We are dog-sitting for my sister this week while she is at camp. This morning while I was getting ready her dog stared intently at the closed door out of our bedroom.

Behind her was a room with toys, her bed, food, water - even another dog to play with. But she couldn’t get her focus off the closed door.

So many times I find people living their lives focused on the door that is closed. Never mind the opportunities, relationships, dreams - even limitless potential that surrounds them. All they can focus on is one closed door.

We all have doors in our lives that have closed - the real question is: Do we know what God has unleashed around us, or are we focused on the door?

The team took a half day today to recover from the busiest week we have in ministry all year. We can’t stay down too long, our biggest event of the year is just four days away - but the short time to rest up and catch up on stuff at home is welcomed.

I’ve spent the day on cmconnect.org, twitter and catching up on people’s blogs - great to disconnect from what I’ve been doing and reconnect with some folks I haven’t talked to in a bit.

What do you do to recover after busy times in life?

I did a post a while back where I said, Anything I do alone in ministry is a failure. If you hang around me long, you know I am fasinated by the power of a team.

There is something amazing about connecting with people in such a way that we accomplish something together we never could have accomplished alone.

One of my goals as a leader is to stay ahead of my team. If I can pave the way for where they are headed - for what is next - then I feel like I have succeeded in serving them. The tuff part is, the more talented the team, the more work it is to stay ahead of them. Here’s what I’ve found that helps:

• I must have alone time to refuel/recharge/refocus before I can lead effectively. This alone time is less about leadership of the team (quote above…) and more about self leadership in preparation for leading the team.
• I have to cast the vision to individuals before I cast it to the group - this allows me to see their reaction, learn their concerns and shape the way I cast to the group. (It also means there is always someone for which staff meeting is a rerun of a conversation we had the other day.)
  
• I will often get the vision for what is next and  work with one or two people on the team to pave the way for the rest of the team. Getting ahead is not easy, but if I work with the most gifted people in the room, it is significantly more simple.

The Bible draws a picture of the Lord as our portion. It’s an interesting thought: God is completely and totally all you need.

So many times in my life, God is not my portion, He plays a part of what I need, mixed in with everything else.

What would it look like if God was our portion? If everything we needed came from Him? Could it be we would go through a week without the empty longings for things in the world? Could it be we would feel freedom like never before from the things that hold us back? Could it be the guilt we carry from our past no longer crushes our spirit?

The problem we have when God is not our portion is that He cannot shape and bless our lives to the fullest because we have pushed Him out of so many places.

Living with God as our portion is all about pushing everything out we have come dependent on for our life, outside of God, to make room for our dependance on Him. It is finding the things we are dependent on and asking God to refocus our dependance on Him. It is finding the areas we are captive to and praying our hearts out for redemption. Living with God as our portion is about taking our focus off the small time we live here on earth and moving it to the greatness of God and the story of His kingdom.

For more see Psalm 119:57 and Psalm 142:5.

Been kind of a heavy week on the blog - I want to end on a light note. These are seriously some of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a while. Check them out!

You can check out the full You Tube Channel.

It is so easy to become disconnected from other people in the world. After reading Arlan’s post on the nations, I remembered an email someone sent that challenged my thinking and prayer patterns for one nation in particular.

Right behind the nation Israel, the second most mentioned nation in the Bible is the nation of Iraq. You may not recognize it at first, because in the Ancient Near East it was called a number of things (including Babylon, Land of Shinar, and Mesopotamia).

Some Biblical events involving Iraq:

• Likely the location of garden of Eden 
• The Tower of Babel was in Iraq
  
• Abraham was from Ur (southern Iraq)
• Jacob met Rachel in Iraq
  
• Jonah preached in Nineveh (jut of the Tigris)
• Daniel was in the lion’s den in Iraq
  
• Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were throne into the furnace in Iraq
• Belshazzar, the King of Babylon saw the “writing on the wall” in Iraq
  
• Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, carried the Jews captive into Iraq
• Peter preached in Iraq

I’m working on a talk for our student ministry right now. One of the key thoughts in the talk is a statement that helps me focus my life:

You can’t out-dream God.

God dreams for you. He has brilliant plans for your life. Some of them He weaves into the fabric of your being from the very beginning. Other’s He presents to you as you journey with Him.

Yet so many people try to out-dream the Dream-Giver. The danger is two-fold:

• If you accomplish all of your dreams in life, but aren’t focused on God, you will find your dreams empty and meaningless. 
• If all you do is accomplish only the dreams you have at this moment, you will miss out on so many of the massive things God dreams for you. 

We must stay focused on God, above our dreams - so the dreams He has entrusted to us from the beginning can come to life in ways we could never imagine. We must also stay flexible to the opportunities He will present to us on our journey - so the dreams God has for us, that are so much bigger than us, can redefine both the story of our lives and the legacy we will leave.

“God treats his most faithful servants like crap. They suffer all the time. Go down the line:  Joseph (unjustly accused and thrown into prison), Moses (banished by God for 40 years into the desert for some “character development”), Samuel gives his life for his people and they never really listen to him, David constantly running for his life from a King God appointed, Solomon like his father had kids who hated him and hated each other, Jeremiah quite possibly a sufferer of clinical depression, Hosea is told to marry a whore so that Israel has a picture of God’s love, Ezekiel’s wife dies in the middle of his ministry.” (author withheld)

So the glass is half empty?

Never mind that Joseph, because of God’s desire to interpret dreams through him, rose to a level of power and authority in the world that no Hebrew could dream of.

Let’s not talk about how the creator and guider of the waters lead Moses’ basket into the arms of a Pharaoh’s daughter, split the waters at the touch of his staff or brought the entire Jewish legal system into existence through his relationship.

Don’t look at how Samuel’s entire life was anointed by God - that such a simple boy, from such an unlikely past, would become one of God’s most powerful voices in a dark and unjust time.

And David - you mean the Hebrew hillbilly who became the namesake king in the lineage of our Savior? His son Solomon, the wisest man ever to live - given his wisdom as a gift from God, unparallel to any other gift in Scripture.

Then, Jeremiah came along, the one man in all of time that God entrusted with His vision - not only for generations to come, but for all of humanity.

And Hosea, the man to whom God gave such a vivid and powerful message of His will that generations today are still gasping at his clarity, integrity and resolve.

But all these things are but waste compared to the unmachless reward these men receive because of their faith. It wasn’t the earthly rewards, the accolades of man or the promotion of self that drove any of these men - therefore the earthy struggles, insults from men and demotion of self did not deter them from their faith in God.

If the glass is half empty, it is only for the brief time these men served their God on earth. Now the glass is full - even overflowing.

——-

How we view things impacts how people around us view things. How we talk about God changes the way people who listen to our voice interact with God. It is critical we do not get caught up in negativity, but focus our lives on the greatness of God and the name of Jesus as the only truly good thing in life and the promise for all of creation’s restoration.

What are your thoughts? What would you change or add?

Extreme poverty seems to float to the top of the list when you think about the massive needs in our world today. What is most interesting to me is to realize you don’t have to go over seas to find cases of extreme poverty.

Right here in America there is a poverty so extreme it has left many in our country dreaming of a life they cannot have. The poverty is spiritual poverty. It is common across all walks of life. It even jumps the labels we put on people. There are people who affiliate with no religion that are struggling spiritual poverty - there are also those who call themselves Christians who are wrestling with spiritual poverty.

Spiritual poverty is deceiving because those living in the deepest poverty feel like they are rich.

Jesus talked a lot about having a rich spirit. In many ways, you could call spiritual fullness one of His life messages - a message He delivered to those in spiritual poverty. The irreligious. The religious elite. Spiritual poverty was just as rampant then as it is now.

The question for us today is two fold. First, are we following Jesus and allowing Him to lift us from our spiritual poverty and fill our spirit? And second, have we joined Him in fighting against spiritual poverty?

Reflections on the One Prayer Fast

Last week we did a communal fast at Fellowship Church. It was a week full of listening to God and caffeine headaches.

Honestly, Friday was my most difficult day. Friday’s are my day off and I spend most of the day at home, disconnected from the folks I normally do life with. One of the biggest things I learned through the week was the power of strong Christian community.

Isolation primes us for attack. In my case, the cravings were stronger and the reasons to quit were more clear than ever - I lacked focus because I lacked friendship.

Fortunately my awesome wife was there to help - coming up with creative dinner ideas and helping us make it through the home stretch.

Lesson of the week: Community is the context for growth.