"A cheerful heart is good medicine." Proverbs 17:22 NLT
MY CALL
I didn’t grow up in a Christian home and the little exposure that I had to church and Christians never turned my head or provoked me to look into Jesus, until, the summer before my senior year in college. Little did I know that during that summer I would make a decision that would alter the course of my entire life. It was that summer that I found my identity, my calling and my ultimate hero in life.
Jesus became my ultimate hero. My primary identity was to be his disciple. His dream for this world, began to be my dream for this world. And so I began to pray the prayer he that he taught his disciples to pray. And one verse in that prayer has always intrigued me. The part where we are supposed to pray, “May your kingdom come, (may) your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
I began to see this world with a whole new set of eyes. Not the overly optimistic naïve eyes of youth, but I began to see the brutal reality of what the kingdom of this world was all about. I began in hope and prayer to partner with Jesus to see His kingdom become a greater reality here on this earth. That is the calling that God has for each one of us – to be a part of a church, a community of God’s people, which is bringing the reality of the kingdom of God more and more to this planet. God wants us to be a group of people who live by faith, who are known by our love and who are a voice of hope.
SIMPLE TRUST – AN ANALOGY
Now in order to see the kingdom advanced through communities that we are a part of, we need to learn to trust God. We need to learn to have what I call SIMPLE TRUST. No matter what our role in the church is, no matter what our gifts or contribution to the body is, no matter what type of profession that God calls us to, we need to grow in our trust of Him. And I have found that learning to trust God can be extremely awkward and incredibly scary. Learning to live by faith is a lot like a little child when they are learning to walk, we feel a little clumsy as we try to engage in something new.
It reminds me of a story about Parker Palmer. Parker was a PhD graduate from UC Berkley. As a professor at one point in his life he became very depressed and he talks about how in his early forties, he decided to go on a program called Outward Bound. He writes:
“I was on the edge of my first depression, a fact I knew only dimly at time, and I thought Outward Bound might be a place to shake up my life and learn some things I needed to know.
I chose the week long course at Hurricane Island off the coast of Maine. I should have known from that name what was in store for me; next time I will sign up for the course at Happy Gardens or Pleasant Valley! Though, it was a week of great teaching, deep community, and genuine growth, it was also a week of fear and loathing.
In the middle of that week, I faced the challenge I feared most. One of our instructors backed me up to the edge of a cliff 110 feet above solid ground. He tied a very thin rope to my waist – a rope that look ill-kept to me and seemed o be starting to unravel – and told me to start “rappelling” down that cliff.
“Do what” I said.
“Just go!” the instructor explained, in typical Outward Bound fashion. So I went – and immediately slammed into a ledge, some four feet down from the edge of the cliff, with bone-jarring, brain-jarring force.
The instructor looked down at me: “I don’t think you’ve quite got it.”
“Right,” said I, being in no position to disagree. “So what am I supposed to do?”
“The only way to do this,” he said, “is to lean back as far as you can. You have to get your body at right angles to the cliff so that your weight will be on your feet. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s the only way that works.”
I knew that he was wrong, of course. I knew that the trick was to hug the mountain, to stay as close to the rock face as I could. So I tried it again, my way – and slammed into the next ledge, another four feet down.
“You still don’t have it,” the instructor said helpfully.
“OK,” I said, “tell me again what I am supposed to do.”
“Lean way back,’ said he, “and take the next step.”
The next step was a very big one, but I took it – and, wonder of wonders, it worked. I leaned back into empty space; eyes fixed on the heavens in prayer, made tiny, tiny moves with my feet, and started descending down the rock face, gaining confidence with every step.
I was about halfway down when the second instructor called up from below: “Parker, I think you’d better stop and see what’s just below your feet.” I lowered my eyes very slowly – so as not to shift my weight – and saw that I was approaching a deep hole in the face of the rock.
To get down, I would have to get around that hole, which meant I could not maintain the straight line of descent I had started to get comfortable with. I would need to change course and swing myself around that hole, to the left or to the right. I knew for a certainty that attempting to do so would lead directly to my death – so I froze, paralyzed with fear.
The second instructor let me hang there, trembling, in silence, for what seemed like a very long time. Finally, she shouted up these helpful words, “Parker, is anything wrong?”
To this day, I do not know where my words came from, though I have twelve witnesses to the fact that I spoke them. In a high, squeaky voice, I said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Then,” said the second instructor, “it’s time that you learned the Outward Bound motto.”
“Oh, keen,” I thought. “I’m about to die, and she’s going to give me a motto!”
But then she shouted ten words I hope never to forget, words whose impact and meaning I can still feel: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it.”
I had long believed in the concept of “the word became flesh,” but until that moment, I had not experienced it. My teacher spoke words so compelling that they bypassed my mind, went into my flesh, and animated my legs and feet. No helicopter would come to rescue me; the instructor on the cliff would not pull me up with the rope; there was no parachute in my backpack to float me to the ground. There was no way out of my dilemma except to get into it – so my feet started to move, and in a few minutes I made it safely down.
The journey of faith is like that. God calls us to do something. We experience fear. We decide to follow God, and we experience the power and beauty of God in new ways.
You can make a guess of what the picture represents on the left. In today's post I am sharing the five most popular posts this past month, in case you missed one of them. Also, I have found that some of you who follow this blog enjoy learning about the other people who visit this site, so I try to give a monthly report of the top 50 cities that have visited this blog in the past month. So here are the top five posts and top 50 cities.
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