convenience store kitty 3 by Kevin Steele

Here’s a question to ask yourself. How convenient is your life? Here’s a bigger question. How has convenience made your life more difficult?

Yes you read that correctly, I’m asking you to figure out how has convenience made your life more difficult. I know you’re thinking “Eric convenience makes my life easier, not more difficult”.

Really? Are you sure about that?

Let me share some thoughts I’ve had recently and you tell me if you still think those “conveniences in life” are really making your life convenient.

I turned off twitter updates to my phone. I found that constant pinging to my phone was a distraction at work and elsewhere. Shortly there after i started to notice just how disconnected i was from my friends, even with twitter coming to my phone.

I stopped logging into Facebook multiple times a day to read my news feed. Shortly there after i started to notice my friends and family would refer to “stuff” in their life by asking why I hadn’t read it on their Facebook wall.

I stopped playing and participating in FourSquare (a social network & location game / service). I found myself asking my friends and myself what they did this past weekend only to be asked if i had stopped paying attention to their FourSquare check-ins.

I also notice from the three examples above that I got “in trouble” for not twittering enough, updating Facebook with status updates or relationship changes & photo uploads, and that I had given up on Foursquare and was still checked into my home for the past month. Meaning that my choice to unplug not only affected my view but others view into my world. Which is sad because i know what i put out on these networks and while the information is good it’s only a small sliver of my life. What was even more saddening was that i realized how much value i put on those small slivers rather than hearing about the larger pies in their lives.

Lets broaden this a bit now. What other aspects of your life have you given over to convenience only to give up more in the process?

For example, we build zoos and aquariums and people flock to these places to see wild animals in their natural habitat’s. Ok so there was some sarcasm there because we all know those rocks in the fish tank are made of plaster and an elephant doesn’t really play with a soccer ball on the Serengeti. Granted there are some people who will never travel under the water, to the beach, or even across the globe to a foreign country and experience these things.

But ask those who have and you’ll see they tell a different story. No matter what age they are or how often they have been their eyes light up and they are filled with joy from the experience. Talk to a kid after his first visit to the aquarium and he’s all full of wonder and wants more. Talk to that same kid after his 3rd or 5th visit and he’s complaining about how this changed, or these animals where sleeping, or this whole section was gone. Yes i was recently that kid complaining.

Think about the food we eat. Did you know the bread in our stores are all about as equally nutritious when compared to a homemade loaf? Take it up a notch and make your own flour for your homemade bread and you’ve now put store-bought bread into the same category as pop-tarts. Think about the pre-prepared meals we buy in the frozen food section. About the food we grab from the drive-ins.

Now before you go hitting the comment link to give me a verbal chewing on how I’m knocking advancements in society take a second to breathe and listen a bit more.

I’m not against convenience. I love the aquarium, my natures best whole wheat bread, twitter, Facebook, and more. I’m a geek and depend on a lot of these conveniences in order to even succeed at my job. I understand we don’t have time to mill and bake our own bread or that we don’t have the time or money to visit the Serengeti.

I get this and am guilty of all of it.

What i am against though is complacency. The idea that this is the best there is for me. The idea that the loaf of bread i buy from my local supermarket is the most nutritious bread i can have. The idea that the best way to keep up with friends is to follow them on twitter, or Facebook or foursquare or some other network. For a long time in my mind these were the best ways, till I learned that i was sacrificing real relationships with convenient ones.

God never makes things easy for us, and whenever something IS easy, I can pretty much promise that later on you’ll have a struggle because you took the easy road. I can point to many instances in my life of this, but won’t bore you with them because I’m sure you’ve got at least a dozen of your own examples. If you don’t have a dozen examples then you have had either a very hard life with no shortcuts or you’re lying to yourself.

A prayer I’ve had recently is for God to make things difficult for me, to challenge me to have more faith in Him then in the conveniences in my life. To give up those things which I lean on to make life easy or easier and instead invest that into Him so that I can achieve the desires He has for me.

Convenience is great but at what cost?

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Oops! by ktpupp

In life we love to point the finger. We love to say that this person wronged us. Or that this relationship failed because they did or did not do X, Y or Z. The blame game is rampant and even when we try not to point the finger we still end up putting blame elsewhere. I struggle a lot with the blame game. I constantly look for fault in others when things go wrong. I say things like “they just aren’t ready”, or “their spiritual maturity is not where it needs to be” and more. I looked at the situation and instead of looking at myself and my role I found something in the other person to justify their actions.

It wasn’t till after my divorce that I started to ask the question “How have I failed you”. For a long time there I was really good at doing this much-needed gut check. But over time my humility has shrunk and I’ve asked it less and less.

My pride didn’t allow me to see my faults.

I’ve been struggling with a lot of different aspects of my life recently. I would spend hours thinking about why things where happening the way they were. Wondering why people were saying the things they said and why they chose to take the actions they were taking. I would find all kinds of faults in them but none in me.

So yesterday I started to really communicate with God. I started to really open up to him and get angry. It’s amazing how when we get angry and really emotionally about our circumstances with God that we can sometimes hear him the clearest. So here I am sitting there in church questioning God on his reasons for letting X, Y and Z happen, knowing full well, at least in my mind, I had done everything He’d asked of me.

Or so I thought, then a word hit me, humility.

It was like a dagger in my heart. Here I have been spending time trying to find the solution in others, changing others or finding their faults and not looking at my own. I got to the point where I was trying to fix them, or guide them rather than just serving them. I had lost so much humility that I wasn’t able to ask myself that very important question. How have I failed you?

Do you realize the amount of humility it takes to sit down with someone whom you think has wronged you, or whom you’ve grown apart from and ask that question? This isn’t an easy question to ask. Don’t expect them to just say “you haven’t wronged me”, and even if they do push the issue.

Even if you haven’t failed them, you’ve failed to recognize how they truly failed you.

This question, if pushed and explored in a loving and authentic manner, will always lead to realization and discovery. You will either learn how you failed this person, or they will discover how they have failed you.

Failure and humility are not two ideas we typically see together. But what if we started to? What if we would humble ourselves enough to really seek out our failures? What if we trusted God enough to surrender our pride and kneel to our friends and ask them how we have failed them.

I don’t see this being an easy journey. In fact it will probably suck, a lot. But once we discover and recognize our failures we can begin to avoid them in the future. It won’t make us perfect by any means but it will strengthen us and give us a better understanding of who we are.

My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. – Psalm 73:26

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Alabaster Sins by craig.daniels

I WAS SHOCKED

I was shocked, confused, bewildered
As I entered Heaven’s door,
Not by the beauty of it all,
Nor the lights or its decor.

But it was the folks in Heaven
Who made me sputter and gasp—
The thieves, the liars, the sinners,
The alcoholics and the trash.

There stood the kid from seventh grade
Who swiped my lunch money twice.
Next to him was my old neighbor
Who never said anything nice.

Herb, who I always thought
Was rotting away in hell,
Was sitting pretty on cloud nine,
Looking incredibly well.

I nudged Jesus, ‘What’s the deal?
I would love to hear Your take.
How’d all these sinners get up here?
God must’ve made a mistake.

‘And why’s everyone so quiet,
So somber – give me a clue.’
‘Hush, child,’ He said, ‘they’re all in shock.
At the thought of seeing you.’

Found at www.mikeysFunnies.com

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Reassurance By: Secorlew

Man did I ever have a case of the Monday’s this week. I had a busy weekend but nothing to abnormal for me. But I was kind of in a funk the whole time and just couldn’t jump out of it. My personal time was spent watching movies and fighting with some code for a site I’m working on. I wasn’t reading my bible at all, my prayers where, well whiny and I just wasn’t feeling it.

Monday I woke up and was not looking forward to the week. I felt defeated. I didn’t know what was wrong but I know I had a lot of complaints. My news and Twitter feeds were full of sad stuff like online friends funerals, pastors stepping down, people arguing stupid stuff etc. All this just stacked up on top of me and what I was already fighting.

If truth be told I just wasn’t happy with Gods plan. I wasn’t happy with his timing and I was frustrated. I felt defeated, ignored, and just a lot of other stuff along those lines.

So that morning I took it to God in prayer. I prayed Sunday night coming home from church and I continued my little “fit” that Monday morning. I put it all out there. My desires, my wishes, my thoughts, my opinions, my anger, my disappointment, and more.

I needed something!

I needed a miracle, a sign, anything to let me know all was good.

I needed reassurance because I wasn’t trusting myself and I wasn’t sure if I was trusting Him either.

That Monday morning, after I got to work, I got a random text from my old Realtor. She had a lease purchase prospect for my house. This is odd because I no longer have my house on the market because, well there aren’t any buyers and I need an angel to buy mine. I thought at first she had sent it to the wrong person but nope she was talking about me.

The deal wasn’t great but it would have been “doable” with a little work on my part. Short story is that after a few texts and some phone calls on her part they backed out because they felt the utility expenses would be too high.

Now mind you I’ve been trying to sell my home for close to 2 years now. I have a specific amount I owe and would be happy to sell if for that amount, but with a Realtor I have to bump that figure up significantly. So it’s been a long hard test for me. I’m OK with it most days and only once every 6 months or so do I get really down about it.

This past weekend / week was one of those down moments.

Now how would you have reacted? Would you have immediately seen this as just another kick in the face? God toying with you by dangling the carrot only to pull it away at the last minute? Punishment for something you did in your past?

I would have but I didn’t.

Instead I saw this as an answer to my prayers. You see I had asked God to reveal Himself to me. I asked Him to show me He was still in control and working in ways I didn’t see or even understand. I wanted to know that no matter what I’ve done in my past He still has His plan and is going to see it through.

I needed to know I could trust Him.

How horrible is that? Here I am supposed to be completely surrendered to Him yet I’m asking Him to prove Himself to little ole me. This isn’t the first time this has happened either and I should be over it by now.

I was broken.

I was desperate.

He remained faithful.

This seemingly insignificant dance with the Realtor was His way of showing me, He was in total control. He was telling me basically “Eric there are a lot of chess pieces on the board and you aren’t always in a position to see other movements I’m making. Chill out.”

I was so ashamed.

I let myself slip back into a point of questioning Him. I let myself believe the lies being fed to me by the devil and his minions. I put my trust and hope in what I saw rather then in what I truly hoped for.

We must not lose hope!

I’m OK now.  I’m stronger now for sure. Can this happen again sure but next time I will be ready and it won’t be so easy.

Proverbs 3:5-8 “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones”

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