Get infected: This ain’t no prosperity gospel.

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I’m a fan of small steps.  Stop stressing out about where God will lead you over the next twenty years and just do something to serve Him over the next twenty minutes.  That’s where is starts.  That’s not where it ends.  This is no prosperity gospel where you give the minimum and get the maximum.  In this gospel, you give it all and strangely stop caring about all that stuff you used to want.  But that doesn’t always happen all at once.  Maybe you’re like me, and it starts with small steps.

I’ve gotten some emails asking me whether I honestly think that doing small things for God is enough.  Doesn’t God expect radical abandonment?  Of course He does.  But you have two options.  The first option is to sit around doing nothing (like I did most of my life) waiting until you are so compelled to turn your life upside down that you do it all in one shot.  We’ll call this the Damascus option (Google it).  The other option is to get infected.  I’m getting infected.

Serving God is infectious, people.  It gets into your fibers and takes over.  But it needs a place to start.  It takes something small you get you hooked.  Here’s the deal.  God built you to love feeling happy.  He built you to want things.  He built you to want satisfaction.  The greatest trick evil ever pulled off was convincing you that the junk we buy actually delivers that satisfaction.  And it does, kinda, for a little while.  But the satisfaction you get from watching your high def TV is nothing compared to even the smallest act of service for God.  Nothing.

I don’t advocate small steps because they are better than large steps.  I advocate small steps because they are better than nothing.  And let’s be blunt here for a second.  A lot of us are doing nothing.  I did nothing for years.  Decades, actually.  You can read the second chapter of my book where I describe over and over the times that God dropped lay ministry right in my lap and I was either too dumb or too stubborn to do anything with it.  For me, I needed small steps to catch the infection that would lead to large steps.  I think right now I’m somewhere around medium steps.  But every day that goes by I see a path coming more and more clear that someday leads to radical abandonment.  God shows it too me slowly because he probably knows I’m too much of a spaz to handle it all at once.  My Damascus moment might be right around the corner.  I need to keep working and praying to be ready for it.

I wish I didn’t need to take small steps.  But I do.  And they are better than the non-steps I took for the first 35 years of my life.  My small steps having me starting to feel the infection working within me.  I know that one day I will wake up, look at my wife, and describe to her an adventure that is both scary and awesome all at the same time and we’ll finally say, “We’re doing it.  Whatever the cost.  We’re doing it.”  And those small steps along the way will have prepared me for that day.

I hope you get called to do something crazy.  Something radical.  But until that happens, please join me in taking these small steps.  In the Bible we always come in at the good part.  We come in right when the fishermen are dropping their nets to follow Christ.  And we’re amazed that they would do that right out of the blue.  But was it out of the blue?  What was their backstory?  What small steps had they been taking over the previous ten years before that day came?  Who knows… maybe they wrote a blog.

These are my small steps.  What are yours?  Telling your small steps helps people to connect.  It helps to get them moving in the right direction.  Or, if you’re already onto big steps or even radical abandonment then I would love to read your stories and comments as well.  Inspire us all.  It’s what you were built to do.

We were built to be heroes.  It’s about time we started acting like heroes.

Photo credit: photophilde / Foter.com / CC BY-SA

Letters From Grandpa

 

A mostly fictional story.

Growing up, like most boys, your grandfather was an iconic figure.  He flew planes in “The War” and you are pretty sure he was shot down at least a few times.  He named his bomber after “his girl”, your Grandma, who he’s been married to for almost 60 years.  He could fix anything.  When he died a few years back, the family was convinced there was something broken in heaven that no one could figure out how to fix, so God called Grandpa home to fix it.  He had tools, some you’d never heard of and would never personally use (and he probably didn’t either).  When he spoke, he did so from a level of confidence you could only dream of.  And he loved his family.  Man did he love his family.  There was something amazing about him.

As a kid, you loved going to Grandma and Grandpa’s house because grandpa would always take you into the garage and ask you to help him fix something.  He swore he had been waiting for you to come because there was “no way” he could ave fixed it without you.  And it would take forever.  Way more time than busy Mom and Dad had for stuff.  And Grandpa talked alot during those visits.  He had alot to say, and alot of experience to speak from.  Even as you grew older, no matter what situation you were in, Grandpa had the right thing to say.  Or more often, the right question to ask.  He didn’t always say alot, but what he said mattered.  Grandpa’s words were burned into your memory.  He spoke at your wedding, and the room was silenced.  Not because he made the most eloquent speech.  Quite the opposite.  He spoke plainly, but from the perspective of over 50 years of being married to Grandma.  And he always, always spoke with love.  Tough love here and there.  But love.  Grandpa was amazing.

That was all a long time ago.  Grandpa passed away more than a decade ago.  And since then, you’ve also lost your Dad.  Some time has gone by, and you’ve handled all the “business” that follows losing a dad.  Now it’s time to start sifting through Dad’s things and figuring out what to do with it all.  First stop is the hardest, the attic.  Who knows what’s up there and how much junk has piled up over the years.  As you cautiously rise the rickety “ladder” that unfolds from the ceiling, you shine a light and it’s not quite as bad as you had expected.  You climb in, being careful to step only on the rafters to avoid rejoining your wife and kids downstairs by way of a hole in the ceiling.

Then you see it.  It’s a trunk.  A pretty large one.  It looks too old to even be your Dad’s.  It’s not locked, so you open it.  The hinges creak and the leather straps make that stretching sound unique to old dried out leather.  Inside you find Air Force stuff.  You knew Dad was in the Air Force but it was never a huge topic of conversation.  But this stuff is kind of cool.  Letters from superior officers in the dry matter-of-fact tone so unique to the military mindset.  Then you see it.  A bundle of letters that look older than the rest.  Through the backs of the sheets you can tell these are handwritten letters.  Clearly not military letters addressing posts and quarters and such.

You instinctively handle the bundle carefully, feeling its age and a sense of its weight.  You fold back the long-pressed crease in the page to reveal the words, “Dearest Mim.”  “Mim” is what Grandpa call Grandma.  Her full name was Miriam but this was his little pet name for her.  You realize that these were letters from Grandpa, to Grandma, and as you read you realize these were sent while he was away in Europe during World War II.  Suddenly these take on a whole new meaning for you.  You immediately forget the mundane task of sorting through and organizing Dad’s things and sit down across the dusty aged sheet of plywood laid across the rafters and start reading.

A few of these letters are to Grandma.  But then you find a bundle tied with a thin ribbon.  You begin reading the first letter, and it is written to your Dad.  Dad was a tiny baby when Grandpa left for the War.  But it would seem he wrote your dad letters knowing he would read them some other time.  You wonder if Dad ever even knew these were up here.  These were full of words of encouragement, advice, admonishment.  Literally writing to a son he was not sure he would ever see again.  Wanting to fill him full of the years of wisdom that Grandpa had inside.  This was amazing.

Without realizing it, you’ve let a couple of hours pass by when you hear your wife making her way up the folding ladder.  You’ve been up here for three hours and at some point it occurred to her that she wasn’t hearing any movement.  She was initially frustrated, wondering what you were up to and knowing your propensity for distraction.  But when she saw your face under that single dangling bulb she knew something was up.

“This is amazing,” you said.  You showed her the trunk, the Air Force stuff.  And the letters.  All of them.  “Have you read all of these already?”  “Some more than once,” you reply.  This was years of wisdom poured out onto paper under some of the most terrifying of personal situations.  Bombs litterally dropping a hundred yards from the pen writing these words.  You dove into them with an abandon, absorbing every word over and over again.  That was Grandpa’s years-long dissertation to his son on how to live well, with integrity, with faith.  How to raise a son.  You realize Dad must have read these because you see so much of how he raised you in these letters.

This was gold.  You set aside the rest of the day and crawled down through the access hatch with letters in hand.  You sent an email to the boss letting him know you wouldn’t be in the next day and apologizing.  Work was giving you a lot of leeway in light of the loss of your dad.  There were a decent number of letters to go through, and you couldn’t wait to dive through them and extract everything you could from these pages.  Suddenly Grandpa was back with you.  You couldn’t help but hear his voice in your head while reading his words.

This is how I would react to a stack of letters written for the specific purpose of filling me with the wisdom of the ages.  Or at least I think it’s how I would respond.  But the fact is that I, and just about every household in the United States, has a stack of letters just like this in their home and don’t even know it.  We don’t know it because we’ve never really taken a look at the stack of letters sitting on our shelf.  The stack of letters was written by Paul, living in perilous times and under just about as much danger as our fictional Grandpa above.  The letter are amazing.  Filled with wisdom.  Practical wisdom.  Things that can change my life.  Change it in such as way that my kids will say after several decades, “Wow, I know Dad must have read these because I see it in the way he raised me.”

We dismiss these letters because they are full of rules we’d rather not follow.  Or at least we assume that’s the case.  Or if we don’t dismiss them outright we pound through them with our study guide in hand and force ourselves to gulp down the prescribed number of verses needed to get through the New Testament in a year, or some other goal like that.  And it takes us about a week and a half to fall hopelessly behind to the point that the letters go back on the shelf.

Why don’t I see these letters as the gold they really are?  Why don’t I stop everything and fly through them absorbing every word as I go with abandon?  Honestly I don’t know.  I even wrote this blog post and still haven’t done it.  But somewhere in my head it makes sense that doing so would change my life.

And maybe that’s the problem.  The Bible was written to a desperate church, a church on the edge of extinction and under intense persecution.  It was written to people desperate to soak in its words of encouragement and guidance and even correction.  But now I’m pretty comfortable.  I’ve got it good enoough that just about any change would be a change for the worse.  At least by my worldly standards.

So the letters sit on the shelf.  And they sit.  And they sit.  At some point, perhaps with the blessing of a touch (or heavier dose) of adversity in my life, I’ll run to those letters and absorb them as they were meant to be absorbed.

We were built to be heroes.

It’s about time we started acting like heroes.

Photo credit: kevinzim / Foter.com / CC BY