A Sense of Joy

Most people who know me would say I am not a very happy go lucky person. I might seem to take things seriously and never be satisfied, but they don’t know the inner me. I have always been a very intrapersonal person. I think a lot. I analyse myself and the things I do. I talk to God a lot and work on my relationship with Him. I feel regret deeply and constantly ask myself if I am inline with His plans or if I could be doing better.

I have been struggling with running a new department at work. My wife and I have recently been sick. I was cleaning the fridge on the weekend and I put a hole in the freezer so we now need to spend a fortune on a new fridge. The first rain of the rainy season came a few nights ago and our newly renovated roof LEAKS!! I was up at 2:30 in the morning moving furniture and mopping up.

And yet the dominating feeling I have had during all these events is JOY !! I know ,without a doubt, that God will see me through these problems. We don’t have enough money to fix them all instantly, hopefully we can get the roof patched up before it rains again. Hopefully we can scrape together enough for a new fridge before all our groceries go rotten. Hopefully…but if not, so what ? We are still alive !! God is still awesome !! I could be dead tomorrow but if I am not I will praise His Mighty Name !!

Someone sent me a comment a few days ago mentioning his despair because his friend is dying of cancer. We are all dying, slowly or quickly, sooner or later, how great it is to fill our days with joy instead of despair. Of course, this is easy to say when you are not faced with a dying friend but there is a lot to be said for living in the positive.

If your friend recovers, you worried for nothing. If your friend doesn’t recover, you spent your last time together worrying. I think that is what Jesus meant when he said we shouldn’t worry. There’s no point. It will end when it ends. Just do all you can to use your gifts, talents and opportunities to the fullest while you have the chance.

God Bless You, spend this day KNOWING that He loves you, His ways are higher than yours and all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purposes.

Not Liking Myself

The weirdest thoughts and feelings have been coming over me over the past few days. I have started to have big doubts about myself and feel as though I am not a likeable person. It seems a lot of it has to do with my new position at work. I am the head of a department with 9 people in it and I have to deal with people’s personalities and differences in professionalism. It leads to quite a bit of stress.

Interestingly, as I was praying about this on my way to work, God gave me another part of the answer. I was nearing my place of work when I saw a guy pushing a huge pile of rubbish on a ‘becak’. The Holy Spirit told me to give to him. I stopped my motorcycle, opened my wallet, pulled out some money, did a dangerous U-turn and headed back toward the man. As I handed over the money and he replied ‘Matur Nuwun’(A formal Javanese way of saying thank you) a kind of revelation hit me; perhaps I have been feeling pretty pathetic because I haven’t been doing what God has called me to do. I haven’t been giving and serving and loving enough.

I have had few more rewarding experiences in my life than when I have been preaching God’s word to people I know to need a little bit of His love and light in the dark lives. I find no greater joy than finding a place in the gutter with a few homeless kids and sharing a meal. I love nothing more than to tell a group of kids at an orphanage that they are the chosen generation who will be used to bring His Kingdom to heaven.

When I reflect I notice that I have been in a cycle of working hard, being stressed and trying to relax with foot reflexology, holidays, extra sleep and so on. I now understand that if I don’t DO the things God has ordained me to do I won’t have peace.

I believe He requires me to work hard to lead my team at work. I know I need His anointing and wisdom to lead and inspire and provide feedback for the nine different people I am responsible for. I know that if I cry out to Him when it gets tough, He will give me peace.

Amen

A Lesson About Love

For the past 8 years I have been riding my motorcycle for 30 minutes each way to work. I pass through the city of Surabaya and I am exposed to the pollution, the traffic and the ‘life’ of the city.

I took this photo in 2005 or 2006. The young child spends his days at a set of traffic lights begging. He walks around in 35 degree heat on the burning hot road, day in and day out. On my journey through the city I see 10s of similar children.

One girl I noticed many years ago was probably a similar age to the boy in this photo. She would be in a certain area for weeks or months and occasionally she would move to a different corner but I saw her regularly, as I do most of them.

Just recently I was on my way home from work and I saw her. She couldn’t be much older than 14 and I wouldn’t be surprised if she was closer to 12. When I saw her, a week or so ago, she was walking out to the cars at a traffic light and begging for change, she had no shoes on and I noticed that she was pregnant.

My heart cried out and I prayed to God, “Please Lord, guide me. Let me know what I should do.”

I know people who run orphanages, I can motivate people from my church and cell group, I can pay for the birth, I can sponsor the child, I can deliver food and vitamins to the girl during her pregnancy, there are so many ways I can help.

But, what does god want me to do ? If I help that girl, what about all the others I see on my way to work ? Thousands of people living in appalling poverty !

So I spent a week, fasting, praying and asking for input from others. The conclusion I have come to is that I need to trust my spirit. When God puts someone in my path that I can help I need to be ready to ACT.

When we act out of love we can’t be wrong. Yes, we should pray for wisdom in things like this but don’t let doubt and fear creep in. When He is with us, who can be against us ?

I have made the decision to talk to the girl the next time I see her and find out what I can do to help. I may or may not get the chance, she may or may not want or need my help. But I hope it is not to late and next time I feel my spirit cry out I hope I will act first and think later.

GBU

The cow ‘turds’ of my past are the compost of my future

As I rode my motorcycle to an orphanage a year or so ago I was petrified I wouldn’t have anything to say to the kid I was going to counsel. I had thoughts of listening to his story and not even understanding what he was saying as he was from Ambon and, even though my Indonesian is pretty good, I might simply not be able to understand what he was saying. Even if I managed to understand, I was filled with uncertainty about whether I would be able to be of any help to him whatsoever. Doubt tortured me and I wondered why I had volunteered myself to be an ear for these kids.

And then it happened. As the kid spoke I was filled with awe at how great God is. He shared his life story, growing up in Ambon and how his father had abandoned his family. His struggle with guilt because of the terrible model he had been for his younger brother and on and on…. It was all exactly the same or very close to the experiences I had during my childhood and teen years.

The next week I went through the exact same doubts and in a completely different context the next kid had experiences very similar to mine. And so, week after week, God sent teens for me to minister to and ironically He had prepared me to minister to them over a decade before through the experiences I went through during my childhood.

Not long after a minister was preaching and he said “Pupuk masa laluku menjadi pupuk untuk masa depanku” (the cow ‘turds’ of my past are the compost of my future) For me it all fit together as it only can when God is the orchestrator. I saw that all the pain and problems I had experienced with my father’s suicide, leaving home at 14 years old and almost 10 years of substance abuse and wandering, were partly preparation for the ministry I love doing these days.

I resolved to take a different perception of problems and always be (at least partly) pleased when trouble strikes as I trust that God has something in store for me. Amen

If you think of your spirit or ‘spiritual man’ as a physical being, what type of person are they ?

Is your spirit man malnourished and weak ? Is your spirit man fat, greedy and lazy ? Is your spirit man well trained and an example of a well tuned machine ?

If your spirit man is malnourished, FEED HIM !! You may be living in a body that gets a big hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs, lunch of pizza and salad and a dinner of steak, potatoes, peas and carrots followed by ice cream and chocolate sauce BUT your spirit man has to starve or make do with a cold snack of bible reading, prayer or worship a couple of times a week.

If your spirit man is fat and lazy you are probably the sort of person who loves being blessed. You go to church or read the bible or pray knowing that you will get something out of it. The problem is you fail to give back (or give away). Look for opportunities to be a blessing. Take the Word of God as it is meant to be taken, literally, and feed the poor and widows.

If your spiritual man is well trained, good. Don’t loose your conditioning. The muscles of a body builder will turn to fat as soon as they stop working out. Keep growing and building in God and as you flex your spiritual muscles the Devil will be rebuked and people will see the good deeds you do and come to know your father in Heaven. Amen

Imagine you were on the spaceship in the picture above. The environment you had just been in was desolate but it was all you had ever known. You existed there and you knew how to survive, perhaps you had even found some happiness and contentment.

Then one day you realized there was another potential place to live. You set off on a journey to the place in the distance. If you looked at where you were going it would be small compared with the place you were coming from which would fill your perspective.

As you travelled you would reach the half way point and eventually the place you were going would fill more and more of your perspective. Eventually your new destination would be prominent and the place you came from would be small in the distance.

This is an analogy of our walk with God. The old environment is ourselves, our ego. We must leave it behind and take on more and more of His characteristics until the old self we once were is in the distance past and He fills all of our perspective.

God Bless You

Integrity

As a teacher I work very hard, planning and preparing classes to insure that the students are challenged, motivated, and engaged. It is not easy, many factors are working against me. The main one is that the students are so used to getting through their school day in a form of cognitive hibernation.

Einstein said “ It is a wonder that imagination survives formal education”

As education professionals we no longer have any excuse. Multiple intelligence theory, bloom’s taxonomy and the basic psychology of education has been well established for decades now. We understand the way children learn and the factors that affect the process.

Yet still, in classrooms all over the world (I am willing to bet) students are being bored senseless, not because they are a generation of hedonistic, pleasure seeking, MTV watching demons but because teachers fail to engage and inspire them.

There are a multiple number of reasons and factors that lead to this classroom genocide of our children :

1) The education system was not created for unique individuals to learn and discover the world around and within them. It was created to pigeon hole each member of society. This is by far the biggest obstacle. WHY do we send our children to school for 6 hours a day over a period of 12 – 20+ years ? What benefit can all that ‘preparation’ have when the ‘real life work’ they are being prepared for will last a mere decade longer than the education process ?
2) A lot of teachers are disenchanted with the profession, the conditions, the salary, the administration, the class sizes, the curriculum etc.
3) After 4,5,10 years of teaching generation after generation, some find it difficult to recreate the enthusiasm they found for their vocation.
4) And YES, children are changing. Society has changed. Kids today are used to MTV – images and sounds flicking and changing every 5 seconds or so. Even CNN and other news channels are sensory overloads. Monotone teachers and a couple of photocopies have the same effect on the student as shooting them with a strong tranquilizer. Text books full of pretty colored pictures of people in the 1980’s don’t compare to what these kids can access when they get home from school every day; the latest news + clips from all over the world as it happened just minutes ago, via the internet.

And yet I accept NONE of these excuses !! No principal or colleague may see. The students themselves may not even complain. You may have a million and one reasons why you go into a class and teach a mediocre lesson but God knows. He will reward you for what you do in secret. Not just give away money but going the extra mile because you know that if you inspire your students you are affecting them, their peers, their family and everyone they come into contact with in the future.

Study, learn, grow as a teacher, being inspiring, teach with passion, give 110%, do more than the administration expects of you, more than the students expect of you, more than you did yesterday. You are shaping the future generation.

Three quotes to finish.The first two are from famous people but I must appoligise as I have lost the names of the original authors. The 3rd is my own.

1. “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

2. “Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality.
It is the words that speak boldly of your intentions.
And the actions which speak louder than the words.
It is making the time when there is none.
Coming through time after time after time, year after year after year.
Commitment is the stuff character is made of; the power to change the face of things.
It is the daily triumph of integrity over skepticism.”

3. If you can’t commit, get out of the way and let someone who can do your job !!

God Bless You, especially if you’re one of those who go the extra mile, day after day.

God Will Win !!

Just been reading ‘The God Chasers’ by Tommy Tenney. Many parts of the book have struck me even though I am only a couple of chapters in. One thing in particular that I have felt for a long time but been unable to articulate very well is this :

We box God in so much. Church is so structured and constricted by time schedules and expectations.

From reading the book and meditating on it I have really been inspired. How much do we trust God ? How much do we let Him do what HE wants to do ?

We prepare and arrange and set everything up to build the ‘right’ sort of atmosphere. We guide and coax people to a religious experiences.

I recall the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal ( 1Kings 18: 22-40 )

Elijah challenged 450 of Baal’s prophets to call on the name of their God and ask him to set fire to a stack of wood with a sacrificial bull on it.

” 26 So they took the bull given them and prepared it. Then they called on the name of Baal from morning till noon. “O Baal, answer us!” they shouted. But there was no response; no one answered. And they danced around the altar they had made.

27 At noon Elijah began to taunt them. “Shout louder!” he said. “Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.” 28 So they shouted louder and slashed themselves with swords and spears, as was their custom, until their blood flowed. 29 Midday passed, and they continued their frantic prophesying until the time for the evening sacrifice. But there was no response, no one answered, no one paid attention.

30 Then Elijah said to all the people, “Come here to me.” They came to him, and he repaired the altar of the LORD, which was in ruins. 31 Elijah took twelve stones, one for each of the tribes descended from Jacob, to whom the word of the LORD had come, saying, “Your name shall be Israel.” 32 With the stones he built an altar in the name of the LORD, and he dug a trench around it large enough to hold two seahs of seed. 33 He arranged the wood, cut the bull into pieces and laid it on the wood. Then he said to them, “Fill four large jars with water and pour it on the offering and on the wood.”

34 “Do it again,” he said, and they did it again.
“Do it a third time,” he ordered, and they did it the third time. 35 The water ran down around the altar and even filled the trench.

36 At the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed: “O LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. 37 Answer me, O LORD, answer me, so these people will know that you, O LORD, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.”

38 Then the fire of the LORD fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench.

39 When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, “The LORD -he is God! The LORD -he is God!”

40 Then Elijah commanded them, “Seize the prophets of Baal. Don’t let anyone get away!” They seized them, and Elijah had them brought down to the Kishon Valley and slaughtered there.

Elijah trusted that God was God all powerful. He let God prove Himself.

How much do we trust God ?
Do you trust God enough to say the mountain move and KNOW that it will move ? Do you claim His promises ? Do you stand and preach His will ? If He doesn’t give you the words to speak what are they worth ?

How much do we let Him do what HE wants to do ?
I have determined next time I go to my devotion time with my students that I am not going to prepare anything. I will call on the name of the Lord and I fully trust ad believe that He will be there and The Holy Spirit will accomplish the desire of His heart.

Lord, forgive us for being so mediocre ! Your will be done. Shake us up Lord ! Let children and teens proclaim your word ! Let parents pray into the lives of their children and see miracle after miracle, victory after victory. May your spirit flow through our churches and set your people on fire with the anointing you have prepared for us. Let your light flow from corner to corner, from street to street, from home to home. Push the darkness out of our cities, free the people from the grasp of drugs and prostitution, crime and hopelessness. May your love and your light bring salvation to all. Hallelujah !

I BELIEVE YOU CAN, I BELIEVE YOU WILL, I FEEL YOUR SPIRIT IN MY ACHING TO BURST FORTH AND DO MIRACULOUS THINGS TO BRING YOUR WILL TO THE EARTH !! ALL GLORY AND HONOR TO JESUS CHRIST ! AMEN, AMEN, AMEN

Phillip Ian Tri

Here is a part of a post from 2007… http://yearn4god.com/2007/12/06/philip-ian-tri-11207-51207/

Philip Ian Tri (1/12/07 – 5/12/07)
When Andrew and I received the following text message from Pak Stefanus (Head of Ada Hari Esok Orphanage) we were of one mind:

“There is a woman in Tandes who needs to give birth by operation, there are a lot of complications and she is very poor. Is there anything you can do?”

In just a few seconds we agreed to bless her with the money that was left over from the Charged Retreat. We sent Rp.4,700,000 (US$507.15) and waited. After a few days we heard that the woman’s blood pressure was too high to do the operation. We prayed for her and finally were told that the baby was born on the 1st of December (2007). The problem was that he was only 1.8kg and needed to be in an incubator in intensive care.

We subsequently helped with further medical costs and raised an army of prayer warriors to pray for the baby. The mother of the baby even allowed us to name the baby. His name was Phillip Ian Tri (Philippians 3) as God had put the following verse in my Spirit :

Philippians 3:7But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. 10I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Phillip died at 8 days old. Yet I believe he knew God and is with God. Even more, I believe that his short life did a great deal to teach a lot of people about the value of their lives. I pray the same is true for you. Don’t live a long, lost life. Set your eyes on Jesus and run the race to the end well.

God bless you and your family and loved ones.

What A Thrill !!

I had a great holiday in Bali !! I went paragliding and flew 8 times. I had forgotten almost everything but it soon came back to me. My most memorable flight was just as the sun was setting.

I took off and gained height. As I was soaring I had a view over the land toward a pink and orange sky and to the other side I could see out over the ocean. I felt an overwhelming urge to Praise God and that is exactly what I did.

As I soared above the land, beach and ocean I just gave thanks that God had created such a beautiful earth and He had equipped humans so well that we could work out how to do things like fly.

I left Bali with a wonderful feeling that God is good and life is good. No matter what circumstances throw at me I pray I can keep the perspective that My God is an awesome God and as His son I AM A WINNER !  ( For if He is with me, who can be against me ?)