Lessons from my daughter – I LOVE HER!!

Being a father has been a great experience for me. Next to coming to know the Lord and marrying my wife I can say that fatherhood is the best thing that has happened to me. Everyday I am challenged to pray for my daughter, pray for her future (including her husband, YIKES) and to sit and watch in awe at how she is growing and exploring. As Allyson and I have watched this little angel grow we have marveled at how much we are learning about how God feels about us as His children. I have been keeping a journal of thoughts as I watch her grow and how it reminds me so much of our growth as we learn to see God as our Father. I remember when she first was able to really focus her eyes and fix her eyes on objects, it was beautiful to watch her eyes light up as she recognized something that was red (She loves the color red so she has a lot of Minnie Mouse dolls). Then she started moving her arms and checking things out but nothing has been as fun as her exploring the carpet of our family room on her hands and knees. She is a daredevil, hurrying from one corner to another and grabbing anything her little hands can grasp and put it in her mouth.

99.9% of the time we see so much of the beauty of what it means to explore the world as a young child, but there is that 0.1% that we shake our head at in amazement. It is amazing to me how she can have the whole floor to crawl around on, a plethora of toys laid out on the carpet designed for her enjoyment and she gravitates towards one thing that she is not supposed to touch. This week the chilly temperatures have caused us to turn off our AC and actually light our fireplace (Which is unheard of for June). On Monday morning I spent the morning at home studying for an exam I have coming up this week and I was sitting by the fire as Olivia was playing on the carpet. Her Aunt Laela just bought her the coolesttoy that Olivia seems to love yet it wasn’t this toy that caught her attention, it was the flickering fire that she wanted to play with. She proceeded to crawl over to the fireplace where I sternly said ”No” to and picked her up and directed her in the opposite direction.

She made a frustrated sound (which is usually a growl) and turned back around to head towards the fire. It reminded me so much of us a humans. We think we know what we want and we will actually go as far as to say, “God, I dont care what you think. I know how to take care of myself and I will “touch” what I want to touch.” I cant tell you how many times I knew I shouldnt do a certain thing yet find myself licking my wounds after I get ‘burned’. I wonder what would happen if we would view God’s standards a little differently. A lot of Christ Followers seem to throw the Commandments the Lord set out for His people in the Old Testament out because of the Grace given through the sacrifice of Jesus. We are not to ignore the standards of God, they were set for us as God’s people as instances of worship and honor to our Heavenly Father.

The old story goes; If you want to get a kid to touch a hot stove, tell him not to touch it. Have you ever wondered about yourself? Do you find yourself doing those things that you know you shouldn’t do? The apostle Paul found himself in this position when he wrote:

¹⁴We know that the law is spiritual; butI am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. ¹⁵I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ¹⁶And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. ¹⁸I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. ¹⁹For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. ²⁰Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

 ²¹So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. ²²For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; ²³but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. ²⁴What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? ²⁵Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!

The Scriptures tell us that we are marked with sin because of the sin of the first Adam. Yet, it is the second Adam (Jesus) that cleanses us from our sins and because of this we can come to God in perfect relationship.

I love my daughter dearly and delight in her no matter what, even when she does things that I dont want her to do, my motivation isn’t to take fun away from her, it is simply to protect her from the imminent harm that will come when she dabbles with “fire”. We as followers of Christ are New Creations on the inside, yet we are wrapped in flesh and it is our flesh that desires the things of this world and not things from above.

May we learn to honor God with our actions as well as our hearts.

Tall Bike Video

Here is a video of a good friend named Si who has been a part of the nine70 community for a lot of years (Since we began). Si has a great heart for people and loves bringing joy to people’s lives. I love this kid to death and I am proud of the way he influences people and is searching for ways to impact others.

He loves this bike and is VERY talented. This was recently done by the news team at Colorado State Univeristy. I hope you enjoy.

Let Love Live

Brett Favre, Identity, Jesus and you

I usually dont listen to sports talk radio, especially in the mornings. However every now and then if there is something big happening in the sports world I tune in to hear the conversations that are being had on sports radio. This morning I drove our daughter to her babysitters house and on the way there I tuned into the local sports talk radio station hoping that there would be ample discussion on the Denver Nuggets and their current tear through the NBA playoffs (Until they meet the Lakers). The conversation was not on NBA playoffs, but rather on the possible return of Brett Favre to the Minnesota Vikings. Not only is he going to be playing for one of his biggest rivals when he was in Green Bay, but this is his second return to the NFL after “retiring”. I guess you can start calling him Favre version 3.0.

I personally would love to see Favre play for the Vikings, but as the conversation was continuing I started to think a bit about why someone like Favre would return after retiring a second time. I could understand if he continued to say that he wanted to come back after last season, and if the Jets didn’t want him he would go to another team. But that’s not what was said, Favre said that he was done and that football was behind him. Yet here we are 4 months later and he wants to come back. Why would someone do that? I obviously don’t know Brett Favre personally at all, but I wonder how difficult it would be for him to go from playing football to sitting around not doing much. This morning on the talk radio a guy named Mike Golic was talking, he was saying that he had been playing football since he was 11 years old and its really all he ever knew. When he retired from football he was thankful that he had already dabbled in broadcasting so that he had something to do when he was done playing. As I thought about that comment more and more my heart broke for him, Favre and so many others.

For some reason we are so tied to what we do as a vocation that we forget that we were actually a human before we got into that particular profession. Our identity is not a doctor, lawyer, policeman, teacher, pastor, etc… those are just what we do. Our identity does not need to be tied to our careers. When we meet people one of the first things we ask (If not the first) is, “What do you do?” As if someones job will tell us who the person is. At CSU I had football taken away from me becauseof an injury my senior year and that whole year I had to grapple with the question of who I was beyond football. Since I was in 4th grade I identified myself as a football player. In high school and college I was known as a football player and sometime along the road I had lost my identity as simply being Reza and a lot of us are in this same boat. We are more than our profession and until we figure this out we will never be satisfied with what we do in life and who we are. Football players are idolized in our culture, and I don’t think it is a good thing or a bad thing, it is just what it is. Being idolized can energize you for a bit, but after a while you still need to find out who you are in the inside, what you are made of and what is important to you.

When we tie our identity up with our profession we find ourselves a lot like Favre, not knowing what to do after we are done playing football. We spend so many years trying to attain a certain position or career that in the process we forget who we are as individuals. Obviously it isn’t wrong to have a career or even be successful in that career, the pitfall we must avoid is finding our significance in that particular career. In my life I have found that knowing that I have the opportunity to have a relatinoship with God in spite of my shortcomings has helped me realize that I have an identity and it has nothing to do with being a Pastor. My identity is a child of God, a husband, a father and then a Pastor (In that order).

What about you? Where do you find your identity? What would happen if you stopped doing your profession? Do you know who you are or what your life is about apart from your career? Now that’s a thought that we have to ponder…

Let Love Live.

Brokenness and Hope

This week at Timberline Pastor Dary really challenged all of us in seeing our brokenness in a different light. Allyson and I have experienced moments of extreme brokenness as individuals before we were married and also as a married couple. One thing Dary said really made me think; He said that brokenness forces introspection and when we get burned we are careful not to get burned again. This obviously makes sense, who wants to be burned a second time?

However the danger in this is that it can cause us to be frozen in fear rather than move forward in confidence. The word courage does not mean without fear, courage can be defined as moving forward when you are scared. There have been times in my life that I felt like such a coward because of my fear, but I am glad to say that in SOME situations (sadly not all) I have been able to move forward in spite of that fear. What about you? Do you find yourself frozen with fear because of past hurt, pain or brokenness?

If I have learned anything about a relationship with God, its that God is a God of Hope. Hope is something that we all look towards, for many of us (Whether we know it or not) it is hope that keeps us moving forward in life. Barak Obama was elected president of the United States mainly because of the message of Hope that he preached during the election. Setting political agendas aside I think that his campaign exposed something in our culture, people are looking for hope in life. There are so many things that cause us to loose hope, these are real things and it would be foolish to minimize them by saying a cliche like “Keep Hope Alive” or “Everything happens for a reason”. The reality is that somethings are senseless and others sometimes do things that effect Innocent people and causes them to loose hope in certain situations (Financial, relational, emotional, physical, etc…). HOWEVER, there is hope in life. Jesus himself preached a message of Hope to a generation of people and that message continues to spark hearts all over the world.

Brokenness can cause you to see things in a different light, and that can be a good thing. Don’t let brokeness keep you from moving forward. “Do not loose heart… I have overcome the world” (Jesus of Nazareth). What a great promise to rest in.

Let Love Live