Two Realities Become One

Lately I have been studying a lot about the resurrection of Jesus Christ and what that means for this world. When speaking of what exactly happened when Christ raised from the dead and brought about His kingdom on earth, many scholars like to use the term of the kingdom as "already here but not yet fully." Although this is true in some aspects, this way of wording it can easily lead us into a dualistic mindset resulting in separating the world in Christ from the world of the "secular." Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers a clarity to this delima:

"One is denying the revelation of God in Jesus Christ if one tries to be 'Christian' without seeing and recognizing the world in Christ. There are, therefore, not two spheres, but only the one sphere of the realizations of Christ, in which the reality of God and the reality of the world are united. Thus the theme of the two spheres, which has repeatedly become the dominant factor in the history of the church, is foreign to the New Testament. The New Testament is concerned solely with the manner in which the reality of Christ assumes reality in the present world, which it has already encompassed, seized, and possessed. There are not two spheres, standing side by side, competing with each other and attacking each other's frontiers. If that were so, this frontier dispute would always be the decisive problem of history. But the whole reality of the world is already drawn into Christ and bound together in him, and the movement of history consists solely in divergence and convergence in revelational with the rational. But between the two there is in each case a unity which derives solely from the reality of Christ, that is to say solely from faith in this ultimate reality. This unity is seen in the way in which the secular and the Christian elements prevent one another from assuming any kind of static independence in their mutual relations. They adopt a polemical attitude toward each other and bear witness precisely in this to their shared reality and to their unity in the reality which is in Christ"

Source: A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Worthy Readings : Being and Doing

"It is hard to know what else Jesus could have said to have made his point more clear. Let us restate it one more time: according to Jesus, there is not authentic Christianity, discipleship or Christian ethics apart from DOING the deeds he taught his followers to do. A fuller summary, influenced in part by a careful reading of the Great Commission would be this: the "deeds" dimension of Jesus' teaching enjoins concrete obedience to Jesus' commands, deed-teaching and disciple-making. Disciples of Jesus study, obey, teach and train others in the deeds Jesus taught and practiced. They do so, we must recall, as a joyful response to, and participation in, God's gracious deliverance and inauguration of the kingdom through Jesus Christ."

"Enter through the narrow gate...for the gate is narrow and the road is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it." Christian existence is a path that is followed, a way of living that is practiced. The road is narrow, many miss it. This is a terrifying warning, and one that makes no sense if the Christian faith is understood merely or even primarily as intellectual assent to convictions about Jesus, as an inspiring and encouraging personal relationship with him, or as a forensic transaction gaining us admission to heaven."
~ Both from the book Kingdom Ethics

Simply, Christ calls his followers to be salt and light in this word, flavor of moral goodness as opposed to moral evil that leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and light, as examples to a dark world of how humans are to genuinely live... Doing deeds and caring for the oppressed so that the world may see and give glory to our Father in heaven. We are to be signposts in a hopeless world proclaiming that death has been defeated and pointing towards the future hope. It is a sad thing to see the teachings of Christ reduced to a mere ticket into heaven resulting in a detachment and escape mentality from this world, cutting the nerve of any action to be apart of God's plan of redeeming it from corruption and evil.

The Power of Peppermint

Next time you hop on your bike, try dabbing a few drops of peppermint essential oil on your wrists. Smelling peppermint can help you ride harder and faster, upping your caloric burn by 15 percent. A study conducted at Wheeler Jesuit University found that athletes who sniffed mint ran faster, gripped stronger, and pumped out more push-ups. Chewing on minty gum or a Lifesaver can have the same effect, since taste and smell are so closely connected.

From: Psychology Today: June 2010

Tame Your Temptations

Ever tried to quit a bad habit, or even create a new one? Of course, we all have and this is a constant factor of life. Change. I recently read a great article in the Psychology Today magazine that made a lot of since about how the mind really works when tying to tame your temptations.

The article suggests that the key to strengthening self control is not to quit "cold turkey," whatever your are struggling with or even trying to implement in your life, but rather to set modest goals. The truth is, and anyone that has tried to keep a New Year's resolution can say, that our willpower can wilt. We break our resolutions, whenever they may be, for various reasons, including pushing our willpower beyond its limits. Using willpower puts strain on the brain, depleting our glucose reserves and sapping our energy. This then leads to a weakened resistance, eventually a handful of cookies in your mouth or 2 packs of cigarettes in one day. Resisting two temptations simultaneously taxes our will even more. To avoid willpower fatigue one should set manageable resolutions and tackle only one at a time. For example, if your trying to quit smoking don't try to quit drinking coffee in the same week!

Another suggestion that they recommended was to set up barriers between yourself and the temptation. Like not having a particular food in the pantry to even tempt you to indulge or avoiding certain types of people during that time that may trigger you to give in.

What is the most powerful control weapon? Simply having a humble view of your capabilities. Taking a realistic approach to quitting a bad habit or starting a new one is ultimately the best approach.

De Bush of Bush...1 month in Togo, Africa

Here is a brief summary of the mission....

The trip began at noon on Tuesday, May 11. We drove to the Tulsa airport for the first leg of our aerial journey, and flew to Detroit. We then flew to New York, and took the seven-hour flight across the Atlantic. We arrived in Casablanca, Morocco the next morning, where we had a six-hour layover. In that time, we visited the Blue Mosque, the third largest Mosque in the world, built in the 1980s. It was an amazing example of architecture, and a rather sad testament to the fact that so much talent is being put forth on something that is not the true way to eternal life. Also while we were in Casablanca we saw the ORU Business team, which spent the month helping a covert missionary under the guise of working with his business. We were able to meet with that contact for a short period and encourage him.

We then took a five-hour flight across the Sahara in the dark to Lome, Togo. Stepping off the plane was rather like stepping into a sauna; it was one in the morning local time, and still felt like it was eighty degrees and was definitely very humid. Our contact, "Papa" Nadjombe, picked us up and took us to his house, where we spent the remainder of the first night. The next day, we drove to the town of Atakpame, where the first pastor's conference was scheduled. The conference was a two-day affair, most of the segments being taught by an ORU faculty member who had come with us for the conferences. Our team also taught segments about children's ministry, a field that is not usually emphasized in West Africa. We explained the importance of such ministry, and gave strategies for effectively reaching, engaging, and teaching children. My contribution was a short lesson encouraging the pastors by reminding them about loving our enemies and forgiving those that persecute us.

The day following the first conference was Sunday, and our team split up into different groups to speak and lead children's ministry at several different churches. I went with another team member and had the opportunity to preach while she did kids ministry outside. That afternoon, the team traveled to Kara, which is about two-thirds of the way to the northern border. That Monday and Tuesday we did the second conference there, which was basically the same as the first for a different group of ministers. We traveled back to Atakpame, driving through the village of Bassar. There I saw the church David Wakefield (the grandfather of one of my team members) built in the 1950s. He was one of the first missionaries to the northern regions of Togo.

In Atakpame we rested for a day, then drove west into the mountains to the village of Aka. This was to be our base for the next few days, while we drove to villages scattered in the mountains to do evangelism crusades. The first was in a village that had no church of any sort and, to my knowledge, had never been preached in. After playing with the village children for a few hours, We set up a projector and sound system, and showed a video in French about God's power, which was then translated into the local language. After the video, our contact Nadjombe gave a message and encouraged the people to receive Jesus as lord. Roughly a dozen people responded to receive Christ and follow Him.

The next day was Sunday again, so the team split to minister in the village we had done the crusade in and one other. I was at the other, and helped with kids ministry. This was the first time that I have ever been surrounded with a hundred kids which we had no translator to communicate with. We ended up playing a series of games with them, then attempting to tell the creation story, ending up with the guy helping us telling the creation story himself …plus the birth of Jesus. The next day we fasted and prayed for the mission until dinnertime, and after dinner put on a crusade in the village we were staying at, where several dozen of the villagers accepted Christ.

I want to give a quick explanation about the format of the crusades, and what happens afterwards. Nadjombe is the head of AELVNA, the Lay Evangelism Association for Unreached Villages (the French translation of these terms is how the letters are arranged). He works with dozens of evangelists to plant churches and dig water wells in villages throughout Togo. He will visit several villages in an area and give salvation messages, and if there is not one already plant a church. Wherever a church is planted, one of the evangelists from AELVNA will live in that village for up to three months to train and teach the villagers about living as Christians and help organize the church.

On Tuesday, May 24 we drove out of the mountains to Kougnohou, which was our base for the next week. Over the course of our stay, we visited the site of one of the chapels being built and continued to evangelize in mountain villages. It was the night of the twenty-eighth, our second night evangelizing in a village the name of which escapes me, when a small, skinny old man came forward to be filled with the Holy Spirit. As it turns out, he was the village sorcerer, and had accepted Christ the first night but wanted prayer to be filled with the power of God instead of that of Satan. He gave up his idol, and we prayed for him. Afterwards he was telling the other villagers about the peace that he felt now. We came back Sunday morning, and burned his idol. We then hiked with all the villagers who had come to church that morning about a mile into the bush to the local river, where we baptized the former sorcerer and thirty other villagers. Our contact told us that this had not happened in five years.

That Monday we visited a waterfall near Badou, which was absolutely picturesque. To reach the waterfall we hiked about a mile and a half through beautiful bush and across a small creek. We then drove back to Lome, and spent a few days debriefing about the trip and our experiences. The last Sunday we visited a church that the ORU team last year started. I helped with the kids ministry while some of the other guys preached. At six in the morning on Monday June 7 we flew out of Lome on our trip back to America and ended up in Time Square, New York City on a 12 hour layover. This was quite a culture shock coming from the bush of bush to one of the biggest cities in the U.S. It was my first time to see New York and we had a short good time looking around for a while. When then made our was back to Tulsa to debrief with the rest of the 1 month teams.

Thanks to all who supported me with prayers and financially during this time. With your help many lives were changed in some of the most remote places on earth. Thank you for your help in reaching these people and providing for them. Through your help we were able to give these people some form of hope for their lives now and in the future.

Gentle God

Here is a great blog post that one of my fellow classmates posted recently...please read, it will be worth you time.

http://echoesandmemory.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/gentle-god/

Why Work?

If you just answered..."To make as much money as possible, of course!" I would like to suggest thinking of the activity of work a little differently...and I will start by defining the underlining problem with thinking of work as something secular or separate from worshiping or glorifying God.

Dualism: the doctrine that there are two independent divine beings or eternal principles, one good and the other evil or the belief that a human being embodies two parts, as body and soul.

The Church had its first battle with dualism when the heresy of Gnosticism threatened the truth laid out in the Bible not long after the death of Christ. This way of thought has managed to penetrate the minds of Christians, especially in the west, and manifests itself in several ways as a radical discontinuity between Creator and creature, spirit and matter, religion and nature, religion and economy, worship and work, body and soul, and so on. This dualism is the most destructive disease that afflicts us. For now I will focus on the separation that has been made between work and worship.

Personally, I have had a dualistic mindset and am just now learning to change my worldview concerning these things. Over the weekend I read an amazing essay by Dorothy Sayers titled, Why Work? This essay addresses how for the majority, we have disconnected work from worship and work from pleasure. Sayers calls for a revolution in our whole attitude to work. She suggests that work should not be primarily looked upon as just a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. In this way work, which takes up the majority of a person's life, takes on a deeper meaning and purpose as it should. When we even hear the word work we tend to cringe. Sayers writes, "that it should, in fact, be thought of as creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God's image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing."

We should measure work not by the money it brings to the producer, but by the worth of the thing that is made. When work is reduced to a mere means of making money, although this is an obvious gain from work, one can find themselves becoming enslaved by work. Work then becomes a chore and a burden, something that is hated and despised. It is only when work has to be looked on as a means to gain that it becomes hateful; for then, instead of a friend, it becomes an enemy from whom tolls and contributions have to be extracted. What most of us demand from society is that we should always get out of it a little more than the value of the labor we give to it. By this process, we persuade ourselves that society is always in our debt...a conviction that not only piles up actual financial burdens, but leaves us with a grudge against society.

The second consequence of looking at work apart from worship is that at the present time we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature. The employer is obsessed by the notion  that he must find cheap labor, and the worker by the notion that the best paid job is the job for him. Only feebly do we ever attempt to tackle the problem from the other end, and inquire: What type of worker is suited to this type of work? People engaged in education see clearly that this is the right end to start from; but they are frustrated by economic pressure, and by the failure of parents on the one hand and employers on the other to grasp the fundamental importance of this approach.

A third consequence is that, if we really believed this proposition and arranged our work and our standard of values accordingly, we should no longer think of work as something that we hastened to get through in order to enjoy our leisure; we should look on our leisure as the period of changed rhythm that refreshed us for the delightful purpose of getting on with our work, that is if you value enjoying what you do. When one is engaged in a work that he or she loves and enjoys instead of how much it pays, then work becomes a pleasure and a joy. What do you love to do?

In nothing has the Church so lost her hold on reality as in her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate department, and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world's intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in religion. All that God made was declared good and Christians should be able to do the same as they engage in the creative process of working. Every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade not outside it. How does one serve God while working? By doing well whatever it is that person is doing, and if it is enjoyable and a pleasure to do this will be done with ease because it is done with passion and perseverance. Work then becomes an expression of ourselves and not just a tiring burden in which we have no interest. When work becomes separated from worship then a person will end up spending most of their lives laboring poorly, not doing their best and thus not fulfilling the purpose for what they were naturally created to do. Bottom line...do what you love and take joy in your work!