One of my favorite songs in high school was Frail by Jars of Clay. It’s a haunting song, but lately it’s the lyrics that have been haunting for me, not the sound.

My favorite lyrics have always been the last verse which say:

Exposed beyond the shadows
You take the cup from me
Your dirt removes my blindness
Your pain becomes my peace

The song has always resonated with me because of it’s comfort with recognizing human frailty and failure. While I have loved and pursued God for most of my life, it rarely looks pretty and put together.

As I’ve been finishing some of my final edits to the book manuscript the past few weeks I’ve been camping a lot on the idea that God makes a masterpiece out of our mess. It’s my experience that the model Christian always has his or her life put together in an immaculate way. And my frustration with that is my life never seems to be match up. I tend to always feel inferior to the “Godly” people around me. They seem to have perfected this whole faith and life thing a lot better than me.

The model Christian often presented and placed on a pedestal never seems to have a messy closet. The dishes in their kitchen aren’t stacked up in the sink. They have don’t have huge piles of laundry beside their bed. Their hearts seem to rise and set with motivations to love and pursue Jesus. Their stories of struggle always end on a positive note.

It’s all disconnected from my life and my mess. I’m continually drawn toward the things of the flesh, or the sins that can easily entangle my life. I always find ways to remove Jesus and my love for him away from the center of my life to focus on empty and fleeting things.

I love what Mandy Steward says about our messes in her book Messy Canvas. Our lives are about “believing in a Master Artist who created redemption and loves us so much that He paints over our imperfection with His perfection. It is seeing the real, the mess, in light of the ideal, and so transfiguring it. It is accepting mess and then challenging it to become something more” (page 38).

We have a Savior “whose dirt removes our blindness.” He is for us. He loves us enough to not only see past our failures, our mess, our sin, but He loves us enough to transform us in the midst of it. He extends His hand to us in the darkest hours of our lives. Through the incarnation of His Son, Jesus, we see that God cared enough about us to enter into the mess of our lives.

The model Christian is not the perfectly tidy man or woman. The model Christian is one who continually seeks after Him in the midst of mess, wading through the murky and muddy waters of life scouting after the divine. It’s this process that makes something beautiful.

He’s making a masterpiece out of our mess.

In my interaction with older adults I find plenty of condescending remarks toward millennials and more specifically to 20somethings. A lot of it is warranted but some of it is flat out wrong. One of the things I believe is flat out wrong is the perception that 20somethings somehow do not value success and sit around playing video games for half the day while working at a coffee shop for a few hours a week to get free coffee (if this is you, well then you need to read this post).

I would say that 20somethings are trying to redefine what success looks like by desiring significance more than what others deem to be “success.”

Significance is not driving a BMW by 30, owning a 3 story house, moving up the corporate ladder, or having enough money to travel in Europe. Don’t worry, none of these things are bad on their own and kudos to those who have been able to do accomplish those things by 30, but when they become how we define our significance I think we’ve completely failed ourselves.

I’d like to share a few ways that I believe lead to becoming a significant 20something.

1. Have someone speaking into your life. Your spouse or significant other does not count. This means having honest conversations which are never easy. This means being vulnerable and humble enough to ask for advice. We need outside perspective otherwise we become no different than the people we call narrow minded.
2. Speak into someone else’s life. I know we’re young, but this doesn’t mean we don’t have something to offer others. Even though we’re willing to be humble enough to admit we need the help/perspective/advice of others, we must also recognize that God has equipped us to provide the same thing to another (or more) around us.
3. Discover something new. For me this was discovering the joy of long distance running in order to live a healthier life. It took me until the age of 24 to find it, but what it really took was a willingness to step beyond the box I had placed around my life of how I operated day in and day out. No one at any age should get stuck in the rut of doing life the way we always have, but especially not someone in their 20s.
4. Help build a community. I think true community is a lot harder than we make it sound at church. True community means being with those we would often choose to avoid and giving space in our lives for people we would have previously ignored. Anyone can have community with their college friends, but few people can help build a new community.
5. Make it a practice to give something away. I’ll never forget the reminder that Rose and I received after helping a couple in need from our church. We only gave up a few hours and some sweat but we left saying to each other, “it’s always better to give than receive.” So often we lose sight of this fact.

Are 20somethings really redefining what success and significance looks like? I doubt it, but I do think that we can choose to pursue these 5 ways (and others) in order for our success to be defined by things that have nothing to do with monetary value.

What would you add to the list?

This post is part of a series of posts in support of These Numbers Have Faces and their great work to allow young adults in South Africa to dream with their convictions by providing them with an education. Be sure to check out the series on dreaming with conviction they have going on and support them in any way you can.

I sense that so many of us go through life in a specific way simply because that’s how it’s supposed to be done. In many parts of the world people have the luxury of just going to college after finishing high school because that’s what people do. It is fairly rare that someone changes the lives of those around them by going through life the way that people say we should.

Few of us ever do anything with conviction. Rarely do I have conversations with people who strike me as supremely convicted about where they want to go with their life and how they desire to change the lives of others in the process. Often I live my life without any core convictions.

Over the past few years it has become more common for people to find fulfillment in life by how many things on their bucket list get crossed off. Instead I wonder what it would be like for each of us to seek after life through one or two convictions. I’m not asking us to specialize, but I do wonder how effective we can be at making any discernible impact when we have so many small convictions that we hardly remember all of them.

I believe many are lost somewhere in this process toward having a dream and living it out with conviction. Consider Martin Luther King and his core conviction and how he changed the world by giving all of his life to that one conviction.

Here’s a simple process to get us going toward the goal of dreaming with our convictions:

• What are your convictions? Before we can consider dreaming we must consider how God has uniquely wired us. Philippians 2:13 tells us that God will provide us with a conviction that should then move out into action. I know that many do not even know what their convictions are. Ask God. He will lead us toward a greater understanding of how we’ve been prepared to care intimately about something specific.
• How do your convictions match up with the needs of this world? Buechner is well known for saying, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” It’s one thing to perform a task because that’s what we’re supposed to do, it’s a whole other thing to perform a task because we have a conviction about doing so. God doesn’t give us convictions to hold these things in our hearts permanently. He desires for us to live them out through action.
• How is God changing you through your convictions? This might seem like an odd question to ask. After all, if our convictions are supposed to move out into action it would seem like they are a part of who we are to change others. But this seems to be a bit selfish even though I recognize our convictions do change others. God asks us to walk in this life with humility and meekness and I believe because of this we’re then called to allow our convictions to change us to become more like Jesus. To dream with conviction can be as much about changing us as it is about changing others and making an impact in our world. Most often we’re too comfortable with our current state of life to even begin dreaming with our convictions. We realize that it might change us. It’s a scary place to be, but a good place to be as well.
  

What does dreaming with conviction look like for you?

After a bit of a hiatus over late December I’m back with the somewhat weekly installment of three great articles/blogs/videos/etc. As many of you know I posted a link carnival of sorts every week for over two years. For the sake of discussion and only putting out what I see to be high quality content I narrowed it down to three. As always feel free to let me know via email/Twitter/contact page if you have something you’ve seen or read that should be included here.

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1. Justin Bieber recently shared about his Christian faith and lack of church attendance. In an interview he said, “A lot of people who are religious, I think they get lost. They go to church just to go to church…I’m not trying to disrespect them…but for me, I focus more on praying and talking to Him. I don’t have to go to church.” I find Bieber’s stance to be quite common in Christians, especially younger Christians and I appreciated Dan Kimball’s response to this:

“We aren’t Christians based on whether we go to a church meeting or not, that is based on our faith in Jesus. So I agree with him there, but having faith in Jesus then means we should then be functioning in a local church according to the guidelines of Scripture. It would be sad thinking of a Christian living out their faith on their own without being in a faith community.”

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2. Adam McHugh’s blog is one I bring up quite often. He’s an author who has done a wonderful job of continuing to discuss topics covered in his book on his blog. As a more introverted person I constantly struggle with how to successfully navigate church ministry with people. I want to value people and also remain true to myself, something that isn’t easy to do. A post he wrote this weeks gets at this bias toward extroversion as what being a good Christian looks like.

“It is bad enough when people in the church criticize our introversion as unfaithful or closed, but it is extra painful when the extroverted bias of our culture leads nonbelievers to consider believing introverts to be bad models of faith, even to be turned off to the gospel because of our temperaments.”

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3. Bobby Gilles does a lot of writing, and because of my season of life this post on writer’s block was helpful to think through. There are plenty of different spaces to do writing in. I tend to prefer writing out of my home because I have all my resources available and I also have a quiet space to think in. Bobby does a good job of looking at the pros and cons of various spaces to write in.

“Compare your productivity at home with elsewhere. And this is what it comes down to, no matter which setting you’ve used till now or which you prefer. Where do you write more? And where are you more apt to write the good stuff? The stuff that makes you say ‘This is why I’m a writer. I’ve hit my mark here.’”

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Have a great weekend friends.

I was recently having coffee with an acquaintance to get to know him a little better. He’s been active in trying to get some business ideas off the ground and I thought it would be fun to hear more about the story.

After about a half-hour of talking about life and some of their latest pursuits it became pretty clear to me that he had zero intention of getting to know me. Somehow in his mind he had come to the conclusion that I had nothing to offer in terms of getting the business venture one step further down the road toward success. Walking away from our time together was disheartening for me. I prefer to think of myself as valuable and important enough to be given an opportunity to be heard. Being marginalized as not important enough was an awful feeling.

I have the same tendency in my own life. Too often I place extra worth and make an extra effort to value and get to know the people at my church who can benefit and help the ministries I coordinate.

While my whole family was together over Christmas (a rare thing these days) we shared which of the fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control) we had grown in the past year and which ones we wanted to grow in this coming year. I shared that I wanted to grow in kindness and love because I tend to use people as cogs in my machine that must be extremely efficient or I try to replace them.

Our entrepreneurial society tells us to value only those who can help us take the next step toward significance and success.

God tells us to love all people.

Somewhere along the line we must learn the lesson of laying down our own desires for the good of all people. Somehow we must counter-culturally show love and kindness to all people despite our true nature pushing us to do the opposite.

As long as we are most concerned about keeping ourselves #1, Christlikeness will never be an attribute of ours.

Don’t use people, love them.

I had to work on New Year’s Day morning a little over a week ago. It was a Sunday this year so we gathered as a church to worship, celebrate Communion, and to be challenged by God’s Word. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how I view church and how important the community of gathered believers is or isn’t to me.

While I had to be at church on January 1st this year I wonder if I would have made the effort to come if I had no obligation to be there. Who in their right mind really *wants* to get up early on New Year’s Day to go to church to sing songs and listen to someone talk for half an hour?

In reality I could put in my favorite Gungor album and hear a lot better music than most any church in town. I could find a podcast sermon that would probably be a lot better than anything I could hear at my church. What’s the point of making such a sacrifice to attend church?

I’ve sat with these thoughts over the past week because the reality is I doubt I would have gone to church. I’d like to think that I would but most often I choose the path of least resistance for myself before I think about those around me. Church, for most of us, is a place where we desire to “fill up our spiritual tanks” on great music and great teaching. But we can’t get those fillings in a lot of different places?

I write all this as a fairly conflicted person: Wanting to care so much about the community of believers that I choose to continually sacrifice my wants and needs for them, but at the same time desiring that I get what I want and need first.

I fear that my generation is growing up in a time where church (or the components of our program driven churches) has become so accessible that it’s diluted to the point where we don’t even understand why we *need* it. Why should we go to church early in the morning on New Year’s Day? Because it’s about the people we gather with.

Two quotes that have been a source of great conviction and encouragement for me this past week are from Lauren Winner and Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

God’s Trinitarian being suggests that we are not to simply invite people into our homes but to invite them into our lives as well. (Lauren Winner)

Self-centered love loves the other for the sake of itself; spiritual love loves the other for the sake of Christ. (Bonhoeffer)

On Sunday mornings I most often attend My Selfish Church where I value community so long as it values and benefits me. I never attend or get involved in church when it would involve me sacrificing more than I would prefer.

I believe we’re teaching the wrong message about church attendance and membership. We don’t do it because God commands it or people before us have done it that way (though those are valid reasons for church attendance and membership). We do it because we need each other. This is not some pithy statement, but the harsh reality.

The community of God’s gathered people is an instrument of His presence infiltrating our lives with skin and bones.

Much more than music and teaching, we need our brothers and sisters.

Agree? Disagree?