The Spectacular Ordinary Life

It was a very ordinary act of service to God, but Jesus called attention to it and made it spectacular.

We need to practice simplicity because these things can overwhelm us. When we lose touch with what’s going on around us, we lose touch with ourselves and also lose touch with God.

We want to be able to pay attention to what is around us without being exhausted by it.

The missions community is probably more needy than their secular counterparts because if you’ve committed your life to God, you have the overlining pressure that you are working for God, you’re working in some other place, you’re having to adapt to the culture, you’re having to slow down, you have to listen to what’s going on around you in a fresh way, all the frustrations of understanding the culture.

There are lots of guys that I meet as I travel around the world who are struggling with cynicism. They’re kind of exhausted on the inside. They are struggling with finding freshness in their own lives. They’re not paying attention as they should. And somehow, they are totally committed to overwork. Workaholism is a great challenge in cross-cultural life.

If you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, that’s a great place to get messed up.

It’s so easy to pretend when you’re in this line of work.

You don’t want to end up 20 years later going what happened there? Why am I so dry? How come I’m burnt out?

Cycle of Grace

The Cycle of Grace has to do with where you begin in your active service, which begins with acceptance. That you begin with Jesus accepts you.

The Cycle of Work, which is the other side, the darker side, begins with achievement. You begin with I must achieve, and you think in your achievement, you will be loved, welcomed, and enjoy your life.

1 Don’t Lie

If you look at how people live their lives, the more deception, lies, and half-truths they engage in, the more complex their lives are.

You can’t always tell exactly the whole truth—I don’t believe that’s possible—but you can take the truth seriously.

The enemy is too clever for me to try to live my life on my own in some isolated space.

2 Live with an open Palm

Living with an open palm means that in your relationship to God you’re able to say to God I am ready for anything, I’m ready for whatever you give me. If you give me great honor, a great reputation, and a successful life in worldly terms, I’m prepared to accept that. It means a life of suffering, pain, and hardship, and I’m ready to go with that too.

The idea is you don’t have anything you grip onto for your survival.

God takes us on a journey gradually, often finger by finger, opening up our fists. And making our palms open so he can put whatever he likes on us.

I think we’ve been very much affected by the prosperity gospel, even those of us who don’t believe in the prosperity gospel, have been affected by it. We think if I live this authentic life with God that all will go well with me, and it’s a myth. It may be that the more you live your life with God, the more trouble you will be in.

If you want a full life, you need to be stretched. That’s the problem in the city where I live. Everyone’s busy, but they are living a fundamentally boring life. They are fundamentally under-challenged.

3 Allow yourself to be Vulnerable

What do you do with your weaknesses and desires? How do you engage with them?

You start to learn to track your desires, good and bad, as true revelations of who you actually are.

It’s important to live simply because we are such mixed characters: we have weaknesses and strengths. If you deny these things, your life will be overcomplicated.

Don’t live a juvenile life. Have a life where you are dealing with realities of what’s in front of you and you’re not just wishing stuff away.

4 Beware of Answers

We often put pressure on God and pressure on ourselves to come up with quick answers.

Sometimes, we fall into a “God, fix it“or “God, sort it” mentality. “Give me a speedy answer. Get me out of this place.” And when he doesn’t pitch up with the answers, we go back to disappointment and cynicism. “Where did you go?”

Clear answers may not be the best answers.

You have to be willing to start the same practices in your life that will shape your life. You have to start to work on the nature of your prayer life—what’s happening there? The nature of my engagement with scripture—what’s happening there? The nature of my relationship with community—what’s happening there? The relationship with my body—what’s happening there?

Sometimes, you get an answer to something ten years after the question.

If you’re gonna have a heart attack, do it in India.

I have a suspicion that I may be in the most difficult part of my life, in the long walk home of sickness and heart disease, and Parkinson’s shapes its way around my life.

These things don’t get any easier, but the grace gets weightier.

5 Practice Self-forgetfulness

What are the disciplines of the Christian life to practice self-forgetfulness?

You enter into a place where you’re ready to forget yourself in servanthood and give your life away for others.

If you decent yourself, the pressure is off. If you want to be at the center, the press is on.

There’s no community that sells itself better than the missionary community.

Being self-centered is very boring. It’s a boring dance of self-observation.

6 Take your time when saying yes

There are so many demands on cross-cultural workers and full-time Christian workers.

The more yes, as you say, the more they start to meet down the road. I found this happening with my travel schedule over the years, I could say yes yes yes because during those three months I was doing fine. And yes, it was way too many things sorted themselves. I wish I hadn’t said yes in May when the decisions were coming out in September.

One of my gifts is saying no.

7 Keep Jesus and his kingdom at the center

If you know what the center is – loving God and loving Neighbor – all laws caught up in this, I think that’s challenging to live but beautifully simple.

If you know that the whole space, the whole idea is leaving space for God and Neighbor, that simplifies a lot of your life.

The old phrase, “love people and use things”, sometimes we turn that around to be “love things and use people.”

The Jesuits have a great image which I love, is that you live the Christian life with one foot raised. So you’re always in active of walking, you never stand still. There’s never two feet on the ground. Loving God and loving Neighbor is the path on which you walk.

Learning to live your life in a place of stable instability. You know where you’re stable and enables you to live through the instability that will inevitably happen.