Expression

Expressing emotion or feelings, at least the very deep ones, is not easy for me at all. It creates all sorts of issues with my wife but somehow we manage. But there is a relationship I have that I feel deeply about that haunts me because of how difficult it is for me to express it. And yes, it needs expressing.

I am head-over-heels in love with Jesus. I know that is easy to say but I'm serious. It is hard for me to think of a decision I make where he isn't a factor in some way. It is what I live for. And yet I don't think very many people would guess that about me.

Now I know there is a difference in that I do believe HE knows how much I love him whereas I need to express that to my wife. But I think that in this case it is important that everyone else knows it too. But I don't think they do. I'm not even sure if my kids know it to that degree.

If you asked most people who know me, "Does Tom loves Jesus?," most would say yes. I hope. But they would say that about anybody that they know who claims to be a Christian. But somehow that doesn't capture the depth of what I feel for Jesus. It is so much more than just a statement and it bothers me, to the point that it keeps me up at night, that I don't feel I express that very well.

I know it is supposed to be irresistible, contagious even, they say. But is that really true for all people? Or is personality type just an excuse? Am I failing to truly make my love for Jesus inherent in everything I do? All I know is I'm tired.

Change

This is something that has been around forever but for some odd reason I have bumped up against it a lot recently. It has to do with changing or, rather, not changing. It seems like I've suddenly run into several impassioned pleas to, "Don't change who you are," or, the defiant, "Don't try to change me. This is just who I am."

Well, yes and no. Every time these statements are made they must be taken in context. Some people shouldn't change some of the things about them because they are pretty wonderful. And some people need to resist the efforts of others to change them into someone they shouldn't become. The problem is that pretty soon the "don't change" mantra gets set in stone and people end up against change.

Well, the fact is most of us should change, or at least change parts of who we are. I've have personally been working on a lot of things about me that I would like to change and I'm sure I'll discover even more things to change in the future. And that list includes some things that you could say I was born with. I was born with a pointy head too but I sure didn't want to keep it.

Pregnant Aliens

So I just got my electronic version of the new NIV Bible. Now I can start confusing everyone in my church when I read scripture and it doesn't follow along with what they are reading. Oh well, they'll get used to it.

I kind of liked the TNIV and I use it quite a bit. But I do agree that it crosses the line in a few places with the gender issues. On the other hand, I do like "foreigner" for "alien" because it seems to make the point more directly in the USA culture. I also like "pregnant" for the more delicate "with child" in all places except the Christmas story. But I read that out of the KJV most of the time anyway. Linus rules.

Mess

I'm working on this blog template and it is a mess. So for the few of you who drop by once a month.. sorry. I'll either get everything fixed or revert back to an old template.

Purpose

I'm reading "Managing Transitions" today. It is a decent book with a lot of general information in it but nothing earth shaking. I did like the following paragraph on purpose.

"The kind of purpose you will need in order to launch a new beginning must come from within the organization - from its will, abilities, resources, and character. To be more specific, it must arise from the way in which these inherent qualities interact with the situation in which the organization finds itself. It is that interaction that spells opportunity in a changing world. If your purpose is simply copied from another organization, or if it belies the real situation in which the organization finds itself, it won't do its job." Managing Transitions by William Bridges, page 63

Losers

This idea hasn't but thought through very carefully but I wanted to get it down on paper before I lost it.

On the way to a meeting this morning I was listening to sports talk radio where the topic was the championship basketball game that was played last night. They were talking about elite college basketball coaches and it was mentioned that they are scared to death of losing. A loss affects them emotionally much more forcefully than a win does.

In church circles we often talk about "wins". We look for wins. We count wins. We keep track of wins. I'm not sure that we spend much time thinking about losing. That isn't very popular and it seems like a rather negative thing to do.

If we aren't careful we may not even know what it means to lose in a church sense. And if we don't know that how can we even begin to be afraid of it. I don't think we spend very much time considering what losing means in a church.

I think losing in a church changes depending on the season any given church is in. Probably the most recognizable loss is if we have to close the doors. When a church gets close to that they probably do begin to fear losing and some of them are probably motivated to actually do something about it. But losing probably means something else to most churches.

This does fit in well with the missional stuff I've been going through with our church. Changing our scorecard does help us define what it means to win but it should probably also help us understand what it means for us to lose.

The benefit of being afraid to lose may be that it helps us define what normal is for us. If all of our focus is on winning it can give us the feeling that we our losers focused on winning. Our normal is to lose but our goal is to win. If the focus is on our fear of losing it gives the sense that we are winners who are afraid to lose. Our normal is winning and our goal is to keep it that way.

There are a lot of arguments against this and the infamous "playing not to lose" mantra quickly comes to mind. Like I said in the beginning, I haven't put a lot of thought into this and the theory seems to have a lot of holes in it. But it did strike me that elite coaches seemed to have this trait in common and that we rarely talk about it in church. I think there is something to the idea that we should know what it means for us to lose and we should be deathly afraid of it. Having said that, didn't Steve Taylor write a song called "Jesus Is For Losers"?