Poop happens

A bat pooped in my wife’s hair.

This was the first day of the mission in Tanzania. We were at a church in one of the villages. The whole team introduced themselves, and then Ernie Bayton preached the sermon.

As each team member was called forward to say a few words, we could hear the bats behind us constantly. We were sitting along the back wall of the church, facing the congregation. Suddenly, Karen felt something hit her on the head. I took a look…it was definitely bat poop.

Almost immediately after the incident, Karen had to stand up and say her words of greetings. She did incredibly well, especially considering the distraction of having had an unexpected hair “wash” in the midst of a church service.

Karen’s hair seems to attract these kinds of things. A few months ago, we visited Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. In the course of about one hour, Karen’s hair received the special attention of two different sea gulls.

After the service that first Sunday in Tanzania, Karen’s hair received special attention once again during one of the outdoor evangelistic campaigns in the village of Sangera. This time, our whole team was seated under a tree near the platform where I would be preaching. A bird did it’s business right on Karen’s head, but this time at least she wasn’t alone. Fellow team-member, Marilyn Redwine, also experienced the same honour.

Recently, we’ve joked a lot about this special attraction certain creatures seem to have to Karen’s hair. Her hair always seems nice and smooth, so we’ve begun to wonder if maybe these unwanted additions to her hair might actually be serving as some kind of natural “conditioner.” Team-members have even talked about bottling it and marketing it as a special shampoo. However, we suspect that if we had to list the ingredients on the label it might not sell too well.

Seriously though, we’re reminded how these little discomforts can come to us anywhere, but they don’t take away from the joy of loving people. On those very days of the “poop” incidents, we also saw a lot of people come to faith in a loving God who could give them hope and a new life, and we also met a lot of wonderful people who brightened our lives in a lot of ways.

If a moral can be extracted from these incidents, I suppose it is that “poop” happens, but life goes on. I watched happily as Karen joked about her experiences but never let it stop her from loving people and rejoicing in their lives. She could have obsessed with the discomforts, but instead she looked at the big picture and noticed all the wonderful things that were happening around her.

We, too, always have that choice. We can focus on the unfortunate distractions that fill our day, complain about the discomforts that life brings our way, grumble about our aches and pains and regrets…or we can look around us for the blessings that each day brings.

You might not have a bat poop in your hair today, but something will surely happen to try to ruin your day. Don’t let it! Look past the poop to the blessing and thank God for giving you life!

STOP with the judging already

“But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not hereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore, do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive commendation from God.” — 1 Corinthians 4: 3-5

What comfort I find in these words! It’s amazing how often people try to pass judgment on each other in this world, but God’s Word is clear about this matter.

The Apostle Paul knew what it was like to have people in the churches judging him negatively. He was facing this very thing from people at the church in Corinth.

But the above words were part of his reply to the judgments being passed upon him. There are some very simple but profound points that can be drawn from these words.

1. It doesn’t matter what other people think of me.

Other people may judge us and speak badly of us, but all that really matters in the end is what God thinks of us. Paul actually said, “it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court.” We often worry way too much about what other people think of us when the reality is that, in the overall scheme of things, their opinions don’t actually matter!

If you’re doing anything of any worth in this world, you will be criticised. There will be people who disagree with you, people who turn on you, people who don’t like you or the things you do. That’s just the way it is.

But we don’t live for their approval. We live for God’s approval. In the end, it’s only His opinion that will count.

2. We can’t even judge ourselves.

Many of us are terrible about condemning ourselves. We set up standards for ourselves that we could never reach, and then we beat up on ourselves when we fail to reach them.

Paul is wise, however, when he said, “I do not even judge myself.” We are not meant to be the judges in this world. Just as we are not the ones who are called to judge others, we also have no right to judge ourselves.

3. God is the judge.

This is a truth that should set us free to live our lives in peace! We can put ultimate judgment into the hands of the One who will ultimately judge all things rightly.

We don’t need to worry when other people seem to get away with evil and injustice because the Bible promises that one day God will put everything right. It is not our place to judge our neighbour, even when we’re convinced that he or she has wronged us. God is the judge.

And that’s a great thing! If we were the judges we would sometimes make mistakes, but God knows all things and is always fair. The day will come when everything wrong will be made right.

This should also give us peace regarding our relationship with ourselves. The main reason we don’t need to judge ourselves is because we are not the Judge…God is. And the good news is that God has judged His Son in our place so that we can go free. Many of us continually put ourselves back into a prison of our own making, but we have no right to do that because when we do so we are playing God by trying to fulfill His rightful role as the Judge.

Not only is it unnecessary for us to judge ourselves…it’s wrong.

What a peaceful world we would have if everyone would stop usurping God’s role and trying to judge each other and themselves! And what a peaceful life we ourselves could have if we would just let the job of Judge rest in its rightful place.

We can rest easy because the responsibility of being God is not on our shoulders. It’s on the shoulders of the One who can actually bear the weight!

A better view

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Do you see what I wrote above on the first line? Look closer.

It’s a dot.

This week I’ve spent time obsessing over some things in my life that were really bothering me. I’d felt hard hit by some things and was getting really down about it all.

Then yesterday, my wife and I both saw basically the same picture in our minds at the same moment. It was a piece of paper with a little dot on it.

We realised that the things we were facing this week were like a little dot on the big page. In our minds, they looked so big, but in the big picture of things they will mean next to nothing.

How often we get bogged down in one moment, one mistake, one regret, or one problem. We focus on it and imagine it to be a big blotch on our page that we’ll never recover from.

But it’s just a dot.

God help us to get things in perspective and see how many of the things we worry about are really so very small compared to the vastness of the page upon which You are writing our life story!

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Are you ruled by fear or faith?

I once knew a young lady who had an inspiring motto for her life:

“Fear is focus on myself —

Faith is focus on the Lord.”

How very true that statement is! Whenever we start to become fearful, we can be sure that we’ve got our eyes off of God and onto self. For a vivid biblical example, I think of Peter when he walked on water. As long as he had his eyes on Jesus, he could do anything! But as soon as he looked away and started focusing on the impossible situation that surrounded him — the storm, the waves, the impossibility of walking on the lake! — he began to sink.

Are you sinking? Could it be because you’ve stopped focusing on God and are instead focusing on the storms, the waves, and the impossibility of your situation? When you do that, of course, the problem isn’t really the storm or the waves, at least not from the perspective of faith! The real problem is that you are now depending on your own strength to deal with these things…it’s not that your eyes are on the circumstances so much as that your eyes are on YOU.

The more we focus on Jesus, the less room there is for fear. If we’re giving into fear and worry, we can count on it that our faith focus is off…we’re looking to self rather than God.

What are some signs of a fear focus rather than a faith focus? Answer the following questions with a yes or no, and perhaps the answer to that question will become more clear.

1. Do you spend more than an hour every day going over the same problems in your mind?
2. Do you spend a significant amount of time worrying about what other people are thinking of you, perhaps fearful that someone might be upset with you or not respect or love you as you would wish?
3. Do you spend half an hour or more every day worrying that you might contract a terrible disease or die suddenly?
4. Do you spend half an hour or more every day worrying that somebody you love might contract a terrible disease or die suddenly?
5. Do you spend a lot of time worrying about things you cannot change?
6. Do you spend a significant amount of time worrying about your work, college or church situations when you are not working or at college or church?
7. Do you spend more than an hour of each day worrying that you might have offended somebody?
8. Do you spend an hour or more a day worrying that you might not be saved or that you might go to hell?
9. Do you spend an hour or more each day worrying that God is not pleased with you?
10. Do you spend an hour or more each day feeling excessively guilty for sins that you’ve already asked God to forgive you for?

How many of the above did you answer “yes” to? If you said yes to 2 or less, fear is a problem for you, though only at the level of the average person. However, God can and wants to help you overcome all your fears.

If you answered yes to 3 to 5, you have a serious problem with fear and need to seek God’s help immediately! As a result of the fear, you are probably becoming more and more self-centred and incapable of noticing the good things God is doing in your life or of being much help or encouragement to others. In fact, you will probably find that people will become more and more uncomfortable being around you because your fear will cause you to become a negative and possibly even judgmental person.

If you answered yes to 6 or more, you have become almost totally driven by fear rather than faith!! I encourage you to follow the biblical steps we’re about to discuss, but I also urge you to seek counseling immediately! You have become so fear-driven that you will almost certainly need someone of strong faith who can help you and pray with you as you go through the steps to freedom.

However, wherever you are on the fear cycle, don’t despair! Don’t be afraid that you can never be free!!! God can deliver you from your fears.

Try spending more time praying, reading the Bible and focusing on positive things and less time worrying about stuff! Seek help from a good Christian friend who can pray for you and hold you accountable when you start to focus on fearful things instead of faith things. Take the Apostle Paul’s advice as well. He wrote:

“Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.” — Philippians 4: 4-9

Let’s notice a few steps he gives us in these verses:

• Rejoice

Even when there are things happening that you don’t like, God wants you to find something in your life you can rejoice about. It’s not always at easy, but perhaps following the next steps can help you to then come back and find your way to rejoicing as you focus on faith rather than fear.

• Worry about nothing; pray about everything

The Bible actually commands us not to worry, and yet it’s one of those things pretty much all of us spend a lot of time doing! How do we not worry? Well, first of all, we must learn to replace worry with prayer. If all I do is focus on not worrying, I’ll just worry more! It’s like if somebody says to me, “Don’t think about pink elephants.” The moment I try to not think of pink elephants, I’m thinking of pink elephants. However, if I can replace the thought of pink elephants with something else (green elephants maybe?), the pink elephants will eventually fade away.

The same is true with fear thinking. We can’t just sit there and say, “Don’t think about that thing you’re worrying about!” So what can we do? Paul said to pray about it. Instead of going round and round it in your mind, he says to talk to God about it. That’s one of the first steps to overcoming fearful thinking because instead of focusing the problem on self, which leads to fear, you are focusing on God, the object of faith.

• Be thankful

After we’ve committed it to God in prayer, we need to start transferring our thoughts to something else. If we just keep praying about that thing we’re worrying about over and over and over again, our prayers can start to become just another vehicle for carrying our worries. Once we’ve prayed to God about it, we need to ask him to take our worry on board and help us to think about something else for awhile.

So what else should we think about? Instead of focusing on negative, fearful things, we need to think about what we can be thankful about. Years ago, somebody suggested to me that I think of three things from the day that I can be thankful for before I go to bed each day and thank God for those things. Doing so has helped me to remember that, even in the most difficult of days, God is still there working, and it has helped me to focus more on the positive things God is doing as I come to him in thankfulness.

Are you focusing on fears about things that worry you? Think of three things you can thank God for and start praying about those; praising God for his grace, help and provision in those things!!

• Let peace be your guard

Paul says that as we do these things, the peace of God that passes all understanding will guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus. As you start developing the habit of committing your worries to God, ask him to guard your heart and mind with his peace. It’s like he puts a bouncer at the door of your heart and says to those negative thoughts: “This heart belongs to me! Stay away!” When we start focusing on the negative again, we may have to go through steps 1 to 3 all over again, but as we begin to form this habit we will discover ourselves finding more and more moments of peace in life, and less and less hours will be wasted with fearful thinking.

• Think about good things

Paul said to think about whatever is lovely and good. Ask God to help you focus your mind on something good that is happening around you. As you do, you will probably find there’s a lot of good in your life that you have been missing out on because you’ve been obsessing with negative, fearful thoughts. Start replacing fear-thinking with faith-thinking!

• Follow faith-examples

Paul said, “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.” He urged the people to follow his examples and put the things they’ve learned from him into practice. He was a true man of faith, and if people would follow his example they would learn to be content in all circumstances, just as he had (see verse 11).

What faith-examples can you find to focus your mind on? Perhaps you could try reading the biographies of heroes of the faith or watching movies about their lives. Or you could find a mentor who models faith to you, whether it be somebody you know personally that you can meet with regularly, or a teacher or preacher you admire whose teaching can boost your faith and help keep your mind on course.

God doesn’t want you to live in fear! In fact, the command not to fear is the most commonly repeated command in all the Bible!!

No matter where we find yourself on the fear cycle, these steps given to us by the Apostle Paul can help you and me to become more faith-centred and less fearful.

Remember King David? He was in hiding and in grave danger when he wrote the following words:

“I sought the LORD, and he answered me;
he delivered me from all my fears.

Those who look to him are radiant;
their faces are never covered with shame.” — Psalm 34: 4-5

As long as our eyes are on self, fear will control our lives; but as we look to him, he desires to deliver us. Have you noticed how the face of a fear-filled person tends to look clouded? Well, according to David, when we look to him instead our faces are radiant! May God help us to shine for him as we give our fears to him and keep our eyes on Jesus! Lord God, deliver us from fear-thinking and transform us into faith-thinkers as we learn to look to you in all things!!!