Where I am from in Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I grew up in a little town called Rudyard.  My grandmother owned the local laundry mat and lived in half of the building with the laundry mat on the other half.  When I was a kid I used to visit my grandma and play with my siblings and cousins in the laundry mat side of the building.  When we had played all the games we could think of from tag to hopping from one table to the other to the washers trying not to touch the ground because there were monsters trying to get us that lived on the floor but couldn’t jump, we would take to the outdoors.  Running around like happy little do letting our imaginations run wild, we would eventually make our way into the “coffee shop” next door.  Now this was the common scene in the “coffee shop.”

There were always the same three or four ladies in the coffee shop, they smoked like chimneys and drank coffee all day talking about their husbands what was going on in town and the latest dirt on so and so.  There were all kinds of nick nacs that no one in there right minds would buy for sale.  And when us kids would come in off the street all amped up from running from the aliens or whatever it was that was chasing us that day into the safe haven of the coffee shop where no monster dare enter, these old ladies would turn and “shush” us to keep it down.  We would get our fuel (candy bars and soda) and head out for another round of “oh crap here they come, RUN!!!” And we back into imaginary land.

From my experience and what I know now, life was very different for everyone back then.  Money came with harder work, it was spent more frugally, when you wanted to get a hold of someone you called them on that ancient piece of equipment called a land line and if they didn’t answer they weren’t home and you would wait and eventually run into them in town.  There was no email, or voice mail, if you wanted to send someone information you used the US Postal Service and stamps.  Life just seemed to be simpler.  You worked an honest days work for an honest days wage and bought bread, milk, beef and you paid the electric bill.

I know that I’m over simplifying it here but the point is that we have over complicating it now in the name of convenience and a quick buck.  I’ve noticed that there are a lot of things that have come onto the market that promise you that it will save time, energy, money, etc.  So what we have done has bought the product in hopes of gaining all this freedom that don’t currently have.  Well, the problem is that with that time we fill it with something else that in turn forces us to buy something else to save us more time and the cylce continues until we are at our wits end trying to manage all the time, energy and money saving gadgets that take up all our time, worn us out and thrown us into debt.

We “need” instant coffee that costs us $3 in drive through, food to come out fast and then require it to be healthy to boot, we expect people to get back to us immediately to phone calls or emails.  Did you know that the average American expects a return phone call within 20 minutes?  So these are just a few examples of the things that we call convenience that actually require us to work a lot harder to have.  If you buy a latte a day 5 days a week averaging $3 a drink, that comes out to about $66 bucks a month just in coffee.  That’s $800 a year.  Where instead if you brewed coffee at home it would cost you at $7/lb about $126 a year.  Of course it would take longer and you may have to get up 8 minutes earlier than you would otherwise but look at the savings.  And you may even get to interact with your family or roommate a little in the morning and that’s $674 less a year that you have to work to earn.

Now I have to say something here, while I’m sitting in a modern day coffee shop sipping my $3 latte writing this, that I know that I have not made all these changes to my life that I have written about. What I am trying to get at is we CAN NOT complain about our economic status if we are unwilling to change our lifestyle practices to save money by cutting out costly conveniences and letting go of expectations on others to fulfill a need we may have.

Just trying to provoke though here.  No condemnation whatsoever, but if we want things to change, if we want more time with our families, friends and the things that matter to us the most we have to make sacrifices and simply spend time with the family, friends, etc.  We need to stop listening to what the TV says will make our lives easier because they are not concerned about you or your well being, they are trying to make money off a product or services that is unnecessary and costly to you and I.

We are grown ups that feed ourselves by picking up the fork and putting it into our mouths not by sitting there having someone else feed us.   We need to think, make our own minds about what is important and NESSESARY. Everything else is luxury.  So spend more time running from monsters with your friends and less time wondering if you should buy the latest time saving gadget.

You know what I’m talking about, it’s the title of this thing you’re reading.  Rejection. The pain of it can be crippling can’t it?  You don’t want to do anything accept get as far away from it as possible, as well as the wake of pain and heart ache that soon follow.  Maybe you are like me and your eyes fill up with tears and there is that lump in the back of your throat that won’t let you say anything.  Or maybe you get angry and shout and stomp and throw things.  Or maybe you are a little tougher skinned and you pretend that it doesn’t bother you, but hoping all the while that you can keep your cool or you’ll loose it.

Well, I’ve just experienced something that I hope I can convey to you in a way that makes sense.  We all know what it’s like to feel the sting of the pain when someone rejects us, but I was just experience the pain of knowing that I was on the reject-er end of the ordeal.

I made a mistake, I did something that directly disobeyed God and chose to go my own way rather than submitting and running from the sin that so easily entangles me.  I spit in God’s face and while he was sitting right beside me, I chose sin over Him.  I later repented and asked for forgivness and that God would extend grace to me, again.  And he did, in a gracious way I wasn’t expecting.  He opened my eyes to reality of my rejection of Him and His ways.  I saw that I had done to him the same that has been done to all of us so many times, that have caused us so much suffering and heart ache.  I saw the rejection.  I really saw the pain that it caused Him.  I saw the tears well up in the Father’s eyes as he looked at His son Jesus who was there to take the the beating and crushing on the cross so long ago.  I was reminded that it was me who sent Christ to the cross for the sin I so easily chose tonight.  I saw the Father reminded of the pain His son went through for ungrateful men like me.  And during this I was struck with pain.  My eyes welled up as I came to the knowledge that I, like all of us are capable of doing to others the very things that we wished had never happened to us and hoped would never happen again.

I am opened to the fact that we like sheep have gone astray, each of us has gone our own way, but He, our gracious Father doesn’t want us to be seperated from him.  So, He calls in the night to his unfaithful sheep to see and to learn and to change.  To be filled with the knowledge of Christs death and resurection, and so be awakened to our depravity and desperation for a Father that is patient and forgiving but is never asleep to moments like these.

There is a ankst in gut.  There is a voice hanging around trying to convince me that I am a failure, a fake, a nobody.  The voice does a pretty good job of convincing me of this about 35% of the time.  then about 40% of the rest of my waking time I deal with trying to live by the truth in the face of all this.  The rest of the time I am in bliss, because I am not thinking about it.  I think to myself sometimes, “Am I living?  Am I taking advantage of everything that I have been given, from my guitar to my unemployment to the times I just sit on the couch and just cry myself closer to the God I love so much.”

I want to LIVE!!!!  I feel as if I am bound by circumstances sometimes.  When really I am only bound by the limitations that I place on myself partly by not living up to my own convictions and partly because of my laziness.  But none the less I want to live.

I came to a revalation last night that I had forsaken the one thing that breaks through all this and sets me free to live a life of fullfillment and joy and freedom in the face of all the circumstances.  I have given my hidden time with the God I love to the acts of trying to fix all the circumstances that really just suck in my opinion.  I have given away my secret prayer life, my secret giving to the poor, my secret fasting, my secret time of dinning on the Word.  I realized that I had given them up, stopped interacting with my Lover behind closed doors.  Therefore I had stopped hearing His soft yet powerful voice speaking His message for my life to me.  I had lost direction, I was lost in a wilderness of confusion surrounded by darkness and had lost hope of ever making it out alive.

Well, now I see what it is that has to change to change everything.  I have to get back to living the secret life of passionate interaction with my Lover.  This is the only place were real life changing direction and truth come from.  So, I could live. And I am going to.

I want to see God in all his mercy and grace and power move through me to heal people with mental disabilities.  I’m not talking about feeling a little down after a hard day at work.  I’m talking about schizophrenia, depression, OCD, paranoia, etc.  I want see God restore minds in people who seem to have no choice in the matter.  They are locked in by their minds, punished by the agony not knowing how to not think a certain way.  I am no expert by any means, I just know people and have known people that their lives were upside down, backwards and inside out due to something they couldn’t control with all their might.

I want to see God release healing to minds like I’ve seen him release healing to bodies and relationships.  I’ve seen peoples legs grow several inches right in front of me, I’ve seen people get out wheel chairs that have obviously been in them for a really long time.  I’ve seen mothers and daughters restore a relationship in the matter of one conversation after not speaking for years.  I’ve seen a man who’s heart was in three pieces be healed overnight, completely restored.  I’ve seen all these things but have never seen anyone healed of schizophrenia, or dementia, OCD, or even autism as debatable that may be.  BUT I WANT TO SEE IT HAPPEN!!!!  That would be a great thing that I would want to see.  I want to a lot of those other things as well but this is what is pounding in my chest and crying out to God for the mercy and grace and power and anointing to see it happen.

Anyway, I want to say that to believe is to see.  Some may say, and I’ve heard it said that to see is to believe, but In God’s economy it is to believe first, trust that it is his heart to do it.  Lay my hands on those that struggle and suffer or may not even be aware they are affected by it and pray that the God of heaven in all his love and tenderness and passion for the human heart to love Him, would open up the heaven do a miraculous thing and heal the mind, to set it free from the bondage of chemical imbalances and illness and whatever causes these disorders as they call them, and watch to see what God does.  Maybe nothing.  Or maybe, just maybe he will do what it is that I am believing him for!!!  And then I will be able to say that I have seen it.

As I was sitting there in this greasy spoon sipping my warm cup of coffee waiting for my corn beef hash and eggs, I started to well up.  My heart was being tugged by the simplicity of these old men sitting around shooting the breeze, the smell of fresh coffee,a lingering sense of peace, and the fact that no one in this place could be in hurry even if they tried.  I started to remember my home town in upper Michigan, a town of about 1100 people and my family there and all the memories that were made.  I started to see the blessings in living in that small town, or any small town for that matter.  I was being drawn into the reality that I have a complicated life even though I try to steer clear of that as much as possible.  I wanted a more simple life in that moment.  I felt like I wanted to drop everything and move Elma and start over, fresh and simple.  But that wouldn’t solve my problem.  I can live simple in the city.  It takes work, but it can be done.

I learned a valuble lesson in this oasis from caos.  Slow down, take time for meaningless chat with the guys and 12 cups of coffee for a $1.25 plus tip.  Peace come from one source, and He tends to give it when we slow down enough to reflect on him and what he has given us.  It takes meaningless chat and cheap coffee and turns it into life giving bread for the soul.

 Our pastor spoke last week about a topic really similar to this and he was fired up about seeing God move in out midst.  He wants it bad!  And so do I.  I just want to see God bust out of the neat little boxes we have placed him in and really blow our circuits with the way he does things.  They are going to be quite different than we expect them to be and much more challenging to our ideas of how things ought to go.  I need a paradigm shift towards seeing things the way God sees them and away from the traditional neatly packaged christian faith that makes everyone happy and comfortable.  I want to live a radical life for Christ and his kingdom, being Spirit led, and yet approachable to those that aren’t.  I want to see the kingdom of darkness stripped of its power in people’s lives and set free from the bondage of sin, injustice and wickedness.  I want to see people know that they are loved and cared for by a loving, gentle, powerful God.  I want to see mental illness starved of its power and people restored to their right minds.  I want to see those hidden in the shadows of guilt and shame rise to fly high on the wings of grace, peace and acceptance.  I want to hear the praise of Jesus in the streets and supermarkets, homes and coffee shops, offices and hospitals, high schools and malls.

 Anyway, you get my point.  I want Jesus to make you and me the message of hope he designed us to be.  And by His grace we will and are.

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I came to a greater revalation this morning to that old saying “garbage in , garbage out.”  You know the concept.  If you fill your mind and heart with garbage, i.e.  television, rotten music, foul language, etc. that is what will come out of your mouth when you speak.  But on the other hand, of you fill your heart with the word of God, worship music, etc. then when you begin to speak, the things that come out of your mouth will be honoring and pleasing to God and those around you.

I fact as I am writing this it is an example of it.  I came into work and before I started my day I tapped into worship, prayer, and the word.  Something that I haven’t had in a couple of days and almost immediately love, joy, encouragement and affirmation started to spill out mouth and mind.

A simple message with great implications.  Matthew 12:34 “Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.”

Mistakes happen.  No matter how hard you try to avoid them, they happen.  And they come at times that are inconvenient and can be quite unsightly and down right embarrassing sometimes.  And in my experience the more I try and not make mistakes the more of them I make. 

I was watching Bob Ross a while back and something that he said… Wait, I should tell you who Bob Ross is.  He is the painter guy on channels like PBS that teaches you how paint over the air waves, you know, the white guy with big afro and beard that hadn’t changed his clothing style in like 30 years.   He is always cheerful and saying things like “Lets just put a happy little tree right here”  and “oh, do you see how that just makes that just come alive.”  He is always painting landscapes and he never runs out of tricks that just seem to fall out his sleeve.  Anyway, he was painting this classic landscape and low and behold, on national television, he made a mistake.  Something I think has only done maybe one other time in his whole painting career.  Then he said something that just caught me, “mistakes are ok, don’t panic, just work them into the painting.”  Then he took that mistake he made and transformed it into a tree in the foreground of the painting and made it look like it was meant to be there.  If you didn’t see it happen you would never have know it was there.

I like his advise and I think it goes beyond painting.  You see, good ole Bob probably made a lot of mistakes in his career off the air before he was ever in a place to possibly make one on air.  And his mistakes on air were probably few and far between.  He learned though making mistakes that you can work them into the painting rather than scrapping the piece and starting over.  He learned that mistakes are ok, and that all you need is the knowhow to take the mistake and work into the painting.

Like I said before, we are going to make mistakes, but do we have the knowhow to work them into the paintings of our lives?  God has extended to us grace.  Christians especially, have a really hard time taking advantage of that grace and receiving it.  People tend to be harder on themselves and have higher expectations of themselves than God does.

Relax, enjoy the painting process, the thing about it is that we are not paining it by ourselves, we are painting it with the Great Artist.  And he has a pretty good idea and plan to work any mistakes that we make into our lives rather than scrapping it and starting all over.

Well, those are great questions and I am not going to pretend to know the answers to them, but something I do know is that I like it when they happen! It seems like when a group of people get together and they decide that it is time to be honest about what they see in each other that is unique 0r profound or just simply eye catching, God invades and empowers the words. They go deep, to places that we wish we visited more often. They seem to hang in the air like the fragrance of something sweet and filling. And I can’t seem to get enough!

I mean, when you hear from the mouth of another, that they spot that you are doing something or are something that you always wished that you might be, it makes your heart almost beat out of your chest and your eyes release a flood of joyful tears. When you know that someone else knows something about you that you didn’t know they knew, it’s like God just reached out and gave you big hug saying, ” I know who you are and I like to brag about you to others and to let them in on what I already know about you.”

We have treasures stowed away in some locker deep in hearts and there is tension about them. On one hand , we wish we were known fully by those around us. So that they could better understand our motives and know whats going on without having to say anything. To have a connection with someone else that is real and safe to be ourselves. We want to be known! On the other hand we are afraid because we have also been hurt by people who know too much about us. They took advantage of us or broke trust in a situation. So we hide ourselves in shallow relationships and cultural norms and escape with endless entertainment and worthless speech that keeps us on the surface, safe and secure, knowing that if you could stay here you wont get hurt. Or at least if we do it wont be as bad.

But I am here to tell you that the joy that comes in the real honest moments of encouragement, far outweighs the pain of betrayal. Forgiveness is deep and healing, and encouragement is knowing that God really cares enough to show you off to others! Open yourself up, come out from hiding, take your light out from under that basket, you are amazing and God want to show you off!!

When we look at the overall theme of what Jesus Christ did in his life and death it was all to give God the desire of his heart, us! He wanted us back! The original sin for Adam and Eve caused there to be a division between us and God and we have been living it out ever since! Because of God in His holiness He could not be associated with sin, so for years there was a division. Then God sent his son Jesus Christ to close the division. This is probably not new news to you. But here’s the deal, His plan worked, to a point. He made access possible, but not required for our lives here. He wants us so bad that He made a way for us to be in relationship with Him but doesn’t force us into it like some overruling dictator with a heavy fist forcing people to like and vote for Him. It’s our choice! He loves us so much that He has a longing in His heart for us to love Him back.

I remember when I was a kid I had this dog. It was hound dog named Jessie. I loved that dog. I fed it took care of it cleaned up after it, and as long as I was doing something for it, it was happy. But every time I let it off the chain or out of the cage to play with it, it would take off. It would be gone for weeks at a time even a month one time. I remember trying over and over again to keep the attention of Jessie so that we could just play, but as soon as it hit the threshold of that cage it bolted off into the woods like it had a long overdue meeting with some tree way deep in the woods behind my house. Eventually one day it took off and never came back. I was heart broken, devastated, I never wanted another dog from that day on.

His desire is us!!!!! It is seeing us turn and face Him, talk to Him, hang out with Him, ask Him to be there more clearly, ask Him for direction and wisdom, fall in love with Him! And like Jessie we are prone to running off every time we see a little freedom. The thing is that the most freedom we will ever experience is in His arms holding us close. And He really wants to be with us. You have heard it said that he wants to be with us so bad that He would die for it, well he did and he would do it again if it needed to happen, but it never will because it was finished when He died the first time and rose form the dead three days later.

When we give Him the desires of His heart it opens up the flood gates for Him to pour out from heaven upon us the desires of our hearts.