Often times, as Christians, we get this mentality that it’s our job to fix people. That mentality is fueled by two ideas: 1) that we can see a person’s life objectively and 2) that we can judge sin.  Most time we don’t process it this way, but if we were to dissect our motives – then we’d know it to be true. But never once in scriptures are we called to fix people. Share the Good News? Yes. Show love and compassion? Yep. Fix people? Not once. If this is true then why we defaultly fall back on lecturing and preaching at people. It doesn’t work, so why do we do it?

What am I getting at? Well, in my latest clash with Pharisees, one of our students was being shackled by judgment – a harsh hand for something they did. Were they wrong? Sure. Do they know it? Yes. And in watching two people react to this student my eyes were really opened. One adult decided to lecture the young man pointing out the many ways his life has gone wrong. They wanted to convince him of their own rightness. This adult had not earned the right to speak into this student’s life.

The second person approached the young man very differently. This adult had been journeying with the student for quite some time. The first adult had not. The second adult had a conversation with the student; not lecturing or shaming them, but pursuing their heart. Through their conversation life change happened. The lecture just resulted in hardness of heart.

If journeying with a person works. If Christ’s example says that journey is the way… then why do we do it any other way? So many times we use the Bible or tradition or our own self-righteousness to separate us from others. It is used to fuel this air of judgmentalism (‘you’re sinful and I’m not’) which births this lecturing mentality. This way keeps us clean. It keeps us pious. And it keeps our hands from getting dirty. We ultimately remain in control.

To journey with people, we simply walk humbly with the Lord and invest our lives into others. With journey we are forced to be on God’s time table. It takes time and we have no control over situations or people that we encounter. Journey facilitates openness, authenticity, fragility, brokenness and a deeper love that we can experience alone. The lecture keeps an ‘us and them’ mentality that will always keeps us apart and we were never meant to be apart.

If we don’t journey with others in Christ, living loving, investing, then Gospel you live out is no longer the good news to those around you. It becomes a wall when it was meant to be an open hand. An open hand reaches out to others. An open hand accepts help. An open hand joins with someone else’s hand because the gospel was mean to be that way.

A fool lectures thinking they have it all figured out. A wise man knows he isn’t wise and has compassion for the one who has stumbled knowing they have stumbled too. Life is a journey that is out of our hands, out of our control, and beyond our understanding. So let us journey together, humbly together reaching out to the one who is in control and wants to journey with us.

We can tell people the right answers, but if we are unwilling to journey with them our words are meaningless… and so are our intentions.

I saw this over on Aaron Ivey’s blog.

It’s a blog cloud that takes the most used words in your blog and puts them together in collage.

http://wordle.net/

Here’s a terriffic spoof of the band Journey and the new movie Journey to the Center of the Earth. My favortie line…”Journey is melting the earth!”

This one’s for you Kevin…

I feel like I’m hearing the same conversations and the same arguments about the same things lately. I’ve gotten ear fulls. And it’s always about the same two things. The two things that have been making me sick are: religion and politics. Needless to say, I’ve been pretty cynical lately. Then, I heard some quotes from founding father, Thomas Paine, over the radio today that only spurred me on further.

Thomas Paine on Politics:

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.

Thomas Paine on Religion:

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

So, I’ve come to these two conclusions: 1) religion and politics just don’t work and 2) there’s not much difference between the two.

They’re both about conviction, power, control and being right. Both involve pushing forward a certain dogma of beliefs and practices. The problem with both is that they’re all too human and easy to define. They both seem to boil down to “what we can do.” And the more I follow after Christ, I find out that life has less and less to do about me. It’s not about power or control, but giving those things up. The more I walk, the more I find myself being farther and farther from those two things. So I could care less about religion and politics, thank you very much.

It happened a couple of days after Christmas. I received a phone call from someone I haven’t heard from in over a year—someone whom I never thought I’d hear from again. It was an old student wanting to have coffee and needing to talk.

Normally this wouldn’t surprise me, but the last time I had seen Jimmy was over a year ago. I remember that experience very well. It was just before our ‘07 snow retreat and Jimmy’s father was looking for help with his son. He was out of control and diving deeply into drugs. Jimmy’s father had heard about our weekend retreat and thought we could help. Jimmy showed up for the trip so incoherent he could barely speak. It was like having a child around, his brain was still fried by drugs. I spent a majority of that trip babysitting him. The volunteers and I prayed the whole trip for Jimmy.

The young man on the phone with me sounded very different than one I spent time with a year ago. He was sharp and articulate. Needless to say I was intrigued.

As we sat down for coffee Jimmy began to open up and share. For the last 10 months he has been in a rehab facility getting help for his drug addictions. During Christmas he was allowed to go home for a few days and he wanted me to know that he had changed his ways. He remembered the retreat and how people cared for him there. He remembered how we told stories about a loving God. He remembered about how Jesus offered him hope and new life. I sat there drinking my coffee watching the beginnings of a changed life in front of me. I was amazed, but that isn’t the end of the story. It only gets better.

When we finished our coffee, I invited him to attend this years’ snow retreat. Jimmy accepted on the spot.

A week later, he was so eager for the retreat that he showed up hours early. Over the weekend he shared his story with the other students. They listened and many of them who had been dabbling in drugs heard a stern wake up call. Every time we shared a message or read scripture, Jimmy was hungry to take it in. Any time we had discussion, he was the first one to share or ask questions. I was so excited.

Later in the weekend, we offered an opportunity for the students to pray to accept Jesus as their Lord. They closed their eyes and prayed. And with their eyes still closed, I asked if anyone had made the decision to raised their hand. Jimmy’s hand didn’t go up. I was excited for the students who had made the decision, but had hoped that Jimmy would have taken that step. We finished out the weekend in great fashion and I loved the time and the conversations I had with him.

A week later he called me up again. In that conversation he shared with me that he thought a lot about what we had talked about over the weekend and he decided to given his heart to the Lord. He wanted a new life and decided that Jesus was the only way. Then he informed me that when he graduates from high school, he wants my job as well!

I’ve always read about dramatic life changes, but this was the first one I was able to watch happen right before my eyes. From incoherent, to following after the Lord; God loves the prodigals.

His journey has just begun, and it won’t be easy, but he’s come so far already. The work God has begun won’t easily be diminished. Pray for this young man as he seeks the Lord.