Mick's Minute

Once upon a time, my spring sport of choice was track and my specific event of choice was the high hurdles. I spent a lot of time training to be in the best shape to run those hurdles with the best form. And in the meantime, I got a lot of bruises, a few pulled muscles, and not very many medals.

Fast forward to today, a couple of decades later, and these days I try not to hurdle much of anything if I can help it.

So from a certain perspective it would be easy to think that all those days spent training for a race that I was never exceptionally good at were kind of a waste. But they really weren't, because as it turned out in training for that particular event, I learned some very important things about life.

For example, I learned that be it on the artificial confines of a quarter mile track or in the midst of day to day life there is something about competition that can bring out the best and worst in people, and that’s a really fascinating thing to see. I think that’s one of the reasons why we don't just play sports, we also watch them. The fact is that we were all designed for greatness, and that fact becomes a little more obvious when we find ourselves surrounded by people who are all striving to be the best.

As it turned out, high hurdles weren't good for me because I was the best at it. They were good for me because I was at my best at it. My training changed the way I ate, it changed the way I slept, it changed the things i thought about and talked about. And It woke up something inside of me that craved victory.

And all of us, long after the days when we hang up our track spikes, must come to grips with the joy and the terror that comes with the fact that we were built by God for greatness.

And it’s a real challenge, because most of us have long ago given up on greatness. We have histories that include too much losing and not enough winning, and no expectation that that is going to change.

So as a result of that, we "settle in" to whatever kind of life seems achievable for us, and we take whatever is left of that in-born drive to be something and do something, and we push it away. Sometimes we eject it out of ourselves in bouts of anger and frustration, sometimes we try to bury it in ourselves under mountains of busyness and distraction. But neither approach ever really works. So sometimes we find ourselves feeling lost and listless, sitting in the stands of life, and wishing we had something to run for.

Ladies and gentlemen boys and girls guess what? You do.

You, right now in this moment, are nothing less than an image bearer of the living God created for a greatness that is beyond anything we can even imagine. You may be broken and dusty and in desperate need of a tune-up, but regardless, that is what you are.

In the book of First Corinthians Chapter nine 24 the Bible says:

"'Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize."

Ladies and Gentlemen, embrace the race today. Not because you will be the best at it, but because you will be at your best at it. Turn your heart to the living God, and experience in this moment the life that He has for you.

I learned the other day that every time one person looks at another person a special part of our brains kick into gear that help us to see the intricate details of each others’ faces.

The reason for that is a good one—its so that we can tell each other apart.

There are hopefully people in your life who are important to you, and hopefully there are people out there who think of you as important.

But the fact is that pretty much everybody you ever meet has the same number of eyes and noses and mouths, and those parts are all located in pretty much the same places on your best friends as they are on your worst enemies.

Even though human beings are very different from one another, human faces are not really all that different from one another.

But regardless of facial similarity, most of us want to keep the same people in our lives, not just people who pretty much look the same. And while it might make it a lot easier to pick up kids from school if all you had to do was grab the right number of kids who had approximately the right size and shape, I think we can all agree that it’s a really important thing to be able to tell people apart from one another for lots of different reasons.

So, in order to make certain that we all know who is who our brains are specially designed to notice the very slight differences between human faces so that we can very accurately tell each other apart.

In fact, without that special design, we wouldn’t be able to tell each other apart any more than we can tell apart a herd of identical-looking sheep.

However, once in a great while, this particular part of somebody's brain gets broken. When that happens people get a condition called “face blindness,” in which they can literally not see the difference between people's faces, and this condition is so severe that even though the person can see other things perfectly well, they cannot identify the faces of even their closest friends and family.

Thankfully, face blindness is a rare condition so not very many people have it.

But I mention it today because I’m wondering if maybe you think that God has face blindness for you.

We talk about God quite a bit in our culture. His name comes up regularly in conversation and country songs, and He usually sounds and least somewhat special and important.

But do you ever feel like, to God, you are not special and important? Like God might be very interested in people, or at least interested in other people, but when God looks at you He just sees another face in the crowd?

If you ever feel like that, I have great news for you today.

God is not blind to you. In fact, He sees you perfectly.

There is an old song in the Bible that is about exactly this subject. Psalm 139 starts out and says:

O Lord, you have searched me

and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise;

you perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down;

you are familiar with all my ways.

Before a word is on my tongue

you know it completely, O Lord.

It goes on like that for a while, and I would encourage you to look it up and read it. Wherever you are, wherever you’re going, whatever you’re thinking, God sees you. There is no blindness in Him. He sees you, and He cares.

And for me, that changes everything.

It is a beautiful thing when the supporting details of our lives are shiny and new and in tip top shape. There is nothing quite so grand as a life that is firing on all cylinders with blue skies and clear paths as far as the eye can see. Its a beautiful thing that kind of life, but alas, it is not a permanent thing.

To the contrary, it is likely that most of the supporting details of your actual life are squeaking and creaking along and just generally wearing out. The very irritating fact of life is that Everything Breaks down. Everything.

Our houses fall apart. Our cars wear out. Our bodies get old and sick. Even the sun is slowly burning itself out. Its not fun, but it is true. Everything in the universe breaks down. And that simple little fact guarantees that at least some of the time our lives are going to be hard.

Life is going to let us down big time, and that is going to be a very unpleasant experience. It may be something like your car breaking down and leaving you stranded late at night on a lonely highway. It may be something like your marriage breaking down and leaving you devestated in a lonely life. It may be something like you breaking down and failing a lot of people that you love and care about. The details change from person and person and from year to year, but somewhere, somehow, something is always breaking.

And that is pretty terrible news.

In the Bible there is a book called Lamentations, and it is about as fun as its name makes it sound. The whole book is basically the very sad song of a guy who watched as God allowed the destruction of a bunch of people because of their sins against Him. It was a terrible time that lasted for a terribly long time. But even in the midst of that particularly awful breakdown, there is this relentless theme of hope. For example,

I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”

—Lamentations 3:19-24

It is absolutely true that everything in creation breaks down. And because of that you most likely have some fear, or anxiety, or pain in your life today. You have earned it, and life has given you every reason to carry it. But remember that that is not the whole story.

It is also true that God is faithful, and that His plan for everybody is good, and that He never breaks down. Other things are going to keep breaking down, but if you are slogging through the breakdowns of life with no hope and nowhere to turn, you don't have to do that anymore. You can trust God to do right and be right, and to care about you every day of your life.

I recently shared this sermon at the Broken Bow Evangelical Free Church in Broken Bow, Nebraska.

We live in a super-complicated world. Relationships are complicated. Health is complicated. Finances are complicated. Work is complicated. We are complicated. From the deepest of the inside of us to the farthest reaches of our lives and beyond, there is so much that has gone on and is going on, and all of that is highly interconnected in ways that we never fully understand.

Everybody wishes that we had a firm handle on our lives, like the world's best bull-rider on an enjoayble but mediocre ride, fully in charge, and fully in the know. But instead we are more like feathers in a hurricane, overwhemled and confused, not knowing what in the world is happening right now, and not knowing what is going to happen next.

Its no wonder that in the midst of all this complication we very often get lost. And I don't mean lost as in a little bit turned around. I mean lost like a blind man in a blizzard. In the midst of it all we try to get a handle on our lives, but we don't know where we are, we don't know how we got here, and not only do we not know what to do, much of the time we don’t even know who we are. And its a terribe feeling to be lost in the midst of a complicated life that seems to be out of control.

So today, as a person who knows what its like to be lost in a complicated life, I’m going to share with you the single most simplifying truth of my life.

For me, as I recognize and apply this truth in my life, all of those complicated parts of life that I just mentioned become a lot more clear. I discover at least a basic idea of where I'm at. I discover a whole lot of what I’m supposed to do in most situations. And I discover who I am. And on my good days, because of this truth, even when life is absolutely crazy, I am not. Are you ready for it??

Jesus is for real.

Thats it. Jesus is for real. It may seem strange, but in that one truth, my whole life comes into focus. Because of that one truth I know that God is real, and that He loves me so much that He would send Jesus for me. I know that I’m important. I know that you are important. I know that God is big enough to take care of us. I know that God has a plan that is bigger than today. And I know that I can trust Him. All of that, and so very many other things, stem from the simple truth that Jesus is for real.

No matter how complicated things around me get, the more that I understand and live out of that truth, the more peace I have. Because Jesus is for real, I know who I am, and I get to choose to live out of that every day. I’m still a bit of a mess, don’t get me wrong.

But I am also whole. And thats pretty great thing.

I am a pretty laid back guy. But there is this one thing that I experience from time to time that drives. me. crazy! I can deal with a broad range of irritating and frustrating things without getting worked up about it, but when I have a technology problem, it makes me furious.

In a moment I transition from being a sane and rational person who capably navigates the challening waters of life into some kind of crazy man.

I find myself having to control the volume of my voice and even fight the urge to break things. It is a weird and not very good experience. But as I've thought about this weird little part of being me over the years, I think the reason why I get so angry about this kind of thing is because even though I use technology all the time, I don’t really understand technology. I just see these devices whose entire reason for existing is TO WORK. To just do what they are supposed to do. And when they don’t do that, it drives me crazy. I'm getting angry just thinking about it.

I’ll admit that I probably need to work on that a bit, but the reason I wanted to talk about it is because I think that sometimes we start thinking about other people kind of like I think about my technology. In short, we start treating people like objects that only exist to perform certain functions. Maybe its someone really important in your life, or maybe its just person in front of you driving 10 miles an hour even though YOUR ARE IN A HURRY. Either way, when we start treating people like objects and those people don’t perform how we want them to, we get really mad at them. We might even see them as useless obstacles that are taking up space in our important lives.

But here’s the thing though. People are not objects. They are people! And as it turns out, thats a really important distinction. In all of existence, there are basically two catagories. There is God, and there is His creation, which we are all a part of. And in God's creation there are again basically two catagories. There are PEOPLE, and there is everything else. Because the thing about people—even the annoying ones—is that we are ALL the only thing in all of creation that is created in the Image of God. Literally the only thing.

That means that all people are special and important, no matter who they are, or what they’re doing. That includes everyone who annoys you, and that includes you. So if your computer is driving you crazy today, I’m probably not the best guy to talk to about that, because I have that exact same problem. But if the people around you are driving crazy, consider the possibility that you might feel that way partly because you have stopped thinking about them as people at all.

But they ARE people. Whoever they are and whatever they are or aren't doing, they (and you) are PEOPLE. Complicated people created in the image of GOD.

If you can remember that, maybe you will see them and yourself differently. And maybe some really good things will come from that.

Greetings, fellow humans. A long time ago, pioneers would travel from the eastern to western United States on a trail just a few miles from my modern day front door. For the most part, those individuals and families traveled in large, spoke-wheeled wagons across all kinds of terrain and in all kinds of weather. And as they did so, the wagons in front made very deep ruts in the trail, and the wagons in the back fell into those ruts and could not get out.

And just like that, the phrase "stuck in a rut" was born.

And its not such a bad thing, being stuck in a rut, as long as the rut in question is going in the direction that you want to go. But if you want to go a different direction, or even in the same direction but just on your own terms, then first you have to get out of that rut, and that is where things get complicated.

The Oregon Trail is just a dusty memory now, but being stuck in a rut is still very much a real (albiet metaphorical) thing. In life, the easiest thing that a person can ever be is whatever they have always been, and the easiest thing that a person can ever do is whatever they’ve always done. That is the rut in which we all live. All of our lives are very well-worn in that we tend to do and feel and think the same things over and over until its pretty hard to do or feel or think anything else.

And I suppose that would be fine if all of our lives were already pointed in the right direction in every possible way. But thats not the rut in which any of us live. The fact is that sometimes we all need to go in a different direction than we are used go going, and we all need to grow into life in ways that we haven't grown yet. But it is impossible to go places you’ve never gone or grow into something you’ve never been by doing what you’ve always done and being who you’ve always been. Thats not how life works. And on top of that, even when we hate the ruts of life that have trapped us for years, those old ruts keep calling out to us, and they feel like home. So much so that even if we can escape for a while, very often, we eventually just jump right back in.

Its a pretty bleak picture.

As a person who has plenty of ruts of his own, I’m very thankful that this very problem is addressed in the Bible in the Book of Romans Chapter 7. God used an amazing guy named Paul to write the book of Romans, but even though Paul was an amazing faithful person, he wrote these words in the Bible about his struggles with the ruts in His own life and the sinful causes of those ruts:

“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”

Then a few verses later he says, “For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing!”

Finally, a few verses later he says, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

And then in the very next sentence we get the answer. “Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

If you’re like me, and you’ve got some deep ruts in your life that you would love to escape, I have good news for you. Because you will never be able to escape those ruts on your own, God sent His Son to rescue you. And if you are ready to be rescued today, Jesus is the ultimate rut-breaker.

You’ve probably noticed by now that there is a lot going on in this world in which we live. There are people and places and cultures that are completely foreign to us, and in which the most basic activities of life seem strange and bizarre. And some days, things aren't much better even right in the middle of our own lives. We are confronted with people we don't know how to deal with, problems we don't know how to solve, and situations that we can barely even comprehend. And all of those things can happen at the same time, even as we are having an otherwise very good day. The bottom line is that for most people, life can be really complicated.

Apparently not, though, for a famous American poet named Robert Frost. Robert Frost once wrote “In three words I can sum up for you everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.”

Thats it. It goes on.

As it turns out, that was a pretty brilliant observation. Robert Frost was a guy whose life was filled with world-stopping tragedy. He lost his father when he way only a young boy, then his mother. He dropped out of college twice, worked a lot of hard jobs that he didn't like, got a farm, and then lost the farm, and experienced several other really hard things in the midst of all of that. But, as he so rightly observed, the world did not stop. On the best and worst days of Robert Frost's life, it just kept on turning.

That reminds me of a famous part of the Bible out of the Book of Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 that says “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.” All of us are in different places in our lives today. Some of those places are really good, some of those places are really bad, and most of those places are somewhere in the middle. But wherever you are in your life today, remember: life is going to continue to go on.

Somedays that is really frustrating, because some days we don't want life to go on. We want it to stop just right where its at. And other days, we can't wait for life to move on. The sooner the better. But in every day, I would encourage you to turn your life to the things matter.

First off, Start with your connection with God. The life that He has for you can only be lived with Him at the very center of it, so there is no better place to start or finish than with Him. Life is happening, and its going to keep happening. It goes on. So wherever your life is going, make certain today that you are going with God.

Greetings and Salutations delightful people one and all, I hope that you are having a wonderful day doing whatever it is that you're finding to do today. One of the cool things about my life is that I am a book nerd, and I get to spend lots of time studying the greatest collection of books that has ever been or will ever be written. I am of course talking about the Bible, which, although we tend to think of it as one book, is actually a collection of sixty six different books written over a period of about 1,500 years. As I say that, lets take a second and be honest about the fact that even if you are also a book nerd of some sort, for many people the idea of spending tons of time reading and studying the bible does not sound like a cool thing.

To the contrary, sometimes people have a really hard time with the Bible. On the one hand, its supposed to say lots of important things—and it does—but on the other hand reading the Bible can feel boring and confusing and the farthest thing from exciting and enlightening. So the reality is that a lot of people have given up on the Bible.

For some people that means that instead of digging in and getting to know the Bible, they just wait for people like me to do the work and then hand it out in a sermon or a book or a few minutes on the radio. And for other people giving up on the Bible means acting like the Bible doesn't exist, ignoring it completely, and looking for your answers in life elsewhere.

If you find yourself in either of those camps this week, don’t give up on the Bible. Its worth the effort, and so are you.

When you discover on the first page of the first book of the whole Bible that people are the only thing in the entire universe that is created in the image of God, that changes things. It changes the way you look at the people in your life (even the annoying ones) and it changes the way that you look at yourself. And when you discover on the last page of the last book of the Bible that after Jesus died for the sins of the whole world and then came back to life, He gave us a glimpse of what forever is going to look like, and He promised that He is going to come back and make that happen, that changes things. It changes the things you care about, and it changes the things that you choose to put your trust in.

From front to back, The Bible tells the true story of God and people, past, present, and future. That story is still going on right now, and you are a part of it! So don't give up on the Bible, and don't give up on God, because I promise, He has not given up on you.

These days I am just cold. The temperature has been pretty low, the wind chill has been brutal, and sometimes when I go outside I feel like my bones are starting to freeze. On the up side, I have been really thankful for my house. Its warm in there, and I am amazed by the fact that the freezing wind and snow can be blowing against the north wall of my house, and yet, six inches away on the other side of that wall, the temperature can be 60 or 70 degrees warmer. And its a good thing, because if it wasn’t, I would be popsicle right now!

The cold winter outside and the warmth of my house inside has got me thinking about the other places of safety and refuge I have in my life. We need those because the truth is that we’ve all got much bigger problems than the weather, and most of those problems can’t be solved by four walls and a heater. But as for me, I have refuge in my life from those things also.

In short, I have surrendered myself to God. He has taken me in, and every day He keeps me safe in the midst of the storms of my life. And for me, that has made all the difference. Psalm 91 in the Bible starts off with these words:

“Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust.”

It is a beautiful thing to have safety and comfort in good and bad times, and my good news for you is that you can have that too.

Maybe you are about as worn out by life as a person can be. If you are, its time to come in out of the cold and the wind. God sent His own Son Jesus to show you the way in, and to hold the door open just for you. God is good, and He wants to be our safe place.