Actions, NOT Words, Define What You Believe

Photo by Cleft Clips

Have you ever known someone who said one thing and did another?

Maybe a friend who claimed to believe something, but their actions didn't line up with their beliefs?

Or maybe even a friend who claimed to hate Justin Bieber's music, but then you caught him listening to it in his car?

Closet Beliebers. They need to just own it already.

If you're like me, you probably do a lot of wondering, This just doesn't add up. Why does all this happen?

I came across an interesting story recently that sheds some light on the topic.

A marketing genius was talking to a class at USC a few years ago. And to prove a point, he asked his class:

"Raise your hand if you like going to plays more than going to the movies."

A bunch of hands went up.

"That's a load of crap and you know it," he said, "and I'm about to prove it!"

"Raise your hand if you've gone to a play in the past two weeks."

Nothing.

"Now raise your hand if you've seen a movie in the past two weeks."

Hands all over the place.

Seems to me like some kids believed that they were a little more hipster than they actually were.

His point: Trust peoples' actions, not their mouths.

Marketing gurus know not to take people just at their word. Because if you invest money into what someone says instead of what someone does, you might end up outta luck. Why? Because what people DO and what people SAY don't always match up. Trust what people buy, not what they say.

Marketers know people's decisions are driven more by emotions and less by logic. People like to see themselves in a more favorable light most of the time. Me included. We might say something in an emotionless situation, but DO something completely different when our "wants" get tangled up in it.

For instance, have you ever said to yourself, "I am content with the clothes I already have," and then gone out and bought another expensive pair of pants?

You didn't buy them because you needed them... you bought them because you wanted them. And that shows you that maybe you aren't as content as you thought you were.

Actions reveal deep wants, which do a much better job of showing us what we believe than our words do.

Crazy, right? Our actions show us what we believe.

We may say we believe something if it's what we feel like we "should" believe. We may even think we believe it ourselves. But if it doesn't show up in our actions, we must not believe it.

And thus, we end up with these little "Trojan Horse" beliefs about ourselves.

Think about it.

How many times have you heard your friends say, "I believe _______", but their actions don't match up?

How many times have you and I done the same thing?

I know for a fact I'm guilty. I say things like, "I know God will take care of me," and then I live my life like there's no way that's true. I start taking matters into my own hands, living out of fear, etc.

My point is this:

You can find out what you TRULY believe by watching yourself. How do you act? What are you doing? Does it line up with what you're saying? When it comes to belief, the actions will ALWAYS trump the words. That's why they have that saying about it:

"Actions speak louder than words."

Right?

Because actions reveal beliefs.

So if you wanna know what someone TRULY believes... don't listen to them. WATCH them.

Why Do I Get So Mad When I Lose?

Photo by Lenore Edman

When I lose, I get furious.

I just recently lost a game I really wanted to win. I REEEEAAALLLLYY wanted to win it.

I've been thinking about why I'm so mad. There's something deeper going on, and I haven't quite put my finger on it yet. But it's the deeper things inside of me that intrigue me most. And anything that I can't stop thinking about is worth digging to find the source.

I'm going to try and analyze the feeling I get when I lose. Hopefully you can gain some insight into your own life from it.

After I lose a game, my mind races. Why did I lose? I HAVE to know why I lost. What would have made me not lose? What can I do for next time so I won't lose? That's what's happening right now, even as I type this.

And when the other team celebrates their victory, it makes me even more mad. I hear them celebrating and the only thing I can think is "If I hadn't sucked so bad here and screwed up there, you wouldn't have even won. You're not even good." It seems as if I have a problem letting people be better than me.

I think the problem is that I value myself by my ability to prevail against adversity.

I don't know why, and I don't know how. But I have learned to define myself by what I do. After I lose, I get this tremendous urge to go practice for hours and hours, so that I will never ever lose again. So I will never ever not be enough again.

Yeah, I know. my identity isn't in what I do. It's in Jesus, right?

The problem is sometimes that doesn't mean anything to me. I can say it to myself, but that doesn't fix what's deeply wrong at my core. There's something wrong -- but it's too many layers deep. I can't see what it is.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being competitive, but I wonder if there is something wrong with where it's coming from.

My friends and I had a conversation on the beach about competitiveness a few years back, after a riveting game of beach Bocce. The question was this: "Do you love to win, or do you hate to lose?"

I hate to lose.

I think I'm even afraid to lose.

I'm afraid because of what it will mean about me...  that I won't be enough.

But what does "enough" mean?

Does enough really mean "good enough to win at a video game"? Yes, that's what's got me feeling like this, by the way. A video game. I know when I think logically about it that it's incredibly silly to say I'm not worthy because I lost a video game. But there's something in me that tells me I'm not until I can convince myself logically it's silly. And that's how I know there's something wrong way down deep inside me. My deep self believes it. I'm believing something about the world, about myself, that's not true. But it's buried deep inside me. It's like a computer virus, hidden in my computer. What could it be?

At least I know that much. And if your experience is similar, maybe you can use this as a shortcut to get at least this far.

Here's the question I'm going to struggle through this week. Why is it that I'm not defined by whether I try and succeed or whether I try and fail? Because I just don't know why that's a bad scale. I just know it is a bad scale.

I'm not going to stop here. I'm going to figure out.

 And if you are ever in the same place as me, I suggest you do the same. Because the answer is out there, and we don't have to live like this. We've been freed from having to believe in lies. So often, we just accept it because we don't think anything will ever change. But that's not true. God's plan for us is constant release into more and more freedom.

Join me in pushing forward to find the truth. Because the truth will set us free.

John 8: 31-36 - So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” They answered him,“We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will become free’?”

Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

Why Growing in Christ is Like Learning Guitar

Photo by Louish Pixel

First off, if you've tried and failed at guitar, don't freak out.

Second, if you want to ACTUALLY learn how to play, my special fee for email list followers is $25 a lesson. Talk about incentives, right? I'm assuming everyone will be jumping all over that one.

I'm only one man, people. I can't teach everybody how to play.

SOOOO... Why is growing in Christ like learning how to play the guitar?

Well, I'll tell you.

It starts out crazy awesome...

We've had quite a journey, me and my trusty Washburn. I got her (or him) when I was a junior in high school, and we've been best friends ever since. I thumped down the stairs on Christmas morning to find ol' Washy just staring at me next to the tree, as if to say, "Laying with the rest of the presents is beneath me. And besides, I can't fit." I did nothing else for weeks.

When you first make a commitment to follow Christ, cloud nine ensues. You just feel like nothing is ever going to feel bad again, and nothing is ever going to change. Everything is just peachy.

And then it gets hard.

Learning guitar sounds great in theory -- You'll be able to play your favorite songs, rock in a band, impress all the ladies. And then you get into the nitty gritty. And then it gets hard. And then your fingers get swollen. And then you want to stop.

If you want to advance, it takes actual hard work. Sound familiar?

At some point in your Christian walk, you realize you have to actually sacrifice things when you follow Christ. You realize it doesn't feel good all the time. You realize studying the Bible and listening for God's voice is hard work. And sometimes you want to quit listening and go play guitar.

Sometimes you don't feel like you're getting better... 

There was a point in time where I woke up one morning after practicing guitar for three hours the night before, only to find out I was worse than when I had started yesterday. Talk about frustrating. Sometimes you put in a ton of practice, and you get minimal, if any, returns. Sometimes, it even seems like you've gotten weaker.

Does the term "backslidden" mean anything to you? Because I've had plenty of times where I wondered if the last few months or so of my spiritual life had been wasted. And sometimes, even when I'm putting forth the effort to study and learn, I just end up feeling more confused. It's hard to recognize you're growing when every day feels more confusing.

But when you zoom out, you are.

The times where I didn't see results in my guitar playing were always frustrating. But after a while, when I zoomed out from the daily graph to see the monthly or even the yearly graph, I saw the upward trend. I actually was getting better.

Going through trials has a similar way of making you feel like the wheels have come off. But when you zoom out, you can see how far you've come. You remember all the things you've already overcome to get to this point. And you realize God's been faithful, and you're closer now than you were a few years ago. And then, you recognize it -- you actually are growing.

And you're not really sure how.

The funny thing is, I didn't even recognize it. I just suddenly could play the songs I was practicing. And I didn't really know how or why my fingers just decided to finally work -- especially when they seemed so adamant about not working for the previous two months. They just did. And then I began to play full songs, which inspired me to learn more and practice even harder songs. And thus, I learned the rhythm of learning how to do new things. And I've never again been so discouraged by the process. Because I realized it was normal. I was normal.

One of my favorite verses right now is Mark 4:26-29, where Jesus describes living in His kingdom like this:

"A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”

Growing in Christ is like watering a seed. You don't have to make it grow; you just have to provide the right environment for it to grow. And then it grows by itself, in its own way, on its own time. And then finally, you look back, and there's something sticking out of the ground!

There's a rhythm to growing.

It's a correlation more than a steady incline.

Photo by Eric Fischer

 Some days you'll be higher than normal, and other days you'll be lower. But when you plot out the days and zoom out, you see they point upward... especially when you're consistently giving yourself the right environment to grow. James Clear, a blogger and weightlifter, wrote a great post about how whatever you do consistently gives you compounded results.

It's no wonder Paul compared growing in Christ to growing your physical body. Because all kinds of growing share the same rhythm.

And that's why growing in Christ is like learning to play guitar. It's all about the steady progress that comes from time and experience.


1 Timothy 4:7-8 - Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather, train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.

Does Accepting God's Love Make A Man Weak?

Photo by Ahmed Rabia

We men don't have time to fiddle around with love.

It makes us weak. We're strong. So all that feely stuff doesn't have a place in our manly man lives.

...Right?

I used to think accepting God's love made me a wuss. It's honestly not a crazy thing to think -- we men like to feel like warriors, fighting for what we believe in, protecting who and what we care about. We like to feel strong. Strong is part of a man's identity, part of his Original Design. And sometimes, receiving love doesn't make us feel very strong.

Recently, I've been living my spiritual life not accepting love from God because it made me feel weak. It made me feel like less of a man to revel in His love. You know... because love is just so... mushy.

But that all changed a couple weeks ago.

Last month, I felt like God was telling me to read Song of Solomon because he wanted me to bask in his love. Gross, I said. That's what needy people do.

I resisted for a while. I knew what was best for me, and being super mushy just isn't me.

Then, in classic God fashion, He started using multiple different avenues to say the same thing to me. From sermons to books, everything pointed to the fact that I wasn't accepting God's love.

So finally, I relented.

I began to read Song of Solomon. And God began working on me, slowly cracking through my hard, shellish exterior. I began to experience His love in a way more refreshing than a thousand ocean breezes. God began telling me things that were true about me, things that I thought were going to be mushy but actually made me strong. He began telling me how crazy he was about me, which I thought was going to be mushy but it made me filled with courage and the will to fight for goodness in this world.

And then I realized I had it all wrong. God's love makes a man strong, not weak.

Starving myself of God's love only made me lose clarity. It made me turn inward, it made me only care about myself. When that happened, I lost sight of the great battle taking place for the Original Design of humanity, and I lost sight of my role in it as a warrior and a change bringer.

And I realized something else. What I thought was protecting me and making me strong was actually keeping me from receiving life. 

love feels like it makes you needy. But in reality, being vulnerable and open is the thing that makes you stronger. Know what makes you weaker? Isolation. Isolating your deep self from God and from your community. We men, just like women, were made to share our deep selves instead of hiding them. We convince ourselves it's not manly to talk about our feelings, but it's really fear. It's weakness that keeps us from talking about our deep selves, from opening up to love.

Attention men: Us refusing to accept God's love is like us refusing to eat.

Does it make you weak to need food? Of course not. It shouldn't make you weak to need love either. It's a basic human survival need... for your spirit.

I've learned some things in the past month. I've learned that love doesn't have to make a man feel girly. When God showers love on a man, it makes him stronger. It makes him see more clearly. It unlocks power and allows him to fight more effectively in the battle that actually matters -- the battle for souls. Love makes a man fight harder for relationships, fight harder for connection, and fight harder for his friends.

We hold it out of our relationship with God because we get tricked into thinking it clashes with our Original Design.

But the reality is, when men accept God's love and bask in it, and then learn to dish it back out, that's when they become a force to be reckoned with... a force the enemy is truly scared of.

And that's why a man's ability to give and receive love is always under attack.

1 Corinthians 13:1-3 - "If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing."

1 Corinthians 13:4-7 - "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."

1 John 4:19 - "We love because he first loved us."

Living Life Like an Alternate

Photo by Kaki Sky

Ever been an alternate for a team?

There's something about it. It's kind of funny. You're not sure whether you should be sad or frustrated that you aren't good enough to start, or whether you should be proud you're good enough to be on the team in the first place (I'm speaking from my experience with the elementary school track team).

I'd always imagine what it would be like to be the best guy on the team. I'd think about how many people would love me for it, and how my life would have so much more meaning. And then I'd snap out of it and go back to being frustrated that I was just the alternate.

What about you? Do you know what I'm talking about?

What about in regards to Christianity?

Do you ever feel like you're the alternate in Christianity? Like there's five other people God would rather speak to, ten other people He'd rather send to do his work, and 20 people He'd rather give extraordinary worship experiences to?

Have you ever felt like God decided to make someone else cry or raise their hands during worship and not you, and therefore you're not as important?

Because I have.

It really makes you feel like you're living a crappy story, doesn't it? It makes you feel like God's got better things, and better people, to worry about besides you. It makes you feel like the alternate at the elementary school city track meet, watching as your classmates run by and win the gold. It was almost you, but you just weren't fast enough to be a part of something better, something greater.

We want to be heroes in a story. It's deeply set within us. We want to feel like what we do matters, like there's a pathway that leads up, like God really cares whether we get to it, like we could have something special of deep meaning to give the world and our friends if we were just able to find it.

Instead, we too often imagine ourselves as one of the extras in Lost, the random survivors who you've never seen before, who have apparently been there the whole time. You can always tell these guys are going down before the episode is over. Any survivor that you have never seen before ends up getting shot in the back with a flaming arrow, or something of that nature. Somebody's gotta get dominated or it wouldn't be interesting, right? Too often, though, that's how we perceive our part in the grand scheme of things.

It causes us to live our lives like worthless expendables.

We resign ourselves to unimportance just because we think we are unimportant, unneeded, and largely unwanted.

I know people who have really passionate encounters with God in church and in life. I know other people who see that, see the lack of those things in their own lives, and believe they're not worth anything to God because they don't experience those things. I used to be the latter. I felt like a second rate Christian, so I lived my life like a second rate Christian.

In high school, I looked longingly into the lives of many of my friends who were having really meaningful encounters with God in the same way an alternate watches as his team wins the gold. I was happy for them, but I sure did wish I could be a part of it.

I've learned something important, though.

I don't think it's about how important or unimportant someone is, and I don't think it's about how much someone "feels God."

What I've found is simple: the ones who find their place in the story, and their intimacy with God, are just the ones who really want to, enough to give up self glory and comfort... enough to embrace conflict and suffering and vulnerability, the things that open someone up to love and adventure (qualities of God).

We don't feel like a main character, so we don't act like a main character. But what if our role in the story is directly proportional to how much of a role we want in the story?

Maybe you don't have to put your hands up when you worship. Maybe you don't have to "pray well" in front of other people. Maybe you just have to want more than what you're experiencing; to be empty and not be okay with it.

Desire leads to motivation. Motivation leads to action. Action leads to result.

It's time we stopped treating relationship with God like talent.

Here's my bottom line. The more God you want, the more God you're going to get. Maybe it will take a while. Maybe it already has. But don't let that make you forget God's promises that he connects with those who want to connect with him.

God's message is clear: we are important to him. And we each have an important story to live out. God's love for us has made us main characters in his story. So let's start living like it.


Matthew 7:7-8 - "Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks will receive, and anyone who seeks will find, and the door will be opened to those who knock."

Matthew 9:37-38 - When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

Psalm 37:4 - "Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart."

(When you delight yourself in the Lord, then he will be the desires of your heart)

Song of Solomon 4:9 - "You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride; you have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes..."

On New Beginnings

Photo by Magic Madzik

So I moved to Nashville a few months ago.

There's something curious that happens when you make a move. You kind of get this opportunity to be something different. Nobody really knows who you were before you got there.

To a lot of my Nashville friends, I'm "that writer guy" or "the guy who's writing a book." But I'm not really known like that in Knoxville. Most people in Knoxville know me by the things I did as a Young Life leader or a youth leader at Cedar Springs, my home church. Some may even know me as "that guy who almost threw up on stage during his talk at youth group," or worse. Who even knows. I've done some weird stuff.

New beginnings are interesting. When your slate gets wiped clean, you have this rare opportunity to start again. You get to recalibrate, to rediscover yourself without the baggage that comes with your old identity, the way other people saw you that somehow defined you.

I'm on a kickball team with some people in Nashville. I wear a zip up hoodie and I put my hood up for every single game. The first couple times I did it, it was because it was raining. Now I do it because I think it's funny that some people know me as "that guy with the hood." As far as they know/care, I've never taken my hood off for anything, from pool parties to beach trips to weddings. And that's funny to me.

When you first meet somebody, that's when their story starts in your world. Until you start to think about where they might have come from, their past doesn't really matter to you.

And that's kind of how new beginnings with Jesus work.

When you meet Jesus, he offers you a clean slate. It's like you get to start your story again. It's one of those moments in life where you get to take the things you were known by, and the things you knew yourself by, and throw them out the window. You get to readjust the lens you look at yourself through, which causes you to live differently and more authentically.

You get to really find out who you are, to go the way you would have been going had you not had all that extra baggage.

And the coolest part, you can do it as many times as you like.

The things I hate most about myself, and the things I'm most embarrassed of, I can bring to God and he will give me a clean slate. He will let me start anew, like I've moved cities and started a new life, without my old self hanging over me to tell me how the "real me" is supposed to act or live.

I can choose to live out of the identity my past has told me I am, the one who has been unfaithful or an inconsiderate person or a bad lover or a bad friend, but I don't have to anymore. I can live out of the freedom of a clean slate. I can live out of my original design, the identity I was made for.

Is today the day for a new start?

Psalm 103:12 - "He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west."

2 Corinthians 5:17 - "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come."

Embracing Being "Small"

Photo by Jörg Schubert

There's a part of me that really wants to be famous.

I think it's because I long to leave a meaningful mark on this world.

When you get into your twenties, you become well acquainted with the struggle for meaning. If you haven't made it here yet -- get excited. It's something to look forward to. Late nights of wondering what the heck you're doing with your life, wondering if you may have missed an opportunity along the way, wondering what might have happened if you had majored in that OTHER thing in college.

My Resistance To "Small"

I've been pondering such ideas in the past year. So if I have described you, you're not alone. There seems to be something calling out to me when I get alone with my thoughts, that tells me my life needs to mean something... that it needs to amount to something.

That voice often ends up garbled. That is to say, I translate that restless feeling into sentences. Accusatory sentences with pointed fingers, saying, "Look at what you've done. Or should I say, look at what you haven't done. This other person is four years younger than you and already famous. They're changing things, and making a difference in the world. You, you're just... well... you."

I really want to mean something. I want to influence and impact a lot of people. I want to be a guy on TV, fighting for what I believe in, with my own foundation and my own books and my own mind-blowing ideas.

But you know, it may not go down like that. I may never end up saving the world. And if I don't, is that okay?

God's Heart For "Small"

God showed me something a few years ago. I was taking a spiritual formation class my dad teaches each year, and he decided to take us on a silent retreat to a lodge. We had to drive an old church bus up an 80 degree angle to get to the cabin we stayed at. When we got there, my dad handed us some sheets of paper which contained instructions for the retreat. There were some chants on there, those things where the leader says something and then everyone else says something back.

One of the sentences on the sheet of paper caught my eye immediately, and I couldn't stop looking at it. It said, For those who suffer and those who go back to be with them.

Going back to be with those who suffer. It put a picture in my mind of myself chasing a spotlight that was moving as fast as I could run. But the people Jesus said to take care of were hurting in the dimly lit corner. In order to go back for them, I had to give up my chase for the spotlight.

It did something to me and my fame desiring self. I ran it back through my mind over and over.  It felt like something was yelling from a place deep within me that I hadn't been paying much attention to lately. I had listened to that voice before, though, and I knew who it was. God had something he wanted to say.

Over the next 12 hours of silence, God showed me that there's a special part of his heart reserved for the "small." He enjoys the fanfare just fine, but something about him also enjoys the quiet, the faithful, and the hidden. I mean, look at the way he snuck into the world. He was born in a stable, for crying out loud. To a pair of teenagers. And then he became an unassuming carpenter. Not a royal ruler like the Jews were expecting, a carpenter. Isn't that crazy?

It's like he was trying to show people that things don't have to look meaningful to be meaningful.

Small Love Is Meaningful

It seems as though you've got the big voice Christians who are influencing lots of people, and you've got the everyday Christians who are loving the people in their lives one at a time. One isn't actually more important than the other. Nobody's going to see the work of the everyday Christian. But God does. And he really likes it.

I'm daily tempted to believe this lie: You're not doing enough, you're not accomplishing what God wants of you, unless you are getting famous. You're not working hard enough, well enough, smart enough.

That will kill you. That will take all your joy. That is a sneaky way to make you measure your worth by your performance. And that is not the Gospel.

Some of the most important things that happen for the sake of the Kingdom in individual lives come from the unknown deeds of an unknown warrior, an agent of love, working unnoticed in the shadows. This imagery is absolutely brimming with life to me. There's something sacred and holy about it.

I'm not famous. You're probably not famous (I'm playing the odds game here). The work we do for the Kingdom probably isn't going to be televised or shouted from the rooftops by all our friends. It's going to be small. We are going to be working from the place of the unknown. But let me just tell you, the place of the unknown is one of God's most treasured places. That's where he meets with the ones who go back to be with those who suffer. And he loves it.

Bringing it home with Gandalf the Grey

The small things are often the things that paradoxically bring the most potent change into the world. Gandalf said it best, like he usually does, when he said this in The Hobbit:

“Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of kindness and love.”

Strong.

Maybe, when I'm longing to have a big impact on the world, its actually my misdirected desire to see the brokenness of the world fixed. And maybe if God's desires for the world can come to fruition by me being "small," then maybe it's time to get "small." This story is ultimately about him, not me.

I think I'm okay with that. Because when no one else is celebrating the small things, that's when God is the sole audience. And that's where I'll get the applause I really long for.