Category Archives: Personal

Life, Motivation, Personal

Valuing our Efforts

Even if you look closely, peering into the depths of who we are, we will never know our size. Our perception is always flawed by self-expectations.  You and I are much more marvelous, much more important, much more consistently creative than we will ever know or even admit. We do not credit ourselves with the things and events of which we are the central figure. Our own flawed window keeps us from seeing our own personal worth.  We are blind to our gifts.  We become deaf to our own voice.  We don’t hear our self-magnitude. 

Our blurry image of self is so unrecognizable that we become dependent upon the assessment of others. Assurance of worth seems to be delegated to everyone but ourselves. These others seem only to see our imperfections and our weakness.  Every personal accomplishment is seen as an opportunity for the world to pick it apart. We become so encapsulated in the lint picking opinions of everyone else, we shun any effort that could be construed as being good in the fear of not living up to the expectation of perfection of our detractors.

We must be more than what others see.  We must dig deep into a realistic view of who we are; to allow ourselves to say, “that was good”.   

Being creative is like that.
Writing is like that.  
Life is like that.
Worship is like that.
Relationship is like that.

Life, Personal, Ramblings

Pressing on

Where have the years gone? I sit here in my office. It is a place of study, writing, devotion and occasionally my granddaughter’s computer game room. I contemplate my life and wonder if all the ups and downs of my life really mean much.
Jobs have come and gone: from a janitor to an information technologist, from a meat cutter to a minister and a technical writer to a project manager. Jobs that could well range from a gritty endurance to pure joy.
Travel to special places and not so special are a part of my history. Formal education entitles me to put a few letters after my name. Fifty years of marriage, three kids and now two grandchildren make up my family. I have suffered market crashes and car accidents. I have relocated to Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and now make my home in California. There have been times of laughter, sadness, boredom, excitement, pain, dwindling health, and disappointment.
If there is one constant in my life it has been continual change. But now, here in my office, there seems to be an accepted permanence. It affords me time to write more often in this blog, write my second historical fiction, create Bible studies for men’s ministries, create videos for those who would ask. But change is inevitable.
It has been said there are but two constants in life: death and taxes. Sitting here reflecting on life I must disagree. Looking through my life the only relentless constant is God. It matters little if I have followed him every minute of every day or had some low points, God is still present in those times. I could have done better. I have failed to live up to my own expectations. But through it all God has been there. There has been special standing on the mountaintop type of moments where all is well. Conversely, I have dived the depths of the slough of despond. But God has been there. God has been my constant companion. Even when I did not realize it. His grace covered me and this love has guarded me.
It was Paul who said, “
In all the vicissitudes of life—every mountain-top moment and every lonely valley—God has been my constant helper. His presence has comforted me; His grace has covered me; His love has guarded me.
If I have learned anything, it is that we should live with an eternal perspective. If we seek happiness in this life only, we will miss the eternal prize.
Paul, by inspiration, says it best: “But I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.” (‭‭Acts‬ ‭20:24‬ ‭ESV‬‬). Again from Corinthians, “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
In the meantime I plod along doing what I can and pressing toward the mark. I invite you on my journey.
Just Larry.

Church, Culture, Personal, Politics, Preaching

Rise and Shine

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I don’t understand.  I wake up and the first thing I hear is the news on in the living room and I am blasted by the latest scandal, the latest opinion that is contrary to the ones I have. I wonder how our “Christian nation” arrived at a place where our college students don’t think and just react to the latest rhetoric pumped from a tiny screen. I am aghast that our government seems unwilling or unable to just sit down and talk with each other.  Rather they are so polarized they would rather the country fail than not get their ideological viewpoint undermined.  I sit here questioning seeming fluid self-declared gender identity sweeping our culture, thrown in the face of God-created differences.

It is not just secular tidal waves that loom on our horizon. The church is being changed by these forces.  The church is called to change the world, not the other way around. I read of what we would call mainline churches just giving up on basic Christian beliefs.  “Mary wasn’t a virgin, she was just a maiden.”  “Jesus did not raise from the dead, it is just an allegory.” It has become more of what you do than what you believe, “Live the good life.”  The church no longer talks about the blood of Jesus providing a life-changing salvation.  It is all about an entertainment of the senses in a joint expression of euphoria as a substitute for worship.

As a result, there is a cultural relativism.  There are no absolutes. “We don’t need theology, we need a social application of cultural norms,” is touted at the latest seminar or church conference. The sheep have been set free to roam where ever they think is best.”  And they have taken this relative culture and ran with it.  Running toward destruction.

We must get back to basics.  Where we hold standards high. Where the truth is the truth.  Where the Bible is the basis of life.  There must be an evangelism in our church.  We must show unity, we must love one another. There are mainline churches across this great nation that are dying because they are not connected to the True Vine.

I pray for the church to be filled.  I pray for the church to be called to prayer.  I call for the church to change our culture.  I pray that the great churches of America have a genuine revival of the Spirit of God.

And with this revival will come a change in our country.

Bible Study, Personal, Psycolog, Ramblings

Leadership Dilemma

There is a myriad of stories of Bible studies, small groups, even churches that have less than stellar endpoints.  We look to many causes. “It was the building was not welcoming.”  The heat and cooling were not to my liking.” “There was not enough commitment from the church board.”  “There was an economic downturn in our area.” “The ministries were not meeting the needs of our socioeconomic mix.” And the list goes on and on.

I teach a regular Bible study specifically designed and presented to a subset of the congregation.  It is Men ministering to men.  The attendance has not always been equal from week to week and I am amazed at the progress each of these Christian disciples has come.  Never-the-less, I have to do personal inventory on a constant and continual schedule.  I want to make sure I am not the person that causes the change in attendance.

I am a very boisterous, loud, opinionated, strong personality. And this personal character must be kept in check within reason or there may well be an exodus from attendance. I don’t want to be an emotionally unhealthy Christian leader.

This emotional deficit is caused by a lack of inward understanding of my own feelings, my own weaknesses and limits.  It is this emotional detachment that also prevents an understanding of other’s feelings and perspectives.

Leadership that does not look inwardly will ultimately alienate all that is around them. As a remedy for this inward continual desire to be heard understood and agreed with comes a tendency to work a little harder, to volunteer for one more thing, to give of my time talent and treasure until they have little left.

This type of leader ends up engaging in more and more activities that what can not be sustained.  They seem to continually give out FOR God more than they receive FROM Him. They serve others to share the joy of Jesus because there is little joy in their efforts alone.

In their more honest moments, they admit that their cup with God is empty or, at best, half full, hardly overflowing with the divine joy and love they proclaim to others.

As a result, with all the balls in the air, a leader must continually grab at the next one lest one should fall.  And in the heavenly juggling act, the time and effort due to the current ball in hand go into “good enough” category.

In the process, they obscure the beauty and perfection of Christ they say they want the whole world to see. No well-intentioned leader would set out to lead this way, but it happens all the time.

Bible, Bible Study, Life, Personal, Preaching

Without Love

I may well speak fluently of Calvinism, Reformed, Wesleyan and even Seven Day Adventist within an assemblage of brethren. I can even lead them to a point of excitement and feelings of being accepted as one great body of believers.  Never-the-less, when I walk away, and I see them only as theological misfits, I am nothing more than sound and fury signifying nothing.

I even can preach and teach the great mysteries of theology and apologetics. I can make thoughtful and logical expositional and theological stands.  I can and have used illustrations of media and popular culture in making my three points of homiletics clear.  I have presented the Words of God to such a way that people broke out in song or raised hands in expressions of joy.  If I have opened Gods truth that some were moved to simply sit in awe.  Never-the-less, if I do not care enough to know God myself and those who are loved by that same God, I am nothing but a white noise.

If I create a new vision for the church for new things and buildings are built as one more big edifice to Christianity, but I lose sight of the God I serve and the people that God loves, I am nothing.

If I am well known in the congregation as being one the biggest givers, and I am always there to sponsor the next big thing at the church and always willing to go the conference or barbeque, and I do not show love for those sitting in the corner wanting the most just to be included, they don’t mean a thing.

You see, no matter what I say, or believe or even what I do, if I leave out love, I am a man without hope or worth.

Love is the thing.  Love is never exhausted, it never gets too old, it never runs out of energy.  Love and compassion are more concerned with the other guy than my own selfish desires. Love is giving a couple of dollars to the man standing at a street corner; the very dollars you were going to spend for coffee on the way to church.

Love isn’t about the next big thing that everyone else has.  It is acknowledging all that I have are gifts from Him.

The opposite of love is walking around with the nicest clothes, with head held high, with the expectation that all around you will notice and give you preferential treatment.  It is giving everyone a voice.
It is the realization that you are not that important.  It is the acceptance of equality of idea, belief, stature, hope, dreams, and life.

Love is about sitting in the back at church not wanting to be seen or giving the best piece of pie at the potluck to the person who really needs it. It is giving up your place in line when it is inconvenient. In traffic, it is giving the other guy a way to get in even though he has just cut off three other cars. And when someone does not let you in, you say to yourself, “we all have places to go.”

Love is not caring about a heavenly scorecard keeping the size and quantity of sins for everyone else but me.
Love does not reveal the secrets of other travelers going the same way, instead, love takes delight and joy in new understandings and knowledge.

Love puts up with more than anyone would expect. When things get you down, love is there to bring you back up because God is trust.  Love in you will always be looking for the best in people, best in events, best in circumstances and best in the worst.

For Love, the past is the past and we need not look back with feelings of regret and longing; Love simply keeps going to the ultimate rewards of God.

You see my friends, Love just keeps on going, it never stops, it does not grow weary, it does not slow down because of resistance or age.

All that I have written will be nothing someday.  All the lessons I have diligently prepared and presented in God’s name will be gone and forgotten.

Even the essence of my intellect and understanding will reach a limit.

I can not know it all; I try with all my strength to push one more idea or catchphrase into my limited mind.  But I still know just a little piece of the truth. Everything I have ever learned, explored, understood, known, taught, preached, prayed is and will always be incomplete.  The good news is that when the total, the complete, the absolute, the perfect arrives, my incompleteness will all be eliminated.

When I was a kid, running wild in the streets and hills, I had few responsibilities or wonder.  I spoke of little things and fretted about even smaller things.  But I have grown up and have eliminated all the little things only to be confronted by the things I cannot know.

Today we can’t see the things that are right before our eyes.  There seems to be a wispy cloud between God and me.  I want to see better, I want to find some tool to dispel the mist, but there is none to be found.

Someday the mist will part.  Someday the fog will burn through by a great light. I won’t be long before the crystal-clear day dawns and the sun will cast its warmth upon my face and I will be warmed by it.  We’ll see it all then.  We will see as clearly and keenly as God sees.  Someday the view will be so clear so perfect that we all will see as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!

Until that perfect completeness comes and reveals itself through the new day, we must keep on loving. Faith in the love of God has for us, hope in the inescapable and unchanging Love of God and to simply Love without extravagant limits.  But the best of these is simple and uncomplicated; LOVE!

Bible, Culture, Life, Personal, Sermon Illustration

Knowing and knowing

In teaching ten men on a weekly basis, I have often reached conclusions in my own personal study as I prepare.  Sometimes they are nothing more than a black hole dragging me away from the subject I was trying to understand.  The word “know” throughout the Bible has been most often related to a relationship.  It is more than head knowledge.  It is coming to point of value to the thing or person you have come to know.  It is not just a compilation of facts.  It is coming to understanding and that understanding is worth something.  Only with a sense of importance and a value, does it become known.

An example may help here.  I was returning from Oakland airport after picking up a special visitor to my home.  I left the airport and my GPS device reported immediately there was going to be a 20-minute delay on my chosen route home.  Intellectually I understood what 20 minutes were.  It was a simple inconvenience.  So we pulled into the prime commute traffic heading North.  About three miles down the road I hit the traffic.  in which no one was going anywhere fast.

After experiencing this congestion for seven minutes, my mind told me there would be a reprieve in a couple of minutes or so.  At that point my trusty GPS reported a change in the traffic pattern, “there will be a 54-minute delay on your route. My intellectual understanding of being inconvenienced changed to knowledge.  As we moved as a dreadnaught of hundreds of cars down the five lanes of traffic, I began to be a little irritated with little things.  Little things like motorcycles whizzing down between cars with only inches to spare started to irritate me a little.  I started keeping track of two or three cars that seemed to want to change lanes with every opportunity to gain on the rest of us willing to go with the flow.  It was nerve-wracking.

I was really getting to know traffic. When you know something beyond a simple understanding and then when you become a part of it you are changed.  To know of a future delay and becoming part of it is two separate things.  When you know something as the Bible uses know, then you have to live it. To know is experiencing and being changed by it.  It affects your feelings, your hopes, your dreams, and even your driving habits.

John 17:24 is John’s intent to tell us about knowing God.  His intent is to tell us that knowing God is more than an intellectual head knowledge.  Knowing God is seeing the value.  Knowing God is the relationship.  Knowing God is being changed.  Knowing God is an intimacy. Knowing is more than a warning of an impending delay in my plans, any more than our concept of hell slowing us down.

Life, Personal, Psycolog, Ramblings

Pondering is better than quibbling.

I have been making a concerted attempt at teaching my grandson a few things about numbers.  Once you get beyond the rote memorization and tedium of the times tables there is an elegance to numbers. We talked about prime numbers, you know those numbers that are only divisible itself and one.  1,2,3,5,7,11,13,19,23,29,31,37,41, and on and on.  As we sat together in my study we pondered this list of numbers.  We were wise owls staring into the night as I explained, “as numbers get bigger and bigger there are fewer and fewer prime numbers and like numbers themselves, they go on for infinity.”

It looked as if his head was going to explode.  Mind you he is getting ready to enter the fifth grade, and the relativity of numbers and infinity itself is some of those things that probably needs to held back to at least the seventh grade.  But it was an introduction.  A beginning of a thought pattern that could well carry through to the rest of his life.

For me, there is a thirst for learning that can’t quite be quenched. There is a little itch that cannot be scratched urging me on.  It is more than a want to just rearrange the ideas and facts of others.  I must find the new, the encouraging, the frightful, the consoling, the special in everything I see.  When I am disappointed in someone or experience a slightly hurtful comment, I go to my special place of wonder.  I look out at the world around me and try to discover something new.  You might well call this escapism, or even an unwillingness to face the reality that people sometimes hurt me without knowing.  But for me, it is better than lashing out or making my own snide comment.

Of all the comments, slurs, circumstances, and disappointments that Jesus went through, I see very few instances of Him lashing out.  Don’t get me wrong, I am no Jesus.  Nevertheless, I think it is just better this way.  I will not waste my pondering on quibbles.

Life, Personal, Theology

Micro and Macro, The Small and the Big

I have walked the walk for quite a few years.  I have lived in the hope of God and am justified by His grace.  But there seems to be a place in which struggle.  In my study of John 17: 12,13,15 my conundrum has raised its head again.  It is all a matter of the big and the small. It is struggling with the very nature of God.  I have a real and weighty respect for God, but I question at times whether God in His infinite glory and majesty would take any mind of my plight.  Jesus prayed that Holy Father would protect. And that is the issue of macro and micro.

I have a heavenly check-off list:

  • Grace – God’s unmerited favor to all freely offered and accepted
  • Forgiveness – God offering to wash them away
  • Calling – God offering to all a specific and perfect path to do His will
  • Salvation – A pledged promise to redeem us from the curse of sin
  • Love – An embracing sweet presence and concern.
  • Heaven – A promise for a perfected end and new beginning

But all these things are offered and spread out to all that would accept and believe.  This is God in the Macro or the big things. God the ultimate good, just, holy, Glorious, truth, revealed in His only Son, BUT IS HE INTERESTED IN ME?

I have lived my life with God in the Macro never in the micro. Big things “red sea, scribed tablets, burning bushes, Jesus, Cross, second coming, were all big things.  I have peace, I have fits of joy, I have a working relationship with God. But I still struggle that this infinite God would have the interest to care for me as an individual. Does God care about the individual? Does He care for me personally?
I look up into the starry sky I feel small. I am but a tiny speck among 7.6 million other small specks living on another speck amid an immeasurable universe.

But here in the final prayer of Jesus among his disciples, He prays to His Father that they will be protected.  I don’t see that protection, but it must be there.  The Father never denied the Son of any request.  I have to see it by faith and realize that He is an active force that has put His hand between me and millions of circumstances and problems.  Like a wreck that never happened when I was going down to the local Safeway, I have to accept it as his protection.

What do you think?

Motivation, Personal

Birthdays

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My birthday was yesterday.  I am feeling old.  My bones hurt.  Oh, for the days of jumping from rock to rock in a rushing stream to find an elusive trout.  It is the wear and tear of the daily living that seems to have ripped the desire to pursue my dreams and to shadow my hopes.

With repeated attempts, I find myself unable to reach my greatest intentions. I am not giving up, but I seem to be losing my grip on the things that seemed to matter to me so much over the years.  My greatest fear is getting to a place where I simply say, “what is the use.”  What is the use to continue my quest to help where I can?  What is the use to feed the next generation with my learned lessons of life, if they seem oblivious to the insight? When life was young there was an inner zest, or maybe a simple twitch toward the moral battle rightly engaged.  There was a foe to slay, a flock to shepherd and protect, but now, what am I to do?

All sorts of compromises have been made as practical adjustments to the world in which we live. Legitimate hopes and dreams have been lost in the fog.  Griefs settle upon me as I see myself more like Don Quixote battling windmills than King Arthur fighting the good fight. The struggle seems to have dulled my sword and now has become difficult to hold it up.

My bed beckons me each evening but I can’t sleep because of all the little naps taken to get through the day.  The question, “what is the use” seems more and more close.

This does not mean that I will cease battling.  I will continue to fight the good fight, I will finish my race.  Just because I can not run 100 yards does not mean I am giving up to self-indulgence and retire to the companionship of my easy chair.  I will, and I am doing my part to make a difference.  I have not lost the zest of the moral struggle.  I may hang on grimly to the end, but with the inner fire not quite as bright as it was back in the day, I will keep on keeping on.

The fire is still burning within me and even if no one comes by to warm themselves by it, I will keep it lit.

Your comments are requested.

Life, Personal, Short Quotes

Fathers and sons

Matthew 3:9 in the NIV says: Don’t think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have father Abraham!’ because I tell you that God can raise up descendants for Abraham from these stones.

There were those in the times of Jesus who claimed a right to Heaven just because they were born into a family.  May I just say in no uncertain terms: God is not much interested in the lineage of parents than in the life of the children.

Just saying.