As a continuation of the last post, I was writing about the book Crazy Love. But before that…
My life has been very contrasted to how it used to be about a year ago. After working in a restaurant and finally realizing that God blessed me with so much more than just serving tables, I broke out of the habit of living complacently with what I have and just crave more. Not in the sense of worldly possessions, but because God made me to be more than what I was at the moment. Finally overcoming the loneliness of being single, I realized I would be able to do more now that I am compared to when I was in a draining relationship that was never meant to be. Due to this, I found out that my passion for music extended past the talent to play various instruments and also write music – it came to the point that God also blessed me with the ability to feel music through my body as well.
My days have been filled with what I love to do. From the moment I wake up, I get to enjoy the blessings and hardships of designing; at night, I get to dance and express the love I have for it until the early morning the next day.
So with that in mind, here’s chapter 2.
Chapter 2: You might not finish this chapter.
The title sounds so grim, but there’s a reason for it. Last time, I tried my best to explain that loving God is beyond the mere tedious tasks of the day. But to really soak in the moment and feeling God’s awesomeness in everything that surrounds us. However, it’s not like that in our day-to-day. Day in and day out we worry and think about the things we need to do for the day, the things we haven’t done for the day, and the things we need to prepare for the following day. And Francis Chan puts it quite eloquently, “…it’s easy to to think about today as just another day.” When I read this, I quickly thought of a song Brian and I wrote a while back.
Click to play “Stuck in here”
The pre-chorus goes like this:
What would you say if today’s your last day?
Why do you wait, if tomorrow’s too late?
And often times, our day to day is so worried about the present and about ourselves, we don’t really take the time out of our day to really think of the moment death takes us and we come to the gates of heaven. At this point in the book, our small group had a quick discussion on when we did think about death. *I was somewhat quiet at this point since I wanted to say what I wanted to say near the end of the chapter (which I will also do). But a lot of the responses were about seeing death when it came to someone close to them or there were some discussions about murder trials and seeing gruesome deaths. These were valid view points and I’m not really in here to bash them, but those were just some of the things that were brought up. One of these instances applied to me when one of my friends passed away a while back (but this is not how I feel about death at the current time). I had only recently gotten to know her and within one evening, she was gone. At this point in my life, I had never been to a funeral nor hear of news of someone close who had passed away from me. So it was a real shocker. So for a few months, I lived out a very cautious life and treaded softly to make sure that I wouldn’t do anything stupid. And of course, I went back to my old routines.
The next quick section was about Justified stress. Is there really such a thing? Anytime I see the word justified, I think of it as a way of “trying” to make a deal with God who’s truth is absolute. So in the sense, why are we trying to justify anything? I digress though, Francis Chan mentions that the world usually consists of two people – natural worriers and naturally joyful people. Throughout all my life, I would honestly say I would fall under the natural joyful category so this section was very hard for me to dissect and discuss with my small group members of whom the majority were natural worriers. Natural worriers tend to be “consumed by their problems and feel that their circumstances are more important than God’s command to always rejoice. In other words, [they] have the ‘right’ to disobey God because of the magnitude of [their] responsibilities.”
Francis Chan went ahead and split up that category into two terms that we can all understand – worry and stress.
- worry – implies that we don’t quite trust God is big enough, powerful enough, or loving enough to take care of what’s happening in our lives.
- stress – says that the things we are involved in are important enough to merit our impatience, our lack of grace toward others, or our tight grip of control
This part was a bit ironic cause we started having a pretty huge debate which sort of got out of hand if I last remembered. We started to discuss the line before we cross to worry and eventually stress about things and the irony of it was that my personality was pounced on by several members of the small group because of my “laid back” attitude towards things (which also have its downfall which I have overcome). But I could honestly say that I don’t really worry and stress but I prepare since God doesn’t tell us to not prepare. If He gives us something in our hands, do we let Him follow through with everything?
“4 Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth.
5 He who gathers crops in summer is a wise son, but he who sleeps during harvest is a disgraceful son.” – Proverbs 10:4-5.
And then the discussion between preparing and worry/stress started to tangent from the real topic at hand which is about trusting God with everything. If we prepare the best we could, then it’s up to God. There’s no sense to truly worry about things we can’t control, and no sense in being stressed about the things that can cause irritation/anger. Because it all boils down to the same point again is that by worrying and stressing, we start thinking that our issues are greater than God,
Which brings to the next point: Thank God We Are Weak
Life is fragile. Accidents happen. Babies have a self destruct button on the back of their heads. We drive at 65+ mph in a car. Essentially it comes to full circle and really remembering that we are not in control. It’s a hard concept to grasp sometimes because of all the hard work we can put into a project our aspect of our life, and sometimes it can just be taken away.
And really, Are We Ready? to come before the gates of heaven and have God ask us what we’ve done with our lives to really glorify Him? (There are a few points I kinda skipped, but you’ll understand where I drew this line to get here)
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Pages 46 – 48 are two stories about a man who spoke at a friend’s funeral, showed the audience his love for Christ and stated that death can come at any time, are you ready? He sat down and passed away at that very moment bringing Christ’s message to everybody who was there. The 2nd story was about a girl who devoted her life to following Christ and bringing new believers every single day. Whether it was through poetry, speeches, you name it. She passed away when she was 15 and at her funeral had over 1500 attendees because of the way she lived her life.
I was pretty silent during small group because I had really thought a lot about this moment for a few years now. I had felt that what I was doing wasn’t significant enough. Who had I brought to Christ since I became a believer? Maybe one person? I did some of the work but I can’t take the credit. I had read “The Purpose Drive Life” but I stopped when I got to the part of the book about evangelizing. I had always felt that it wasn’t for me. Even when I started living out a Christian life, I was always afraid to speak to people about Christ and His love for others. Even now, I’m still uneasy about it. So the ideas of going door to door with the youth group I was with at the time scared me away and I never got back to it. There have been moments like serving others (not really a gift of mine, but no excuse…I would rather serve those close to me) but I was felt very selfish and didn’t want to do those either. Several years passed and I’d like to think I’ve matured a bit. But I think God always came back to me and essentially would bring up the idea of evangelizing or doing ministry work. I had been part of the worship team for a brief moment, but I didn’t feel that was really my calling, despite the fact I could play and write if need be. My “pride” as a pianist essentially halted my presence in the worship team and I backed out because I wasn’t playing for God, I was only playing cause my friend wanted me to play for the team and I would end up judging myself as I played. The glory for Christ was not there.
Not until recently when I discovered a snuffed passion for dance is where I felt that I don’t have to say anything to worship. God moves in me and I move to how He moves me. There are techniques and what nots, but dance isn’t always about that – it’s about expression. I did have a slight regret in not joining the dance ministry back when I was in philly to get some experience but there’s no sense in me to dwell on it. Learn from it and move on. With the idea of body worship, which would be more than just singing or playing, we move. God didn’t just create us just to sing, or to strum, or to bang on drums, or to play the piano, but also to move. Movement is so important and we do it everyday. And even before reading this chapter, I was already convicted to do something about it. But after reading about the moment when life could simply be wasted and not be used for the glory of God, my conviction for this has become stronger…
the only difficult part is how to implement this. And with that, I place in God’s hands. I will continue to strengthen my talent and have Him use me.
