The Endeavor

Have you ever had a “where are the keys?” moment? You’ve got your coat on, your book bag or briefcase or purse in one hand, your lunch in the other hand, and you’re just trying to get out the door to work or school but you can’t find the keys! You look and look, you check your coat pockets and the bathroom sink and the key hook where they’re supposed to be but never are. You start to get desperate and check the cupboard to see if you dropped the keys in when you took the cocoa pebbles out, then you check the fridge and see if they’re beside the milk. You even check the back door to see if you left them hanging in the lock all night.

Nothing. They’re nowhere. You stand there, bewildered and frustrated, running late, and wondering how your keys ended up across the galaxy in the Sarlacc pit and if Boba is going to have fun driving your F-150 instead of using his jet pack. Then, with your head low and the most frustrated voice you can muster, you yell out (for me, to my wife — for you, maybe your mom or your boyfriend or Saint Anthony), “Where are my keys!?” And then that special person comes walking in (unless you cried out to Saint Anthony — in that case, who knows what happens next?!) and stares at you like you can’t be serious.

Your keys were in your hand the whole time. Hanging off your pointer finger, right next to your lunch bag. Of course. Sorry Boba, you can stick to the jet pack.

We’ve all had these moments. If you follow me on Instagram, you saw it happened to me last week with a dry-erase marker at work that I put above my ear and forgot about. We get so busy tending to all that needs done that we overlook some of the most obvious details.

I’m going to give you an example that’s been on my mind a few days.

When you look in the Bible at all the people we look to as an example, what do you see? Look at Moses and Elijah and Paul and Timothy. Look at Esther and Rachel and the woman at the well. Look at John the Baptist and Peter and Hosea and Samson. Look at Rahab and Mary and Martha and Lazarus and Elisha. Look at every person from every story. There’s a common thread running through them all. Can you pick it up, or is it like your keys — too obvious to see?

Here it is: They’re all people.

It’s so obvious, but sometimes we miss it. We spend a lot of time praying for God to move, and sometimes we forget that he moves through us. He moves through people. There’s a song I heard recently by a secular punk rock band that I think speaks to this.

But we don’t need miracles
To tumble from the sky
To part the seas around us
Or turn water into wine

Because we are the miracles
We happen all the time
We’re not scared of what surrounds us
We’re not waiting for a sign

We are the miracles

— Miracle, by Rise Against

This is powerful to me because I believe it elucidates the perception of our prayers. It seems to non-Christians that we (Christians) pray and sit and wait. We expect God to move, but we don’t lift our own hands and feet. We want to see a miracle, but we don’t want to be a miracle. But I believe God’s answer to many of our prayers is, “I have already sent help. I have sent you.”

I think it’s good to pray for the needs of people around us. I think it’s good to pray for the needs of our community and the world at large. There are things that only God can do. I cannot save a person’s soul. I cannot take a hard heart and make it soft. But God has given us so much in His Word that lets us know there are many things we can do. We are meant to love the people around us, and many times that means meeting real, tangible needs. Sometimes we do need to wait for a miracle. Sometimes we just need to use the resources God has put at our disposal and get up and do something.

I’ve written and re-written multiple drafts of this blog. Some versions got really into some theology and philosophy, some versions were very long winded and took too many rabbit trails, and even this version isn’t my best and most articulate writing. But here’s what I want you to walk away with: God uses people to meet the needs of people. God wants to use you to meet the needs of people. God may even want to use you to meet your own needs. Sometimes we pray and wait and then get angry when nothing happens. But there’s something in the song I quoted that rings true. Even though the song is obviously slanted away from God, I believe we would do well at times to say, “We’re not scared of what surrounds us. We’re not waiting for a sign. We are the miracles.”

God has given us much. If you’re reading this, that means you have internet access and the hardware to connect. That’s more than a ridiculous percentage of the world. Start thinking to yourself, “How can I help?” Instead of just praying for God to move in a situation, begin to ask Him how He would use you to help in a situation. There may be something only He can do, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do.

God uses people to accomplish things in this world. That means you and me. Sometimes when you’re waiting for God to move, you’re really waiting on yourself to begin doing what God has said to do. What are you waiting for?

My wife and I have been married for eight years. For some of you reading, marriage is way out in the distance, so that sounds like a long time. For some of you, the statement probably falls in the, “Oh, how cute,” category, like when you hear a baby try to say “grandma” for the first time. For me, eight years means long enough to learn some things, and long enough to know I still have plenty to learn.

This post isn’t actually about marriage though. It’s about a lesson I’ve learned from marriage that is applicable to life on any level. The lesson is this: It isn’t all about me.

Profound, right?

When you go into marriage, you go in thinking about the way your spouse makes you feel, the goosebumps they give you, the amazing family you’ll have together, and on and on. You have the “honeymoon” phase. You have infatuation. Then, somewhere along the way, reality starts to set in. The person you married isn’t whatever picture of perfection you had made up in your head. They don’t answer your every beck and call. It turns out the person you married is — wait for it — a person. They’re a person with their own thoughts and emotions and past experiences. They have their own expectations, which quite often differ from yours. They interpret statements and actions and just about everything differently than you, and they can’t read your mind.

So you clash. You clash because you’re two separate people with two separate thought patterns.

Then you have a choice to make. Am I going to respect this person? Am I going to love them and learn from them and try to help them learn from me too? Am I going to see the validity in what they’re saying even though it’s at odds with what I’m saying? Am I going to bear with them even when I think they’re wrong? After all, that’s what I hope they would do for me. Or am I going to be an authoritarian? Will it be my-way-or-the-highway? Will I bail? In short — will I build a strong marriage or will I end in divorce?

The truth is that we would all love to always have our way. But we live life with other people. And guess what, those people want to have their way too. We tend to want grace and understanding shown toward us, but we tend to show disdain or mockery to those who disagree with us.

This isn’t just in marriage, it’s everywhere. Look at your Facebook. It could be any subject from religion to politics to whether or not Chipotle is the best fast food place (hint: it is). There will be much less conversation than there will be volatile arguments and name-calling. Why? Because we don’t want to extend grace, we just want our way. We don’t want to understand why you feel the way you do, we just want you to see why we’re right. That doesn’t work in marriage, and it doesn’t work in life.

I have a friend who recently adopted an atheistic worldview. What’s amazing to me is the amount of Christians who comment on his posts as if he shouldn’t be talking about his belief (or lack of belief – however you want to word it). They themselves will post about their faith, will post Bible verses, will post praises to God, touting their beliefs for the world to see — and there’s nothing wrong with that. But now they see somebody doing the same thing, but their belief happens to be different, and it causes an uproar. Why? Because many would rather degrade than try to understand. Many don’t care why, they just care that there is a difference.

Friends, this outlook breaks down. It kills relationships, it ruins community, it builds walls that hold people at a distance from each other. I believe that there really are things that are right and wrong. I believe that there really is absolute truth. But discarding somebody else’s view because it doesn’t match mine achieves nothing. And wanting somebody to respect my view while I show no respect to them actually does damage. It shows them that I don’t value them. It shows them that they are a second class citizen to me.

Being understanding doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing.

Disagreeing doesn’t necessarily mean being disrespectful.

I remember when I found out my wife didn’t think Netflix on the couch at night counted as “quality time.” To me, why wouldn’t it? We’re together, spending time… Quality time. To her, not the same. I could either listen to her, learn from her, and grow our relationship, or I could dismiss her, slowly break her heart and show her that I didn’t value her, and eventually lose her through divorce or (even worse) through watching her slowly become a different person because of coping with constantly pouring out love to me and receiving none in return.

When you encounter people you disagree with, when you encounter friends whose decisions baffle you, when you encounter people who really are wrong, and when you encounter people who like to point out how really wrong you are, remember: it’s not all about you. Our lives are meaningless without the people around us. They bring the value and the purpose and joy, even if they also bring the disappointment and the pain. Learn from the people around you. And even if you don’t agree with them, respect them and care for them, just like you would want them to do for you.

“The Endeavor.”

What does that name mean for me? What does that name mean for you?

I named this blog “The Endeavor” because I believe that’s what we’re all doing. We’re all trying to achieve. We’re all attempting to reach a goal. We’re all striving to live a good life. We’re all setting goals and working jobs and doing all kinds of things we would much rather not do in order to get somewhere in our life that we think will bring us joy or fulfillment or some sense of accomplishment or leave some kind of impact or legacy in the world. The endeavor is life.

The blog tagline is intentional too: Life, faith, brokenness, and making sense of it all.

What does that mean? How does that tie in?

That’s where I think we find ourselves most of the time on the journey. Maybe I should just speak for myself. This is absolutely where I find myself most of the time. If you can relate, this blog is for you, friend!

Life, because that’s what the endeavor is! It’s my life. It’s all the little moments and all the little decisions that guide me down paths leading somewhere (God knows where), and the success and the hope and the anxiety and the disappointment that all come at the crossroads. I never really know which one I’ll meet until I take the turn, but that’s all part of the journey.

Faith, because life is an act of faith. Because no matter what you believe in you’re acting on faith, and that faith guides you in all you do. If you believe in God, that faith guides you. If you don’t, that faith guides you (though you may not like the term). Mine guides me, and it will inevitably find it’s way into my writing — it already has. Faith, because it’s unavoidable.

Brokenness, because it’s also unavoidable. You will face brokenness. I will face brokenness. As much as we hate it, death and decay are part of our world. Relationships break. Faith falters. The unexpected happens. We all, at some point or another, find ourselves sitting in a dark hole, fumbling around trying to pick up the pieces. I think it’s important thing to recognize. It’s important to know you aren’t the only one. It’s a goal of mine to be vulnerable and honest with some of those moments in my own life, because I hope that by doing so you won’t feel so isolated when you have those moments yourself. I think there are plenty of leadership blogs and podcasts, plenty of people telling us how it’s done and how to be better. I think those things are good. Indeed, I think if you stay sitting in your brokenness and never get up and out of it, you’re sabotaging yourself and you’re settling for less than you’re worth. But I’m not here to teach you to lead. I’m here to say, “Me too.”

Finally, making sense of it all, because that’s the reality we’re constantly living in. That’s what the conversation is really about. We encounter all kinds of things in life — good, bad, indifferent. It’s not a question of “if.” We are bound to encounter it all. But what do we do when it happens? What do we do when our friend overdoses? What do we do when our loved one commits suicide? What do we do when the life we’ve built around us has come crumbling down? What do we do when we reach success we never thought we would? What do we do when things are going smoothly but we know there’s more to life? What we do when we finally get the “yes” we’ve been waiting for to make sure we don’t waste it? Whatever comes our way, we’re left in this place of making sense of it and figuring out how to make the next move in life.

Really, this blog is about being honest about life and inviting you on the journey. It’s about being genuine in the good times and in the bad. It’s about sharing what’s really on my mind. It’s not about trying to be a version of myself that’s better than I am. It’s not about portraying myself in a light that makes you respect me more or think I have it all together. I don’t. I assume you don’t either. And that’s what I love. This blog is my way of saying, “I’m imperfect. Sometimes I’m pretty jacked up. If you are too, take heart. You’re not alone.” And this blog is often my way of going further and saying, “…and this is where I find hope. This has helped me through. I hope if you take hold of it, friend, that it will help you too!”

Thanks for reading. And if the blogs have helped you at all or if you’ve simply enjoyed reading them – share with your friends. If it was a benefit to you, maybe it will benefit them too.

I used to be a video editor. I can remember the first really big project I did. My church does a conference for Jr High through College students every year called Love Is Red. I was putting together a promotional video for it which took me several weeks to pump out. During that period of editing, I was cutting clips and fitting them to a music track, which meant going back and forth over the same music track and the same clips of video over and over and over again.

The same music.

The same clips.

For hours on end.

For weeks on end.

By the time the video was done, I never wanted to see it or hear that music track again! To everybody else, it was brand new and awesome! To me, it was stale and old and overplayed. Not to mention, I knew every little hiccup in the video. Every spot that I wish had turned out one way but didn’t, every spot I had to splice things together that really shouldn’t have been spliced together, every spot where my lack of experience made for some rough or choppy animation – I could see all of it. The people watching may not have seen any of it, but because I knew the content so intimately, I knew every single imperfect moment. I hated it.

Isn’t this how we are with ourselves most of the time? Nobody knows me as well as I know me. Nobody else knows the struggle going on inside me when I’m smiling and waving and cracking jokes on the outside. I know when there’s anger, when there’s bitterness, when there’s brokenness. I know when expectations go unmet, when I feel like I’m letting others down, when I’m not measuring up to the man I think I should be. We know ourselves so intimately that all we can see are the imperfections, all the little things that don’t add up to what we wish they did.

But that’s not all that’s there.

In my video I could be focusing on the one little effect in the background that I wish had looked a little smoother, but everybody else is focusing on the fun happening in the foreground and they’re loving it. In my life I could be focusing on the one illustration I could have made better in my blog, but everybody else is focusing on how it challenged them and helped them change their thinking. I could be focusing on the imperfections of my weaknesses while others are looking at me as a role model for how I use my strengths.

I have a Post-It that’s been sitting on my computer at work for months, maybe even a year. This is what it says:

Did God Make Me?

Do I believe that God has intricately designed me? If so, I am confident in both my strengths and weaknesses, because I know He formed me.

If I allow insecurity to rule me, what do I really believe about how I was made and the sovereignty of God?

The truth is that we all have weaknesses. We have places that we fall short. We do mess up. And the truth is that most of us tend to focus solely on those things. But it is just as true that we have strengths. We may not notice them as easily. They may not be as glaringly obvious to us. But if we begin to ask the people around us, there will be things that seem to come so easy to us that our friends just don’t understand it. It may simply be the way you can smile and be friendly to those around you even when you’re having an awful day. It may be how you can diffuse a situation before it blows up and people start fighting. It may be how you can take a bunch of seemingly random thoughts and arrange them to form a cohesive theme. It may be how you tend to just take charge in a group and people just seem to listen to you. It may be how you just hear a song once and you can instantly sing it or play it perfectly. It may be how you can look at the clouds and see beautiful pictures.

The truth about our strengths is that to us they usually seem ridiculous or insignificant, but there are others who wish they could do it as well as you! Take that last one for instance: seeing beautiful pictures in the clouds. That seems childish to you, but there are people so caught up in their world of practicality that they wish they could just stop, look up, and see something beautiful. There are people who wish to be artists and who strive and strive for inspiration, and all you have to do is look at the clouds. They comb books and google and museums, and they still struggle. You lay in the grass and look up and you can’t contain all the ideas that come rushing in.

We downplay things in ourselves because they are common to us. Others would give anything to have some of your strengths.

I think I should note here that just because you can’t get paid for it at your job doesn’t mean it isn’t a strength. When God created us, he wasn’t thinking about capitalism. He was thinking about humans interacting with the world and with each other. He was thinking about beauty and healing and love and community. You may get fired for staring at the clouds while you’re on shift. But you may also teach your neighbor how to see beauty in an otherwise bleak world. That, my friend, is a strength.

I feel like I’m rushing through this thought a little bit. I feel like there’s a lot I could say. But I do want you to be able to finish reading, so I’ll end it with this.

I believe God has made us. Some of you may disagree. That’s fine. But I believe God made us, and He did so with intentionality. I believe I have the strengths I have on purpose, and I believe I have the weaknesses I have on purpose. My strengths allow me to help the people around me, to complete them. My weaknesses allow me to learn and gain help from the people around me, to be completed by them. It’s easy to live in a place of insecurity about our weaknesses. But it is very freeing to live in a place of security about our strengths.

Let me encourage you to stop worrying about things you can’t control. Some of us will just never be artists, or singers, or actors, or engineers, or poets, or police officers. Some of us will never be leaders of men, some of us will never be content with following somebody else’s vision. Some of us feel like the day is a waste when we haven’t checked off our to-do boxes; some of us have never even thought of making a to-do checklist. Stop worrying about what isn’t an innate gift and start looking at what is. What comes easy to you? What do you love to do? What have you always loved to do? What did you used to dream about before you became such a grown-up? Start feeding your strengths. Realize that God made you, and that all the little parts of you – imperfections and all – are just like the many nooks and crannies and juts and jogs of a river. They may be rough and sharp and cause the water to be unruly, but they also give the river it’s amazing and unique beauty.

Sometimes I wonder why we draw dividing lines in things like we do. Why is reading my Bible spiritual, but having a conversation with a friend is not? Why is going to church spiritual, but having sex is not? Everything gets put in its neat, tidy box and doesn’t mesh or mix with anything else. Spirituality is so sterile and exclusive and hard to access. Secularity is so pervasive and hard to avoid. Why can’t it be easier to just live a spiritual life?

I have a feeling we’re missing it. Now, I understand people have different beliefs about the world and about spirituality, but I belong to one belief system, so I’m talking from that perspective. If you belong to another belief system, you’ll probably be able to agree with some of these points despite our differences.

As a Christian, I believe God created this world and everything in it. I believe God created mankind and nature. I believe God intentionally designed things like emotions and personality and sunsets and sex. Everything we know, everything we see, everything we experience, it was all borne of God. Without getting too far into theology and doctrine, I believe there have been perversions of God’s creation and that is where we see pain and disease and brokenness. But what we have done in reflex to the pain we see in the world is sterilize the spiritual to try to isolate ourselves from that pain.

Emotional instability, insecurity, broken heartedness, lack of trust, broken families, unbalanced children, stranded spouses, and a multitude of other problems (evils, you may call them) can all result from unhealthy relationships and unhealthy sexuality, not to mention the assault, pedophilia, rape, bestiality and other atrocities that result from perverted views of sexuality and the sense of entitlement that some people have toward it. So what we’ve done in reflex is make sex a taboo. Conservative, “spiritual” families don’t speak of it. There’s so much darkness tied up in it, so many places to “stray off the straight and narrow.” We don’t talk to our sons about the beauty of the female figure for fear that they’ll end up in a chair in front of a stage stuffing dollar bills into lacy undergarments. We don’t talk to our daughters about it for fear that the lace will belong to them! We have drawn a line in the sand and said “God does not live here.”

But God does live there. God created sexuality. God created man. Then he said that it was not good that man would be alone, so he created woman. And he created them both naked. And he told them to multiply. God created sex. Sex is good. Sex is spiritual. We get a picture of God’s love through spousal love that we don’t get anywhere else. We get a picture of pleasure in sexuality that we don’t get anywhere else. God designed it that way.

Sexuality isn’t the only place we do this, it just seems to me the most obvious and culturally relevant to me right now. It’s hard to articulate what my point is here, because maybe my point is a little broad. But here it is: God made the world. He made humanity. He made matter. He gave us bodies with nerves and feeling. He gave us the capability to reason. He gave us emotion and passion and anger and love. There’s a reason we feel at peace standing under an autumn sun as it warms us from the crisp air. There’s a reason we are awestruck when we look up at the black sky, scattered about with pin-pokes of cosmic radiance. There’s a reason the body of our mate feels good in our arms, looks good in our eyes, tastes good on our lips. There’s a reason pain angers us and darkness frightens us. There’s a reason work brings anxiety but relationships give us life.

God made this place. He made it intentionally. There is purpose in everything we see and experience. Like I said before, I absolutely believe that there have been perversions of that creation which bring pain and brokenness and they were never part of God’s plan – but even in those we can generally see hope and light. There is more to life than lines in sand. God created all of this so we could experience His goodness in all of it. I would hate to reach the end of my life and realize just how much of life I really let pass me by because I was so focused on the line in the sand that I couldn’t see the beach I was on, the ocean I was next to, the beautiful island I inhabited, and all the other incredible people there with me. And I hope that as I learn to pick my head up and look and feel and experience God’s creation, that I can help others pick their heads up too. God created us for more.