We don’t normally face our fears willingly. Usually, God has to woo us into the desert. We are either chasing love or some other desire, and we find ourselves in the midst of a situation in which we have very little control. And when we lose control, we go into a mild form of trauma. But the good news is the greatest stories are lived in the desert. The great lives are lived in the places we most fear. If we fear being rejected, the great story has us standing at the door with flowers in our hands, if we fear losing love, the great stories have us letting that person go rather than clinging to them. If we fear taking a chance on a dream, the great stories have us quitting our jobs. My friend Jeremy Cowart moved from Nashville to LA recently but decided to tell a better story with his move. Rather than packing up the family and making a long, boring drive, he called Jamie Tworkowski from To Write Love on her Arms and made a Fears Vs Dreams tour out of the move. They’d pull the moving van into a town, set up a table, [...]
I’m reading Richard Rohr’s book Everything Belongs right now and when I came to a passage about using humility to get ahead, I unfortunately identified. Rohr talks about using the language of descent to make an ascent. That is, using the language of humility or spirituality to fit in or be accepted in a given culture. The Bible contains a recurring phrase that goes something like this: they will get their reward in full…The context changes, of course, but the idea is the same. The idea is that we can really know God and walk with Him in peace, or we can use Him to fit in with a religious social group. The real reward is God, not the group. And besides, when we do things for real, we get both God and connection to the group, so why not be the real thing? But motives are tough to decipher, and we can go crazy wondering whether we are being authentic. So how do we know if we are really spiritual, if we really love God? The answer lies in our actions. If we are talking one way and living another, we are just using the language of God to [...]
