For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. 1 Cor 13:12

It is this desire to find understanding that led me to the truth in Christ. But it has also made me feel very insecure, unsettled in everyday life. But now I think I “understand” how to close this gap, By faith! First, I cannot possibly understand every situation, and two, God does, So, the only way I can close the gap is by faith. Faith-based understanding.

Ironically, I have such confidence for this in tech / business meetings where my understanding is woefully incomplete. He will drop a word of knowledge, understanding in my spirit. I must believe for this well proven relationship to be everywhere, and every situation. Faith is how I can enter His rest as described in Hebrew’s 4. God is not striving, neither should we. Let Him bring it to us when we need it. He knows.

Last night I was watching the Teen Choice Awards. Things haven’t changed much since the sixties, except that it’s all now just been branded.

This morning the Lord told me not to interpret my age in the context of contemporary culture. My age says I am out of date, unable to connect, irrelevant. Hollywood will not accept me as a relevant producer. God’s word says different…

A grey head is a crown of glory; it is found in the way of righteousness. Proverbs 16:31

So I must train my mind to not see myself in the negative, even though Hollywood does discriminate. But God… He does not conform to culture, and He does not expect us to, either. He is the grand exception to the world system. That is one way our faith comes into play. We must believe that we, too are the grand exemption. But the exemption only happens when we are standing, thinking, doing by faith.

So too, do not allow yourself to “think” that your faith makes you irrelevant to the people. The irony is, it does in fact make you irrelevant to the culture, but your are not irrelevant to people; you are actually more relevant.

Do not play the voices of other people in my head, what I think they are saying about me… they wag on and on about my weaknesses and faults. Or they complement me in my carnal vanities, reinforcing my fallen nature. Either way, they separate me from what God thinks about me. And, God thinks I am wonderful. Train your mind on His word, what He says. For example, as lost and fallen, apart from his blood, He loved me enough to die for me. As a believer, under His blood, God sees me perfect, righteous and actually “unfallen”. God has made me a joint heir with his son Jesus Christ. I am entitled to everything He has given Jesus. I am now a child of the King.

I really should “think” that way.

We live in a false reality.

It’s our emotional outlook; the product of wounds and pleasures, mixed in a alchemy of dreams and imaginations. It makes for one strange reality. It is developed over years, and none can escape without help from God.

We interpret circumstances to reinforce that outlook, and deny interpretations that run contrary to it. The challenge is to not be conformed to this outlook, but to God’s Word and what we ‘think’ it says about us. But even this must go through our flawed emotional outlook, and it can get warped. We must have the working of the Holy Spirit to help us through. Over time we resolve to a more perfect solution. And this will be love. Freedom to love others as they are, freedom to love yourself as you are. And most importantly, understanding how great Father God’s love is for us, just as we are.

The song Orange Sky by Alexi Murdoch reflects this strange reality .

I think this song reflects the journey of the older brother of the Prodigal Son, as he returns back home. He has learned the profound truth, in your love, my salvation lies.

More on Alexi Murdoch here…

Few are the first to recognize innovation.

More than 200 million people have visited the Eiffel tower since its construction began in 1887.  But at it’s selection as the centerpiece of the Paris Exposition, there was a huge storm of vitriol, mockery and lawsuits.

To get it built, Gustave Eiffel had to fend off critics. He even had to commit to promise disassemble it in 20 years. From the Wall Street Journal, ‘Odious Column’ of Metal…

Even as Eiffel was breaking ground by the Seine River in February 1887, 47 of France’s greatest names decried in a letter to Le Temps the “odious column of bolted metal.” What person of good taste, this flock of intellectuals asked, could endure the thought of this “dizzily ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a black and gigantic factory chimney, crushing [all] beneath its barbarous mass”? The revered painters Ernest Meissonier and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, writers Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas fils, composer Charles Gounod and architect Charles Garnier all signed this epistolary call to arms, stating that “the Eiffel Tower, which even commercial America would not have, is without a doubt the dishonor of Paris.”

Eiffel’s response to the criticism…

‘And I submit that the curves of [the tower's] four piers as produced by our calculations, rising from an enormous base and narrowing toward the top, will give a great impression of strength and beauty.’ Eiffel the ardent republican wondered why his nay-saying compatriots could not see the glory. France, a lone republic surrounded by monarchies, was building “the tallest edifice ever raised by man,” a completely original industrial-strength monument made possible by new knowledge and technologies, a colossal modern wonder of the world designed to draw vast throngs to France’s Exposition Universelle.

I will have a later posting that lists products and projects that few understand as having any practical purpose or future. Can you think of any?

Yeah, that reminds me of the time I…

Ever since I saw the video below, I always try and remember to bite my tongue before I say those words. Brian Regan gives an hilarious take on this in the following video.

Andrew’s post on The Power of Saying Less reminded me of this.

Brian Regan is a well-known stand-up comic with a genius for finding the absurd in the everyday.

Not like we want to.

We cannot know God’s will for our life, but we can walk it perfectly. How? By faith. We ask God and believe that he is leading us sight unseen. But there’s more.

Does our life have a purpose?

Absolutely. It’s a purpose so profound that it was set at the creation of the world. But it can be so hard to know. Some things we do know. To be thankful in all things. To keep his commandments. To love your neighbor as yourself. But it’s hard to know the specific purpose for our life. Why does it feel like we’re in a dark room tripping over the furniture of life? Others describe it like walking a maze blindfolded. Confusing, uncertain and frustrating.

We can’t fully know it.

Yet, we know God is working in our life. All believers in Jesus Christ seem to be able to look back hours, days weeks and months and see hand of God working in their life. Working in many good ways that we never could have predicted or orchestrated. Yet, we are frustrated about not knowing the future. We can’t know it. At least not fully. Look at these two scriptures…

For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9

Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us. Ephesians 3:20

But we can do it.

How? By faith. That is the way to connect to God. Ask for wisdom and believe you have it. Then walk it out. But remember, his path is not a straight line. It can take many years to walk what seems like a short distance because he prepares our character.

Goals are important.

If you have both a strong desire to accomplish something and it advances the kingdom of God, then it’s probably a God given goal. The most fundamental and profound goal is to be married, love your spouse and raise your children in the love of God, whereby they will freely choose to raise their children knowing that same love. That’s why he created us. For companionship.

The power of the unexpected.

How a little creature can bring down a big man. It’s all in the mind!

A great question.

Great stories are based on a great question. One of my favorites is “Is this real or am I crazy?” Movies ask this question, creating a mystery the audience has to figure out.

Often, it’s a debate between science and faith.  Science is about the tangible, verifiable physical world. Faith is about the supernatural, intangible, meta-physical world.

Few story genres debate science and faith better than than Sci-Fi. Mulder and Scully debated it on X-Files for nine seasons. Morpheus offers Faith to Neo in the form of a red pill in the Matrix. Jack and Locke have been debating purpose, fate and the supernatural on LOST for six seasons. Their relationship even inspired an episode title: Man of Science, Man of Faith.

Though different stories offer different answers to this debate, what drives the story is always the quest for truth. And sure enough, truth comes along and rocks their world. The desire for truth makes us question everything we believe and takes us on incredible journeys that can be both exhilarating and heartbreaking.

In the new trailer for the movie Moon [June 12], an astronaut, Sam Rockwell, is on a lonely lunar mission. He struggles with the question, Can he believe what he sees? “Is this real or am I crazy?” I love it when the computer sympathetically suggests, “Perhaps you are imagining things?”

[qt:http://movies.apple.com/movies/sony/moon/moon_h.480.mov 480 216]

[Trailer options at the apple site...]

This is Jenn’s first contribution. Welcome!

It is the near future. Astronaut Sam Bell is living on the far side of the moon, completing a three-year contract with Lunar Industries to mine Earth’s primary source of energy, Helium-3. It is a lonely job, made harder by a broken satellite that allows no live communications home. Taped messages are all Sam can send and receive. Thankfully, his time on the moon is nearly over, and Sam will be reunited with his wife, Tess, and their three-year-old daughter, Eve, in only a few short weeks. Finally, he will leave the isolation of “Sarang,” the moon base that has been his home for so long, and he will finally have someone to talk to beyond “Gerty,” the base’s well-intentioned, but rather uncomplicated computer.

Is this the dumbest generation?

Is the revolution in texting, facebook and twitter making young people dumb? Do they need to get back into classic media and interaction to restore their brain power?

A good friend of mine, Seth Barnes, is a smart, tech-forward guy who has worked with young people all his life recently posted on his blog, Living in a Radical World, the thesis, Facebook is killing us softly. In reviewing the book, The Dumbest Generation, Don’t Trust Anyone Under Thirty, by Mark Bauerlein, Seth echoes the author’s position that this technology is having an adverse effect on the minds of young people.

Quoting Bauerlein…

[His] thesis is that young people spend so much time on sites like Facebook that they are losing the capacity to sit quietly in a room by themselves and read a book. As a consequence, they are losing the capacity to think deeply about issues.

Seth’s own comments…

This is not a question of Facebook/Twitter/Cellphones being good or bad. They are wonderful communication tools. It’s a question of “do you over-use them, and does that shape the way you think?” Because I love young people, I’m concerned about this phenomenon.

Seth received 25 passionate comments on both sides of the issue.

A pastor, Dan Waits, who also works with young people, had some good points of disagreement…

I find all this talk about facebook to be more than just a bit alarmist in nature… spoken whenever something new is introduced into our psyche, culture, & way of doing things.

I’m a 20something pastor that uses Facebook & texting as a major communication tool for our ministry… Facebook / texting is a significant component in the building of our sense of community… setting up meeting times for supper, coffee, or hanging, or just for finding out how everyone is doing.

I don’t think that Facebook/text messaging shorthand has corrupted people’s writing skills anymore than anything else in our culture. I was full time in music ministry for 30 years. Young adult writing skills were always pretty lame during that whole time, long before Facebook & texting were ever thought of.

more at Seth’s blog post…

So the question is whether this medium is dumbing people down, or does every generation viewed the next as dumber? I tend to agree with Dan, that it’s not harming kids. What do you think?

But then I thought different.

Out the window, I saw green buds on the trees! Everywhere. New words came flooding in… It’s springtime! School will be out soon and I have a whole three months of summer ahead to ride bikes, build forts and play army! Neato’.

Well, I’m not ten years old anymore. But that memory is real. The original emotion is wired to those green buds, and I let the warm emotions of a carefree life flow through me, letting them silencing the incessant voices shouting performance, worry, fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Man, that’s a good vibe. Let’s do some more of that!

I started thanking God for the abundance God has provided; the things money cannot buy. I started with my wonderful wife, our four beautiful girls, life in America, our health. My freedom to write and create. On and on they go. I really felt different. Happy! All because I was thinking different. It took less than a minute. The bible addresses this well…

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
Philippians 4:8-9

Think good thoughts. The chatter slows. Be happy.

PS – I took these photos of my buddy John Ellis when we were kids back in the early 1960s. We had some great summers together. He was crazy.