Do You Want Help?

    “Do you want help? Do you really want help?” I often ask those two questions in counseling.
    I will sometimes follow with something like this, “Or do you just want someone to fix your current crisis? Because real help is going to require changes in your life and the choices you are making that have led to this crisis.”
    When a couple is looking for marriage help, they want their husband or wife fixed. Parents want their kids fixed. People who are feeling guilty because of their sin, want their feelings fixed. But it is a rare occasion when people look to a counselor with a willingness to make personal sacrifices and long-term lifestyle changes on their part.
    Yet I hear things like, “I’m willing to do whatever it takes.” But sadly, that is not often true. Had they been willing to do whatever it takes to fix their problem, more often than not, they wouldn’t be in their current predicament. Again, that is often said in order to alleviate a current crisis, but it is rarely meant for the long term thinking patterns and behavior choices that have brought them to their current predicament.
    If you are paying attention to the oil spill crisis in the Gulf, you know what I mean. While our government keeps claiming that everything that can be done is being done, it doesn’t take a lot of investigation to find that is just not the case. Thirteen governments with expertise and equipment capable of dealing with off shore disasters such as this offered to help, all within two weeks of the explosion that led to this devastating spill. Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, The Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United Nations as a whole were all turned down by our administration, despite the claim that everything that can be done is being done. The help they are offering is not merely a matter of courtesy. A few of these countries have technology and equipment for this kind of clean-up that far exceeds what the US government or British Petroleum possess. “We’re doing everything we can,” is simply not a sincere statement.
    So as we are spending the summer at The Bridge talking about problems and their solutions, ask yourself if you really want help. Not, Do do want to talk about your problems, have other people feel bad for you because of your problems, or even admit that you have any problems. The real question you have to ask yourself is, “Do I really want help?” Because if you do, that will mean applying Biblical principles to making difficult changes in your lifestyle and the choices you are making. If you really want help, you’ll be looking to the Bible for the things God wants to change in you! And you will be actively making those changes!

Open Exposure!

    I had a meeting downtown today, which took me into the thrilling Chicago traffic. At one intersection, both an automobile and a bicycle attempted to sneak through a red light at the end of a yellow. The bike was going straight and the car was turning left, and they collided. The car was barely moving and fortunately, the woman on the bike was not hurt….but she was mad! She jumped up off the ground and picked her bike up, ripped her helmet off, and with bike in tow, ran after the car screaming at the driver. Junior was sitting beside me in the car and we both saw the whole thing. I asked Junior, “What is she so mad about? She ran the red light, too! You’d think someone on a bike would know better then to ride out into oncoming traffic on a red light.” Junior responded, “Ya, but that’s how people are; they are always sure they are in the right, even when they are obviously not.”
    True. And in fact, I’m no exception. Studies show that when people are interviewed to share their observations of just about any experience or event, the person being interviewed will slant the story just a bit to put themselves in the best light. It’s human nature to want others to think better of us than what we know to be true, down deep inside. But that’s also a major barrier in our overcoming some of the most difficult problems we face. You can’t defeat a problem you do not acknowledge.
    That was the point of my last week’s message, “Exposure, what it means to walk in the light.” Once we are willing to open ourselves up to God, and a few other trusted people, revealing a genuine openness for truth with a mindset for change, we are able to act on the steps necessary for change in overcoming that problem. But without that desire for truth, or willingness to have our weaknesses exposed, no real or substantive change can ever take place.
    Some years ago, a friend said to me, “Scott, you are so negative, I need to stop hanging around with you. You are rubbing off on me and I get critical when we’re together.”
    Now, that made me mad! How dare he! Within the next few minutes, I had all the best responses in my mind for him, accusing him of being more negative than me and why I had been right in the critical things I had been saying about others. It wasn’t until later that evening when I got my Bible out to read that the truth of his stinging words struck home. Once I was willing to stop defending myself, I began to see my heart and my attitude the way God saw it. And it wasn’t pretty. That led me on a journey to change my outlook and disposition….one that I am still on today. I have my friend, Bob, to thank for that.
    Are you still in denial about your sinful anger, selfishness, immorality, resentment, addictions, worry or laziness? The first step to overcoming is by opening yourself up to God and what He wants to teach you, and to let Him use those closest to you to identify those areas that can be and should be changed.
    We are real people. We have real problems. The Bible offers solutions. It always starts with an openness to truth.

Pillars in Place

    My son is getting married and the Wisconsin bridal shower for my future daughter-in-law is going on right now. Since the rain was coming down hard when my wife was to start out on the two hour drive to the “shower” this morning, I volunteered to drive her. So here I am, sitting at a McDonald’s in the town where we raised our kids, a McDonald’s where Junior played many times in the kids crawling gym as a little boy, waiting for my wife to finish. Back when the kids were little and rushing through their happy meals to get into the sea of plastic balls, we knew this day was coming (older people kept telling us it was), we just didn’t know how soon it would be here. I’m really grateful for how it appears our kids are turning out. I sure hope and pray we gave them a strong foundation for life.
    An hour ago, since I was in town anyway, I drove to the church building of the congregation Linda and I established a little over twenty years ago. It feels good to drive by the building and know that all that work paid off….that there is still a strong and growing congregation here.

    As I pulled out of the parking lot, I looked back and for some reason, the pillars holding up the carport caught my eye. I remember putting them in. I did it almost by myself. The white pillars that are visible are just aluminum wraps around steel posts. I remember wrapping them. And I remember holding the steel posts in place with a plumb level on the side while the welder attached them to the beam above and the steel plate below that emerged from the concrete footing. I also remember pouring the concrete footing. The footing actually extends nine feet below fill dirt to 4 foot square slabs I had poured on the undisturbed ground two weeks before. To extend the foundation the additional nine feet to reach ground level where the steel posts could be attached, I used twelve inch circular forms I found at Menard’s. One of our members brought out a small concrete mixer to the site and I even mixed the concrete before filling the forms that would hold up the steel posts that held up the carport. So from the slab at the bottom to the carport itself, I did just about everything. When it was all finished, I even shingled the roof on top. It was pretty cool to look back and see all four pillars still standing firm, no sag, and the roof held up strong and level.
    But it all went down to the four foundation slabs beneath those pillars. Thinking about my kids, I wondered, what were the important foundation slabs we hopefully undergirded the lives of our children. And four immediately came to mind.
    1) Unconditional love. I know all parents say they love their children. Who would ever say anything other? But the proof in the pudding is in the eating. Real love is demonstrated by affection, words of affirmation, sacrificial care, and from a child’s perspective, time.
    2) Consistent discipline. I don’t believe this is taught nearly enough to young parents today. We have the failed results of some schools of thought in modern psychology to thank for that. But children cannot learn from those they do not accept as their authority. We believed that teaching our children that we were the parents and they were the kids very early would determine whether or not they would learn anything else from us.
    3) Consistent lifestyle. Kids learn more about the way we live than the things we tell them. It was important to Linda and I that we be the same people all the time, at home, at church, alone, or with our friends. Kids see through phoniness quicker than anyone.
    4) Constant teaching. We believed it was important to tell our kids on a daily basis why we lived the way we lived, why we valued the things and principles we valued, and how they could live in such a way that God would be honored.
    These four principles are absolutely necessary for parents to effectively pass their values on to their children….what we call effective parenting. I hope they stand as firm in our kids lives as the four pillars in front of my former church.

The Destination DOES Matter!

    A thief in Orem, Utah, discovered an important principle: Know where you are going before you commit the crime.
    When John White flagged down a policeman to ask for directions, the officer noted that the man matched the description of someone accused of stealing two phones from a nearby convenience store, and the address White wanted turned out to be the same one the officer was checking.
    The address had been left on a slip of paper the thief left at a gas station, according to a March 26, 2010, AP story. The man was arrested when the officer found he had both phones, along with a small amount of marijuana.
    I’m assuming you are not planning on committing any crimes in the near future, but it is pretty important to know where you are going with whatever your plans are.
    Sometimes you may even think you know where you are going but because you were relying on the wrong source of information, you ended up in the wrong place. That happened to me twice in the last couple of months. Did you know that Google maps is not ALWAYS accurate? Two months ago, Google sent me to the wrong city! I later checked to see what address I had typed in and I entered all the information correctly. Yet I was sent to a completely different street in a town some fifteen miles away from where I was trying to go. In another incident, I was sent to the wrong address on the wrong street.
    Where are you going and do you know how you are going to get there? Are you sure? Can you trust the directions you are following?
    I’ve spoken to too many apparently successful men who have confided in me that while they had reached the top of their corporate ladder, once they got there they began to believe they had it leaning against the wrong building.
    Just moving along and making progress in life may keep you occupied and perhaps even mesmerized for a while. But ending up where you want to go depends on whether or not you started with the right goal and then trusted in reliable directions to get there.
    The right goal? Is there such a thing? When you consider that God made every one of us for a purpose, anything that we pour our lives into outside of that purpose will eventually leave us feeling lost, a long way from where we want to be.
    God made you for Him. And while we have all been separated from enjoying His presence through the problem of sin, He has clearly mapped out for us the way back. Living for anything outside of that, will only broaden the gap between us and while it may provide a bit of fun and diversion for a while, it will eventually lead us to emptiness and despair. And there are a lot of false promises of fulfillment through self-help techniques, they can be a bit like google maps when their information is a bit off. But I can promise you this, God’s Word will not let you down!
    Do you know where you are going? Do you know how to get there? Jesus said this, “I am the way, the truth, and the light. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).