Have you ever been in a funk? You know, like you don’t feel quite like yourself, your mind tends to not be as focused as much, and you feel like you aren’t making any ground in your endeavors. I’ve been in a funk. The past couple of weeks have been kinda sloggy when I sit down ready to move, my brain decides it doesn’t want to go as fast as my heart. It’s hard, especially being a writer and loving to do creative things, but it’s not just with being a writer. My spiritual walk has felt this way too. I sit down and ask God to speak, but I end up reading the words and not hearing. I ask if something is wrong with me, I wonder if I’ve upset God in some way, or focus on my past rather than trusting God in my future. I felt like I was doing something wrong, and I was beginning to feel depressed. Many of us have faced times like this in our lives. Asking if we are doing the right thing or if we are where we’re supposed to be. We need to step back. You are exactly where you are meant to be. I am exactly where I need to be. The enemy moves to steal, kill, and destroy. He doesn’t want the good things that God is doing in our lives to encourage us, he wants us dead. We need to break free.
Batman
Misfit Culture
“But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”
1 Corinthians 12:24-26
I’ve been thinking a lot about people recently. Not in a sense of, oh yeah there are other people around me, but more of the fact that there are so many different people all around me. We live in a world where we can have many hobbies, come from different walks of life, and lived through all kinds of events. We are different people that crave community. No one likes to be alone, and no one likes to feel pushed away, yet recently in the climate of our culture we grow secluded and push others based on stupid differences. I have been wanting to write about misfits in community since I did the Misfit series a couple months back, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to say it. Then this past week, a couple of events sparked the words and God spoke to me about some things that are vital in the upcoming season for all of us.
Triumph in Turmoil
“And why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”
Life can be really tough. We go through many trials and things we don’t understand, and if we’re honest, it’s hard to see the silver lining in everything. I know for me this is a hard concept to grasp. God tells us in scripture that he will use all things, but that idea of “all things” isn’t always the most joyful of times in our lives. I love that quote above from Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, because it is a picture of how God uses the tough times in our lives. You see life is full of blessings and good times, but it is equally filled with turmoil. The word turmoil means a state of great disturbance, confusion, or uncertainty. I think many times in our lives we are filled with disturbance, confusion, and uncertainty. Yet in all of it we can have triumph in the turmoil, because our God has already conquered the world, so we can stand strong through it all.
The Choices We Make
Well, life is getting back into the usual swing. Classes have begun, summer truly is coming to a close, kids are back in school, and life has become busy once more. Each day we wake up and are met with choices. Some simple, like what do I want for breakfast or does this shirt match my socks? Yet some are more complicated, and not often as obvious. Choices like, how will I treat people around me today or how will I react to the struggles that may come? The world we live in today can be pretty scary, we see terrorism continue to harm people across the world, we are in the middle of an election year where both candidates would rather point fingers than try to solve real issues, and each day we walk past people who may be going through some of the darkest times imaginable. I remember being a leader at an elementary camp for my church and over hearing a conversation from two boys asking each other what they would do if someone attacked the camp. Woah, the fact that two young boys would think of this because our news is filled with the reality of how dark our world is, was something that made me think about a lot of things. In that moment I thought of the verse in Romans 12:21 which says, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Joshua Writes 