Obedience Challenged

I went to my first dog obedience trial this past Saturday in Ruston. I volunteered as a Ring Steward and basically just made sure people got in the ring with their dog in the right order and assisted the judge with some of the test elements.

Now dog people and horse people are weird. Cat show people are just bizarre. I say this with all love, because I have grown up showing horses in hunter shows and have drifted in and out of the dog world over the years. Some of the greatest people I know are dog and horse professional trainers or dedicated amateurs. But for the most part, we are just really really weird and forget there is a world outside of the stable and kennel.

Anyways, I really enjoyed watching the dogs go through their paces. Most of the dogs were excellent, and the thing I enjoyed most about it was watching the canines focus on their handlers. They watched them constantly and were totally focused on what the handler would ask next. Obedience trials are set up to test how focused the dog is on its handler and how well it follows directions. And the dogs, all of them, LOVED to do what their handler asked. It was the greatest joy for them to please their handler whether it was a simple sit or a complicated scent exercise. All they wanted to do was make their handler happy.

I just love dogs for that reason. They do not think about themselves. It is all about serving someone else.

What great teachers they are about our role in life. Do I stay focused on my "handler"? Is pleasing God my main goal in everything I do. Do I wake up in the morning and get excited just thinking about what I can do for God and that I get to spend the whole day with Him? Or do I constantly look behind me, to the side of me, or get distracted by the bait left on the floor. My handler has a whole pocket full of treats better than the dried out miniscule piece of bait on the floor, but what do I choose to do with this information? Does God constantly have to correct me (gentle or not so gentle) with some yanks on my chain so to speak?

Whenever a dog or horse makes a mistake in a class. It is 99.9% of the time the handler's fault. Perhaps we were not clear on our instruction or we did not train or prepare them correctly for the test. As followers of Christ, we NEVER have to fear this. God will never go against His Word and anything he tells us is wise, its lasting and it is real.

There is a charming phrase in animal lover circles that says, "Lord please help me be the kind of person my dog thinks I am." How true! But even more so, I ask, "Lord if I were to be even half as obedient and excited about you as my dog is about me then what amazing things you could do through me to minister to others!"

I need to take a lesson from Charlie on how to relax

the grip that cannot be loosened

Maltbie D. Babcock once wrote:

One of the most common mistakes and one of the costliest, is thinking that success is due to some genius, some magic something or other which we do not possess. Success is generally due to holding on and failure to let go. You decide to learn a language, study music, take a course in reading, train yourself physically. Will it be a success or failure? It depends upon how much pluck and perseverance that word "decide" contains. The decision that nothing will overrule, the grip that nothing can detach will bring success.

Fall is the beginning of many new commitments. We resolve to "win state" in our football teams, we decide this will be the best year yet in school—you'll be popular, you'll make good grades, you'll have your top choice for home room, you'll have a date to prom that you actually like. It's an exciting time. While around us leaves are falling and nature is cleaning house in order to prepare for spring, we are beginning a new chapter in our social, athletic and academic lives.

But a commitment is more than starting a sentance with "I will. . ." or "I am. . ." Just as a marriage commitment does not end at the altar when the bride and groom say, "I do" neither do any of the other commitments one makes in life. Anytime you make a commitment you can be rest assured it will be tested.

I hope one of your commitments this year is to live as an example of Christ in your schools, putting others first as we practised at Youniversity.

You will experience three tests regardless of what your commitment is:

1. You will experience failure.
Most, if not all, of the heroes in our lives have experienced failure or major setbacks on their way to attaining goals. It is a guarantee and part of the process of tempering your character to be able to achieve the goals you set.

After each failure, you have to pick yourself up and continue. The great thing is you are not alone. If you are living in God's Will for your life. He will be there to help you up, dust you off and encourage you. Even if you are NOT doing God's will, he is still there ready to forgive you and guide you back to the right path. But you have to do your part—you have to get back up.

2. Having to stand alone.
This point is nothing new to a Christian. We often have to stand apart from our fellow classmates and teammates because we have made the commitment to live in Christ instead of living in the world. Sometimes, even our Christian friends and family may unintentionally be distracting us from the goals we have set. Ask yourself, "Who am I trying to please?" If your answer is "My parents", "my coach", "my best friend", "my boyfriend/girlfriend", "my teachers", "Todd", whomever, if it is not "God" then you need to reevaluate your priorities.

3. Facing Deep Disappointment
Wow, if anyone knows about this one it is me! In the last ten years I have had alot of things go wrong in my life. Some of them I could not control, alot of them I could but made bad choices (see #2 - my biggie: trying to please my bosses and my father). Sometimes the pain can be so great in life that you want to give up. Sometimes we are attacked by our fellow Christians. They too struggle with walking "in Christ" and occasionally their human natures take over causing deep pain and misery to people who trusted them. As rough as life gets, we have to remain focused on our commitments, specifically our commitment to live in Christ. Because if we believe that in Christ "to die is gain" then the rough patches in life, though painful and exhausting spiritually and mentally, will pass away. They are as temporal as our life here on earth is.

I know, I know, that doesn't make it any easier right now, but lean on Christ during the disappointments in life. Meditate on God's Word, especially the Psalms - David was a very human man who experienced some ultimate highs and lows in his life and he wrote some beautiful poetry recording these events that apply to what you and I experience today. Lately, God has been bringing to my mind Psalm 130 and Psalm 57.

I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed. (Ps 57: 1b)

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in His Word I put my hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning. (Ps. 130)

I encourage you to spend some time with God evaluating your commitments for the new school year. Write them down and post them on your bathroom mirror where you can see them every morning and evening. Share them with your accountability partner. Most of all discuss them with God: "Are these the commitments you want me to focus on?" "Am I honoring you in these commitments?" "Am I trying to please you in these commitments or someone else?"

And remember, through failures and deep disappointments, when you feel that you are completely, utterly alone: God is there. He loves you with an abiding love and supports you in his everlasting arms. And we, at Axis, love you too. We greatly desire to encourage you and give you the tools to help you see you achieve your goals. If ever you need support whether just to talk to us or to seek out guidance or you need prayer, please come see us. We love you and pray for you daily. You are a vital part of the body of Christ!

shaken and self-stirred

My ad agency survivor friend Paige sent me this link:
www.hammacher.com/publish/73062.asp?promo=QSearch


Now, I ask you, how lazy do you have to be to not stir your own cup of coffee or tea? Is this where design is taking us? Instead of helping us to think and have clarity, is it causing us to get rid of all manual tasks in our lives?

The Zen Masters are fainting. . .

I mean, I need to spend those five calories I burn while stirring my cuppa in the morning. AND I happen to get some of my best ideas or reach "Ah-HA!" moments while doing those menial daily tasks we all have to do (or should do) every day - like sweeping, washing dishes, folding laundry, stirring cups of hot steaming liquids. . .

Bad Spellers UNTIE!

Just noticed the BIG mispelling on my last post. I spelled Quantitative "Quantitive" Praise cheeses that the GRE doesn't test spelling (though I guess they sortof do in the composition part - oh great let's add that to the ever expanding study plan).

I am, undeniably, a southerner - we either like to add letters to words or sound out EVERY single vowel (i.e. my father and his brothers insist on calling Walmart "Walmarts", our President's pronunciation of "nuclear") or we like to remove letters from words whenever the mood strikes us -

But, hey, we aren't the only ones to add letters just to add letters. The British spell favorite "favourite" and color "colour" so there. The tie that binds us goes further back than cotton!

Of course, they then decline to pronounce EVERY single syllable either.

Well, whatever, I am embracing my heritage. I am also avoiding my hour of GRE study. Time to stop procrastinating (ha - spelled that one right!)

Binomials, Pemdas and Quantitative Comparisons Oh My!

For those of you returning to school next week after several months of vacation and now worried that you will not be able to get back into the groove of math, English and science . . . I have absolutely NO pity for you.

Because I am too busy pitying myself.

After 10 years of not doing any math more difficult than balancing my checkbook, calculating a simple percentage or measuring a room for carpet and paint . . .I am taking the GRE.

Now the GRE assumes (wrongly) that you have just finished four years of math and English and are ready for a comprehensive exam to show your knowledge. This may be true for most, but there is a small percentage of us that actually went out of the halls of academia and worked in the world for several years before deciding to go back to school. And that nonsence about "it is like riding a bike, once you learn it it stays with you forever" is utter, complete and WHOLE nonsense.

I used to make A's in Advanced Math in high school and at University. I learned my formulas and equations like a good student, passed my exams and went on from there. My work never required these skills of me so they got dusty, then they got rusty, then they corroded and now all thats left is some vague shadowy mess in the far regions of my brain where all I can really remember about my Advanced Math, Geometry and Algebra classes is where I sat and that my alegebra professor at Tech was a raging Arkansas Hogs fan.

So, I have to take this GRE before going back to school. Doesn't matter that what I am planning on studying will not be using Geometry, Algebra and such.

The English and Composition parts of the GRE don't bother me at all. Those skills have been kept sharp from constant use in my work and in the fact that I enjoy reading.

Have you ever had a dream where you were taking a test you know you studied for but everything has escaped you? (or perhaps this has happened to you in real life - so much the worse!) Well, as I took my "Let's see how you do on this practice GRE so we can tell you what to brush up on before the actual GRE" test, I felt this way. I kept staring at problems and thinking, "Hey I know how to do these! Don't I? I used to know the formula. Wait, it will come to me, surely all those years of study were not in vain. . . surely. . ." Well, the score, was pretty sad. The English section was very good. But the Quantitative section was very very bad.

So, I have set down a study plan of 1 hour every day reviewing my pitiful maths. I would rather have root canal work done. I keep telling myself that, "These are important skills to maintain, you need this knowledge in your everyday life" but in actuallity I don't. I have gotten by in the last ten years quite well without them, thank-you and I will not be using them in my advanced studies at university either since my chosen field of study is not concentrating in maths.

So here I grind, on a Saturday morning, when I'd rather be watching a movie, reading a book, washing my truck, running errands, scrubbing out the horse trailer, whatever. . . anything but multiplying binomials or finding the distance between two points or finding out how long it will take Mary to get to Florida from Louisiana if the current is such and such and the wind direction is this and that.

ugh.

(and I do pity you my friends returning to high school and junior high. . .not so much because of having to return to the books, but because the Louisiana public education system never seems to get the air conditioning working until mid-September.)

It is like fighting the hydra!

So how are your Youniversity decisions going? Still putting "Others First"? Hardest of all, are you living "Others First" in your heart?

When C.S. Lewis was a new believer, he began to realize immediately how hard it was going to be to put self second. Lewis was a brilliant scholar. He taught at Oxford and was highly respected in the academic community. And yet, he too struggled with putting others first.

The passage below comes from a letter to his childhood friend Arthur:

"During my afternoon 'meditations', which I at least attempt quite regularly now, I have found out ludicrous and terrible things about my own character. Sitting by, watching the rising thoughts to break their necks as they pop up, one learns to know the sort of thoughts that do come. And, will you believe it, one out of every three is a thought of self-admiration: when everything else fails, having had its neck broken, up comes the thought 'What an admirable fellow I am to have broken their necks!' I catch myself posturing before the mirror, so to speak, all day long. I pretend I am carefully thinking out what to say to the next pupil (for his good, of course) and then suddenly I realise I am really thinking how frightfully clever I'm going to be and how he will admire me. . .And then, when you force yourself to stop it, you admire yourself for doing that. It is like fighting the hydra. . . . There seems to be no end to it. Depth under depth of self-love and self-admiration."

Do your thoughts look like a tomato plant so over-run with suckers that it produces no fruit? Or perhaps a marigold bush laden with dead blossoms that must be removed before new blooms can grow?

I know my own thought life can run re-runs like Nick at Nite. Over and over and over the same crummy thoughts. Either they are reminding me of failures or they are self-important or they are "woe-is-I pity nonsence. When my mind is focusing on these me-me-me thoughts, it can't focus on good thoughts- thoughts that are focused on God and on others. I have to constantly tend my thoughts like a diligent gardner. And it is only with the Holy Spirit acting as weed patrol that I can create a healthy thought garden where my heart can grow into fullness in Christ.

Fighting the hydra is an arduous task, even with the Holy Spirit as chief gardner in our lives. But it is through this struggle that we remain humble and realize our need for daily "meditations", for daily communication with God. He loves loves loves for us to come with him with our needs. He aches to help us. God help us never to forget how much we need Him every minute of our existence.

So break out the pruning sheers and prepare the fingers. It's weeding and dead-heading time!

The penny dreadful

Most of this post is pulled directly from The Narnian by Alan Jacobs. This is a fantastic book on C.S. Lewis. The best I have read. It is especially helpful if you have ever tried to explain salvation to a logical or brilliant mind. C.S. Lewis, a top academic and survivor of the atrocities of WWI, became a Christian in his thirties and it is fascinating to see how God got through all his logic, atheism, and questions. The truth is a mighty sword.

Anyways, the book is worth reading. The library has a copy.

But here is the bit that came to mind as I nattered on in my first post about our lives in Christ being a like an epic movie:

"Stories most greatly treasured, and treasured for the longest periods, are those that trace, in bold lines, the outlines of our deepest experiences. And if it is stories, among all the things we make and do, that mean the most to us as we face our own battles, journeys, and riddles, what does that suggest? Chesterston would only figure that out a few years later, when he wrote Orthodoxy: 'All Chrisitanity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? -that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about, any one can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology dealt much with hell. It is full of DANGER, like a boy's book: it is at an immortal crisis. There is a great deal of similarity between popular fiction and the religion of the western people.' Christianity, then, IS the penny dreadful--or perhaps the seed from which all penny dreadfuls grow. The story of each human life, in the account given by Christianity, is filled with the suspence and tension of a "boys book"--that is, with just the vital decisions and dramatic consequences that were banished from much modern literature. ..... 'The life of man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God.'"

G.K. Chesterton is the writer quoted by Jacobs in the above exerpt. G.K.C. was a favorite writer of Lewis.

Happy Days

So, after posting my last post, I was thinking of something I read recently in The Narnian by Alan Jacobs that related to the post. I went to pick up the book and out fell a gift certificate from a spa. WHOOP! I have been looking for this blasted certificate for a month, worried that I had accidently thrown it away with a pile of papers.

God is good, very good, he provides at just the right time!

And this massage will be good, very good, too (AND at just the right time!)

Start at the beginning

I have my share of pet peeves like every other human. . . I do not like it when people answer their cell phones in meetings, in restaurants, in libraries/bookstores or in a theater. It shows a great lack of respect for everyone else who has to listen to their conversation when they would rather be a) getting on with the meeting so that they can get on with their work day and go home to THEIR personal life b) enjoy a meal, book or movie without having to listen to someone's longwinded boring and LOUD conversation about picking up the kids and what to bring home for dinner. . .

I also really, really, REALLY do not like animal rights activists who don't care a hoot for animal wellfare. I am still smoldering about the hunt ban in England.

But the third pet peeve, the one that started my ruminations for this post is this: when someone comes in on the middle of a great movie and asks "so who is that?", "why did they just do that?", or "oh, I just want to see the ending."

My mother is one of these people. Now I love my mother. She is one of the neatest people you will ever meet, and one of the nicest, but she has this really bad habit (and I know I have many MANY more bad habits than she).

Anyways, I was watching a complicated movie last week about an SOE in France during WWII. She comes in three quarters of the ways through and proceeds to watch it. I pause the DVD and ask her if she would like me to start it from the beginning because it is really a good movie and she would enjoy it.

Her comment is "Oh, perhaps some other time."

O.K. I am fine with that, no problem, but what on earth is she doing standing there in the doorway watching a key scene which will totally ruin the beginning of the movie!?

"Mom!, don't watch this part! It will ruin the movie for you!"

She stands on blythely watching away.

Now, most of you are reading this thinking, "This girl is nuts. Who cares if her mother sees the part where one of the key pieces of the plot is revealed. So what. It is just a movie!"

And there are others of you, my movie commrades, who are grinding their teeth at the mere thought of someone coming in halfway through a fantastic movie and wanting to play "catch up". For you, like me, see a good movie as more than just a storyline. There is so much more! Good acting, a particular scene, the production design. Miss parts of it, and the ending just isn't the same.

I want my mother to share all that, experience all that. I don't want her to miss out on any of the good stuff. THAT is what bothers me, not that she wants to come in during a movie and ask me a bunch of questions and watch a key scene, but that she is missing out on the whole picture. She is missing out on the experience that the director, writer, actors and designers worked so hard at (and since there are far more bad or mediocre movies out there than good ones, when a great one comes along it deserves ones attention from beginning titles to the 4 point type telling you where it was filmed).

How much more must God get aggravated with us when we constantly ask him, "So how is this going to turn out?"

First of all, because God is in control we KNOW things are going to turn out great. Maybe our end here on earth might not be so great, but as believers in Christ, we have eternal life in the presence of God as our birthright. It cannot be taken away. Not be terrorists, floods, accidents, illness, crummy careers, soured relationships, whatever.

So it must sadden God for us to constantly ask Him, "so how is this going to work out God!?"

And just like that good movie, the ending - whether it be happy or sad, is not as poignant or meaningful if we had not seen the whole film. If we had not invested ourselves in the storyline, the characters and the time period. So it is in life. We have to invest ourselves 100 percent into every day - into the people in our lives, our surroundings, our story.

Being worried and scared about one's future is part of human nature. I have spent many a day worried that I was not doing God's Will for my life. I ask Him, "If you'll just tell me a little of the future, it would give me something to go on."

How stupid I must sound to God! (Isn't it amazing that our holy God still loves us when we act like spoiled stupid numb-skulls for way longer than we should?) He has already told me what I need to know about my future: That as a believer I will spend eternity with Him and His Son.

What does it say in His Word that he asks of me? He asks me to love Him with all my heart, mind and soul and to love others as myself. Am I doing these things every day at 100 percent? Not hardly.

The Bible lays out the life rules for us to follow. If we pray and meditate on His word, if we love others as ourselves. . . if we do these things every day (only possible with the Holy Spirit!) then we will experience that glorious existance - and when we come to the end of our lives on earth, whether they were brief or long, we can look back in amazement and thank God that He, in his infinite wisdom, did not give us a play-by-play of our lives before we lived them. For the joy in life comes in the living of it, and as a Christian who lives out his or her faith every day you are guaranteed to have a life better than any movie, because it will be YOUR story and God will be the director, producer, writer, production designer and casting agent.

So (and I say this to myself more than to anyone else). Quit asking God "when, where, how" and go out and live His Word.

The rest will be the life worth watching and remembering.