make good art
- Embrace the fact that you’re young. Accept that you don’t know what you’re doing. And don’t listen to anyone who says there are rules and limits.
- If you know your calling, go there. Stay on track. Keep moving towards it, even if the process takes time and requires sacrifice.
- Learn to accept failure. Know that things will go wrong. Then, when things go right, you’ll probably feel like a fraud. It’s normal.
- Make mistakes, glorious and fantastic ones. It means that you’re out there doing and trying things….
There’s a video, or a distilled dot point list.
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In the last part of his speech he says, “If you are not wise, then pretend to be someone who is wise, and act like they would”.
It’s actually another way of phrasing a Christian principle of “putting on Christ”. If we wanna talk sanctification (the process of being made more Christ-like), then we have to realise that a lot of the time we wont feel like being Christ-like. We’ve had 15 or 19 or 24 years of not being Christ-like, so clearly there are some habits and thought processes that we need to break.
And that’s not to say that it’s all of our doing either, because it isn’t. It is Christ working in us and through us, that allows us to even “put on Christ”.
birth
When a child is born, a mother is born also.
This is incorrectly paraphrased from somewhere…
I had the opportunity to deliver a baby on Tuesday night, at 6.12pm. Through out the day the young mother was laughing and talking about how low her tolerance for “gross” was. She said she couldn’t even touch chicken fillets without feeling sick, and was worried she was going to throw up when she saw the baby.
Over the course of the induction of labour, she showed amazing resilience in the face of painful, uncomfortable procedures, but anything remotely “gross” would throw her off and make her squeamish.
Then, at 6.12pm, Sophie was born and immediately placed on her mother’s chest for skin-to-skin contact (a protocol enforced at our hospital to help with maternal bonding and the initiation of mothercrafting… and despite the fact that she said “GROSS, she’s all wet and yucky”, there was no denying the smile on her face.
A mother was “born” too.
dig a ditch
2 Kings chapter 3 tells an encouraging account of what we can do in our struggle.
The kings of Judah, Israel and Edom are marching toward Moab to strike them down with their armies, and after a seven day march are running out of water. And it’s all well and good to have a huge army, but if they are going to die of thirst, then you’re not going to win. You’re actually going to die.
But they seek out the man of God in their time of trial, and he says this:
Thus says the Lord: Make this valley full of ditches, and I will bring rain. You will not see the wind or rain, but water will flow in the valley of Edom. (paraphrase)
In your valley, when you’re running out of options and all seems lost:
- Seek God
- Dig a ditch
- Wait on the Lord to provide rain.
This isn’t an empty hope. I’ve written previously about the difference between hope and faith, and in this circumstance, stepping out in faith means digging a ditch and waiting for God to bring the rain. You don’t make the rain; you don’t bring the miracle. But you’re prepared for it.
If you have that broken relationship, and it does seem impossible, then do what you can in the natural, but with the expectation that God will do His part in the supernatural. Do your best and God will do the rest.
Feel like you’re going to fail your exams because you’ve only got 3 days to cram 13 weeks of material? That’s seriously some poor time management skill. But GOD is bigger than our circumstances, even the ones that we create for ourselves. Dig a ditch. Study your face off and pray that God will intervene.
Then you can’t say “Oh, I studied consistently during the semester, and had ample time to revise over and over again, because I’m so fantastic” but, “God really opened the door for me in these exams. I only had a few days because of my poor time management but praise God I made it through, and did so much better than I deserved.”
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Another disclaimer: although it does sound like a formula, God will do what He wants, for His glory. I am not going to guarantee that He will bring the miracle if you dig the ditches, because I am not God. But even if he doesn’t, He is still God.
irreplaceable
There is a difference between position and place.
There is a place that God wants us to be in, that might not be in a position of prominence. It might even be in a place of obscurity. But when you are in place, you can be found.
On a related note, you cannot replace a person. You can fill a position, but you cannot replace a person.
I think the way we phrase things actually says a lot about our belief systems. Saying you can replace someone at work implies that their relative worth is determined primarily by their skill set and the functions they perform, and ignores the fact that they are a person.
YOU ARE IRREPLACEABLE.
You have the amazing gift and talent of being You. And nobody is more You than You are.
Here’s Matt Chandler impersonating Mark Driscoll to make a point:
Also, I think he’s doing a bit of John Piper at the end haha.
truth and fact
There’s a difference between truth and fact. Or rather, we shouldn’t take facts as the entire truth.
The fact of the matter might be that you failed your test.
The truth of the matter might be that God’s preparing you for future passes.
The fact of the matter might be that you’re an underachieving procrastinator with no personal experience or no solid track record.
The truth of the matter might be that this is exactly the reason why you can talk about what God has done in your life, and cannot boast.
I could do more, but I think you get the point.
blog highlight: i am a food blog.
I think I’ve found my new favourite food blog.
It’s called “i am a food blog” and it’s the new pet project of Stephanie Le, a photographer who previously blogged at momofukufor2.
It embodies everything I like about food blogs that are primarily recipe based. A little bit of backstory behind each recipe, personalised graphics, slick clean design, and recipes that don’t seem so difficult.
Go here for one of my favourite posts, about Vietnamese spring rolls.
why bother?
For the sake of full disclosure, this post tackles the phrase “why bother?”.
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It’s really easy to say why bother to the things in your life, especially when you feel like they’re “too far gone”.
Cleaning up around the house.
Catching up on lectures.
Trying to make that friendship work.
Getting fit.
There are so reasons why we can say why bother, and a lot of those reasons might be true.
But the answer is that maybe sometimes it isn’t up to you to make that decision.
Personally, I was feeling an immense amount of discouragement at the numbers that turned up at SMA Conference. I was almost at the point of why bother if it’s only gonna be a few people. And looking back now I want to hit myself for saying that, because it wasn’t just about numbers. And it wasn’t just my contribution to helping organise the conference, but it was a combined team effort.
And more than that, it’s what God wanted me to be doing. It wasn’t my call to say “why bother?”.
And in the end, I needed to look back and think about what my responsibility is as a leader, and the reason why we do any of these things. It’s not about numbers, it’s about impact on individual lives. Through serving and influence, and encouragement.
For every “it’s possible”, there will be a “why bother”. (Another Furtickism)
sma conference
Over the weekend we had our annual SMA Conference for healthcare students and we looked at the topic of integrity – which is so broad, and so relevant that it overflows into everything we talk about.
It was awesome. So many of our committee members and volunteers came together to make things run smoothly, we had excellent speakers with experience in the field and amazing personal testimonies about God in their practice.
And most importantly we had time for people to connect to the speakers and to each other and just to talk through some of the challenges that we face and be prayed for. Couldn’t have asked for more, and it’s an awesome indication of the work that God is gonna do in our area.
One idea that really struck me during the conference was the idea that we sometimes look at Christianity in the workplace and think of it negatively, and look at “what not to do”, or “where to draw the line”. But imagine a day in our healthcare system where the Christian staff are a dream to work with, because they genuinely care about their coworkers and patients. They fully embody the fact that they are fallible, but live by grace and in turn give grace. And the phrase isn’t “Christians in healthcare… geez they need to drop that Jesus thing”, but “CHRISTIANS IN HEALTHCARE – they’re doing a good thing, even if I think their beliefs are weird”.
The day when our medium (our lives and the way we conduct ourselves) better reflects our message (the grace of Jesus Christ in our lives, and the fact that we are all fallible and we all need God).
joy
Happiness is a symptom of circumstance, while Joy is a product of perspective. God is still good, I will be grateful.
I like this. It’s a little bit medical sounding, but it’s something I need to write somewhere, and look at everyday.
Try complaining about music at your Church to an African Church where they don’t have instruments.
Try complaining about your commute to work to a villager who walks 5 miles a day, to earn scraps.
Try complaining about your wrists being sore from counting so much money. (This one… is clearly a joke)
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But more importantly, try complaining about your life in the context of salvation and God’s grace.
