you’re thinking?

 

An idea that I have seen was to have an attitude in conversations that if a question sounds dumb, the default setting is to first say to yourself, “I must not have heard it right.” A skill that we can learn is the ability to tease out of the asker a better question.

 

We are all beggars helping one another to find more food.

 

1 John 1:7, walk in the light, be cleansed from sin.

 

Why do people get eaten up by the institution of Church, mauled and spat out the back door with the right boot of fellowship?

Church has become an inverted perversion.

Let me explain what I mean. That which is meant to be the oil, to make the interactions of people participating together happen smoothly, has become the reason for the interacting, which inevitably turns the people into fuel for this perverted machine.

Think of any machine. Oil is taken in by machinery as fuel and lubrication, it is seen as important, but exists for the machine, to be consumed by the machine and one used, expelled. For me; in this machine; programs, buildings, traditions and positions are the oil to enable people to go about their purposes, as believers walking in the ways of Jesus, to effect the world for good and for God. Oil is consumed, it is to serves it’s purpose and then be discarded.

Unfortunately have gone from worshippers of God to worshippers of oil. We have transmuted the oil, the programs, the buildings, the traditions and positions and titles in to the reason for being. The oil has become the machinery and now people have become the oil, to be consumed by the machinery, left burnt and bloodied, and when they have lost their usefulness, they are to spat out the other end, chewed up, bleeding and often bitter.

I want to view church differently. Rather like this: we the people are the cogs that make it work, we in our doings and relationships are church. The institutions, the programs, the traditions, the services, the hierarchical structures are meant to be oil, grease,  that which makes the structure of cogs, cantilever, pinions, springs, bearings (the people) work together well. The grease enable us to be church, to grow and serve without all the parts damaging themselves or others. If the oil, the institutions, (not people), loses it’s oiliness, then it needs replacing. If the grease loses it’s ability to smooth the way, then the programs need changing.

As I have already said, too often what we actually have in Church is that the programs and traditions becoming the cogs and the people becoming the oil. No wonder people often feel chewed up by institutional church, spat out the other end like so much waste product.

What a radical idea to let the institutions serve the people and if they are not, change them. Yesterdays oil may be no good for today, it may need re-refining. Instead of changing the people, may be the hierarchical structures needs changing.

In considering this idea, if we find ourselves guilty of having done the swap, of being the ones to turn people into oil and institution in to cogs, we need to be brave enough to change thing back.

It’s the people, people.