Compensating for Drift

Combat Weather Airmen practice land nav

This month I hit the land nav course as part of my training to be an Army officer. Somewhere along the way my battle buddy and I got pretty disoriented. [Enter 2nd Lieutenant joke here]. Okay, it happened a few times. In this article I'll share some practical knowledge about what I learned on how not to get lost and the correlations it made me think of in our own lives.

Every Man's Slaughterhouse

For the modern cow, the transition from roaming the range to Big Mac is just another day in the life. It is so easy in fact, that the cow doesn't even see her demise coming. The process is designed to be as humane as possible, giving Bessie no reason to fret as she's taken to the chopping block. Moments later the butchering process begins and the spoils are sent around the world to carnivores like myself to enjoy. This isn't an article about my views on the morality of eating animals but something far more serious- just like cows, we can be lulled into a demise we didn't see coming.

Wrestle Until Death

I got the news over six months late that a friend of mine passed away. He died just a few days after I left for Basic Combat Training last fall and I was cut off from the outside world. The unexpected news hit me hard this morning. We lived on a tight knit floor of about 40 guys in college and he was a freshman when I was a junior. My buddy was wrestling with what it meant to follow Jesus, to be out on his own and making his own decisions. That's a good place to be- especially for an 18 year-old. And the group of guys on that floor known as the 2A Titans couldn't have been a better place for him to wrestle.

I got to mentor a few underclassmen that year and whether he knew it or not, he was one of them. Most of those freshmen I met for breakfast on a regular basis and we'd talk about life, but this guy wasn't ready for that. So I worked out with him, took him skydiving, and brought him along to the occasional Bible study. The next year he decided the school wasn't for him. We didn't talk much after that and the last I heard before this morning was that he spent his summers on a fishing boat in Alaska and went to another Christian school closer to home.

I haven't mourned in a long time, but I stood in the kitchen this morning and just let the tears stream down. No sooner, could I hear the voice of my Lord reminding me of the death of his friend Lazarus and how he got there too late- his friend was in a tomb and Jesus just wept. I know the rest of the story and that Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, so I asked him, "Why were you weeping for your friend when you knew you could do this?" And he answered me, "because this is not how it was supposed to be." When Jesus breathed life into Adam he never intended on one day taking it from him, but the penalty of sin is death. Jesus wept because he was a man who lost a friend he loved and that wasn't part of the plan. Not for Lazarus, not for my friend, or for you or me.

The news of his death hit hard because I don't know what happened to him in the last few years, I don't know how his struggle with the Lord was going or if there were any other godly men that stepped in and walked with him. It makes me think of my own brother and how he has been wrestling with the same questions- or if I am completely honest, with my own life and how I still choose to do things my way. The Lord reminded me this morning that just like I know the end of the story with Lazarus, I know the end of this story too. In the end, love wins. Not in a Rob Bell kind of way where everyone gets a free pass to Heaven, but in the way that Jesus described it to Lazarus' mourning sisters: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die." In the end we are perfected by Jesus' love.

I'm at peace knowing my friend placed his faith in Christ, and that my brother has, and that I have. From there I pray that we would all continue to wrestle with who Jesus is. Take the blows and the punches, the highs and lows all in stride as our savior shapes and refines you to be more like himself. Let the Lord strip away any false pride that you have have that would lead you to believe that your own righteousness is any less filthy than your brother next to you. Believe in the one who came to save you and wrestle with him until death.

His name, Josiah, means "healed by Yahweh" and right now, the same Jesus- the same Yahweh that started a good work in him has carried it out to completion and Josiah couldn't possibly be any more healed than he is now. See you soon brother.

2nd Titan Airborne

Perspectives on Failure

7th Grade. I got to school early that morning and ran to the gym. There on the door was a print out of the names that would be on the basketball team. For a few years I'd been going to basketball camps in the summer, my dad installed a hoop in the driveway, I played in the intramural league, but this was the first time I'd been tested in a tryout. I scanned the paper over and over again looking for my name as if by mistake they'd left it off. Nope. I tried out next year for the 8th grade team and made it. I worked hard during practice, but I spent all but 14 minutes of that season on the bench. I grew up a little when that happened- I realized that there were things I wasn't cut out for, that others were better at things than I was, and that I could fail at something I set out to do.

Book Review: Beautiful Outlaw

This is the first of John Eldridge's books that I've read in a while, and I can't be more glad that I picked this one up. In his book, Beautiful Outlaw, Eldridge seeks to remove the "religious fog" that we've surrounded Jesus with to help show who the real Christ is so that we may come to experience the radical, life changing Jesus every day of our lives.

Business Travel on the Up & Up

Within a year of graduating college I was certified gold. American Airlines Gold that is. Along the way to gaining that irrelevant title I picked up on some tips and tricks to make business travel as stress free as possible.

Preparing for Family Expansion

Generally speaking, I dislike writing about things that would expose my lack of knowledge, wisdom, or comprehension of a topic- however, for the sake of conversation I'll scribble some of my thoughts out. Babies. If you've known me long enough you know that word isn't one of my favorites. If you really know me, you'd know that the only reason for my dislike is that the idea of having my own scares me to death. Over the last 18 months God has really been helping me overcome some of my mental hurdles- but one big one still remains: when?

Living a Man's Story

A PBS Masterpiece Theater show called "Downton Abbey" has been getting some publicity lately. Partly because it is a throw-back to the British "upstairs-downstairs" dramas of the past, and partly because it is a fresh take on the style, with more intricate and fast-moving plots. I used to watch Masterpiece Theater back in the day when I wasn't really allowed to watch anything on TV besides PBS. (anyone remember Marty Stouffer's Wild America?) I don't remember much besides the adults always looked mad or hot or gassy.

The show has had somewhat of a fresh following with the "Downton Abbey" series. I read an article from the New York Times this morning that explains, among other things, the inspiration for the plot: American TV shows like "Sex in the City" and "Glee." Julian Fellowes, the writer for the show, explains his reasoning behind writing a somewhat cruel take on a relationship between two of the characters: "These are two people who have not been given all that much in life, but what they have been given is a real love. I wouldn’t ever want to undermine that. But they’ve got to suffer a little. Nothing harder to dramatize than happiness."

They've got to suffer a little. Interesting.

Consider Romans 8:18- "I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us."

I don't claim to have the answer to famine, war, miscarriages, divorce, or bad things happening to good people. I am exploring the story that I am a part of. God is the author of all things. And good authors know that hardship brings drama, which creates a good story.

I don't want my story to be boring. I want it to bring glory to God. I want it to be exciting. I'll be writing more on this topic in the coming months as it relates to my life and dreams and goals. But take some time to look at the plot twists God has written into your life, and see if you can't find the hand of a master author. And if you're up for a good story, get ready for more.

*if you want to read a lot more on the idea by a guy who is a lot better at writing about it, check out Donald Miller's blog, and his book, "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story."

The Bible in a Year

Recently, our Sunday School class read through David Platt's book, Radical:Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. The book ends with a one-year challenge: to pray for the world, to give sacrificially, to read through the Bible, to spend time developing community, and to spend 2% of your year (1 week) in a "missions" type setting. I'll devote more time this year to articles about some of the other parts of the challenge, but I thought I'd pass along this neat tool that I'm using to read through the Scriptures this year.