On my gravestone

Over the last few days I have been totally overwhelmed by just how many things I really don't know how to do very well, most of them really important things, most of them about being a really good husband and father, and builder and fixer. I am a fallible, feeble fixer, at best. And I am surrendering daily, surrendering to the realization that I am truly grown in my capacity to love through my feebleness, my meekness, my weakness, ultimately my ego-death to the notion of being anyone's superman, and I am seeing that my humble acceptance of my own limitations, while drawing on God's support, creates more than I could have ever dreamed of doing, and my children reflect that back to me in total appreciation of my commitment to just that - surrendering, dying, because, God, there sure are place to go and things to do. Look, there's Pinewood Derby Man! Not! But to kids that want to build, race, and show, hey, thank You, God, for getting me through it.





"On my gravestone (and I'm in no hurry), I'd like it to say 'He died well - over and over again!' rather than 'He did well.'"

-- Yours Truly

"Death. For many, the very mention of the word can conjure feelings of fear and uncertainty. In the life of following him, we are called to pursue a daily death as though our very life depended on it (because it truly does). The scriptures are filled with such strange paradoxes. To be set free, you must become a slave. To be filled, you must hunger and thirst. To become greater, you must become less. And the hardest of all ... to truly live, you must die."

-- David Nasser


Because of the extravagance of those revelations, and so I wouldn't get a big head, I was given the gift of a handicap to keep me in constant touch with my limitations. Satan's angel did his best to get me down; what he in fact did was push me to my knees. No danger then of walking around high and mighty! At first I didn't think of it as a gift, and begged God to remove it. Three times I did that, and then he told me, "My grace is enough; it's all you need. My strength comes into its own in your weakness." Once I heard that, I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and began appreciating the gift. It was a case of Christ's strength moving in on my weakness. Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size —abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks. I just let Christ take over! And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become.

-- 2 Corinthians 12:7-12 (The Message)


3-4God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn't deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, He personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.

The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.

5-8Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them — living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what He is doing.

9-11But if God Himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of Him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won't know what we're talking about. But for you who welcome Him, in whom He dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin — you yourself experience life on God's terms. It stands to reason, doesn't it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, He'll do the same thing in you that He did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and He does, as surely as He did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ's!

12-14So don't you see that we don't owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There's nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God's Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!

-- Romans 8:3-14 (The Message)


I know how to find the things that I can do well. And I know how to focus all my energy on doing those well. And I know how to avoid those things I can't or won't do well so that I can continue to look good doing well. But to die well, letting God grow me and run my life. That's scary. But oh well, here goes nothing. Off I go! Here, Bosco! Ready for our walk!