BE LIKE MIKE

I try
Just need to fly
For just one day if I could
Be that way
I dream I move
I dream I groove
Like Mike
If I could Be Like Mike
I wanna be, I wanna be
Like Mike
Oh, if I could Be Like Mike.
The Great Michael “Air” Jordan. Who didn’t want to be like Mike? The greatest sports figure of all times. In 1991, Gatorade realized the impact M.J. had on the entire sports world and created one of the catchiest commercial jingles of the 90’s. They noticed how people of all ages from every country wanted to be like Mike in one way or another. If you loved sports, Jordan was your inspiration to excel.
Whether Christians notice it or not, those that are younger then us look up to us as well. I remember being in 3rd grade and thinking the 6th graders were grown adults. I couldn’t wait to be as cool as some of those grown men in Mrs. Woods’s class. And there was no way I was going to talk to Samantha during recess. She was too much of a “woman”. SHE WAS IN 6TH GRADE!!!
1 Timothy 4:12 says “Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.” The youth of today must realize the awesome opportunities they have to be an example of Jesus to those younger then them. “In speech, in life, in love, and in purity.” When we speak, let us speak as Jesus, comforting those that are hurting. As we live, let us live a life like Jesus, walking humbly and respectfully. When we love, let us love like Jesus. Being excepting of ALL people and letting them see and feel the love God has for them through us. As we speak, live, and love, let us be as pure as Jesus, letting all see the definition of Christ in you.
The greatest way of witnessing is by living as an example. When you live as examples of Jesus, those that look up to you will see something different, and in their minds, they’ll be singing that Gatorade song about you.

MLK'S DREAM

When Martin Luther King Jr. had his big dream while he was vacationing on nearby St. Helena Island, I don’t think he had envisioned his dream to come true so soon. 46 years ago he had dreamt that we would be able to live in a country where the color of one’s skin would not matter. That white children would be able to play with black children. Where a man’s character would be all that matters. When he had that dream, he imagined unity amongst Americans. In all honesty, I don’t believe he imagined that in 46 years The United States of America would be united enough to elect our first black President. But that’s beside the point. The point is he had a dream and God has blessed our country with that dream. Segregation was only a couple of generations ago. A young African American woman said, “The only thing Martin Luther King was fighting for was equal rights. It’s eerie that we’re celebrating King’s dream on Monday and that dream comes true on Tuesday.”
Times are tough for many. Jobs are being lost. Gas is on the rise once again. Houses are being foreclosed on. With all things considered, how can we find hope in a conglomeration of despair? We need only to remember that our God is a God who does not sit still. He had heard the prayers of so many that were tired, and can here our prayers when we feel we can’t go on. He had been faithful to those who had been oppressed and wants to uphold us when we are being crushed. When all hope seemed lost, God had shown to be the greatest hope that never dies. He is the one that gives change when change is needed. And He is the one who allows us to dream big and gives us hope through those dreams. HE IS GOD!!!
So praise God for these days of Hope and Change. Praise God for raising up a young man in MLK that had enough reason to throw in the towel and lose all hope, but never forgot that God is a God that does not sit still. He is faithful and He hears the cries of those in need. Let these days of change remind us that God is a God who does not change but helps those that call out to Him.

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

GETTING OLD

My 7th grade English teacher Mrs. Wolford seemed old enough to be my mom. She would come to class and drop grammatical knowledge on us daily. She would tell us about her family life and the things that happened at home with her old husband and her child. She would sit in the teacher’s room with all of the other old teachers and talk about old people stuff. After school, she would jump in her car like all the other old people to go home and live the life of an older woman. As a 13 year old, she had me convinced: I never want to be 30 years old like her.

This is a turning point in my life. This month I turn 30. I know some of you parents find it comical that I believe turning 30 is such a big deal. But it’s pretty serious to me. And it’s not turning 30 that scares me. It’s the reality that I’m one year further from being young and one year closer to being old. The reality hit me not to long ago when I said a word that I KNEW was cool, but a kid looked at me with this bratty little smirk and said, “Dude, people don’t say that any more.” I was floored. I had officially became Mrs. Wolford.
That’s the reason I get flattered when 13 year olds call me to hang out with them at Caribou. Or 16 year olds call me to see how my week was. And this has been made possible because of two reasons. The first reason is God’s grace. He has called me to be a missionary to the youth of Isanti County and has opened the door for me to do ministry.
The second reason is fairly simple: they have my ears and my heart. It’s easy as an adult to not be interested in the risqué world of youth and the culture they are immersed in. But it’s not easy to be a teenager in that culture. But one thing I’ve learned is youth love it when they have an “old person” in their life that’s curious about how things work in their world and when we give them a chance to school us on the reality of today’s culture.
One great opportunity adults have and need to take advantage of is sitting down with the youth and studying the “whys” and the “hows” of their world. This gives us the chance to understand why they do the things they do and act the way they act. Too often we criticize this generation and expect them to handle the situations the way we did when we were their age. When we can understand this generation, then we can understand how and what needs to be communicated in order to see kids practicing being in the world, but not of it.
“I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.”

– John 17:14-16

NEW YEARS RESOLUTION OR NEW CREATION?

Take your pick:
Lose Weight, Manage Debt, Save Money, Get a Better Job, Get Fit, Eat Right, Get a Better Education, Drink Less Alcohol, Quit Smoking Now, Reduce Stress Overall, Reduce Stress at Work, Take a Trip, Volunteer to Help Others.

According to USA.gov, these are the most common New Year’s resolutions every year. Looking at that list, I’ve tried a few of those in past years. The key word is “tried”. Whenever I make a New Year’s resolution, I get pretty excited. It means a new start. A chance to become a “better me”. The opportunity to create freshness in life that is much needed. But what it turns out to be is a chance to fail miserably in my attempt of a new beginning. It’s become such a standard to fail my New Year’s resolution, I’m starting to feel as if a New Year’s resolution is just as beneficial to make as having a Noodle Eater’s Hair Guard (see picture). WHAT’S THE POINT!!

“Whoever is a believer in Christ is a new creation. The old way of living has disappeared. A new way of living has come into existence.”- 2 Cor. 5:17

I realized that we need not wait for the beginning of the year to “start fresh”. We’ve been giving an opportunity today. The chance to wake up, take a step back and evaluate what our life looks like and start again. We’ve been made anew in Christ and we need to see what we’ve been made into and continuously align ourselves according to this “new creation” we’ve become. One of the dangers of being a new creation in Christ is we figure the work in us has been done and we leave it as is. Like an algae-filled lake in the late summer, we become stagnate due to lack of change. And the lack of change comes only because we don’t see what it means to be a new creation. We start to add onto this new creation all of the drama, stress, sin, anger, laziness, addiction, irresponsibility and so forth and figure that this is part of the “new creation package”. But if we are able wake up, take a step back and evaluate what our lives look like according to God’s plan of redemption and restoration, then we have begun to allow ourselves to see what needs to take place in order to start fresh today…..not next year.

GIFTS OF LOVE OR GIFTS OF OBLIGATION?

DYING BOY'S FINAL WISH COMES TRUE
We feud with our families and refuse to forgive and forget before the holiday. We feel our Christmas is just not right because we don’t have the funds to spend the way we want to. We train our kids to expect great gifts for Christmas. As adults, we secretly get disappointed when we don’t get the gift we were hoping for. We eat enormous meals and watch the leftovers go rotten in a few days. We go through the holiday thinking we understand the meaning of Christmas because we focus on Jesus’ birth, yet most of us fail to sacrificially give a gift that can make an impact on someone who really needs it. We make sure we tell our kids about the gift of Christ but don’t show them the gift of servitude that came with the birth of Christ.
Jesus came to the earth as a gift of redemption.
I celebrate Christmas by giving gifts of obligation.

May the Lord grant me the heart of this young child.

CHRISTIANS ARE SO UNCHRISTIAN: TRUE OR FALSE?

I've been reading Dan Kimball's book "They Like Jesus, But Not The Church". And it has inspired me to repost an old post. I don't want to forget where Christianity is today and the severity of what is happenening to the Body of Christ in North America. Here it is:

A gentleman came up to me the other day and told me how he had asked a fellow coworker why he didn’t come to a bible study that was open to all the employees at their job? The young man told him to get lost (with more descriptive words) and take his religion crap elsewhere. This blew the man away because his coworker was a man that was always showing others respect and love. But when it came to a Christian trying to have a “Christian conversation”, he was turned away like he had some nasty plague.

In Dan Kimball’s book, “They Like Jesus, But Not The Church”, he tells us how the issue is not Jesus, but rather His followers. Though Christians need to hold onto the Truths Jesus gave, it’s how Christians have handled that Truth that has scarred so many into turning them away from Jesus.
JESUS VS. CHRISTIANS


Judgmental, antihomosexual, hypocritical, too political and sheltered. According to the book “UnChrisitian”, written by David Kinnaman, these are the words of those outside of the church from the late teens to early 30 somethings when asked to describe Christians. According to Kinnaman's Barna study, here are the percentages of people outside the church from that age range who think that the following words describe present-day Christianity:

* antihomosexual 91%
* judgmental 87%
* hypocritical 85%
* old-fashioned 78%
* too political 75%
* out of touch with reality 72%
* insensitive to others 70%
* boring 68%

Kinnaman believes that these are not stereotypes with no basis of reality. Each person in the poll gave specific details on why they believe such things about Christians. This morning, after I read one of those “Christian-fowarded emails” that determines how solid of a Christian you are by forwarding it on to as many people as possible, I could only laugh and think of what a person outside the church would have thought if they read it. It was about keeping America a Christian nation because that is what the founders intended it to be. The last words read something along the lines of “If you’re a Christian, then remind people of what our country is by telling them to SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP!!” Wow.

Christians have two ways to react to this. One way is to justify every critique that has been given us by those outside the church and point the finger back at them. The other way is to evaluate how we want to be perceived by those outside the church and how can we change that perception without compromising The Truth. One thing is certain: those outside of the church hate us....and sometimes, I don’t blame them.

JUDGING A BOOK

Several months back I was hearing all this hoopla about the “Twilight Series”. I read magazine articles about it. Some saying it will be the first series to sell on the scale of Harry Potter. It was the next hot thing out there. So I decided to check it out. When my wife and I were in the check out lane at Wal-Mart, I told her I forgot something and then ran and grabbed the book. When I brought it back to the check out lane, she looked at the book and said, “Are you sure you want to get that? It looks and sounds like a girls book.” I kind of agreed, so I put it back and grabbed a different book.
Over the next couple of months, we kept coming across that book and the youth of our church couldn’t keep their mouths closed about it. Needless to say I regretted not getting it. So I went out and purchased it. While I was being drawn into the book, I was waiting for something vampireish to happen. Some fighting, action, garlic, stakes, crucifixes. But all I was coming across was some really cheesy teenage love story. IT WAS DRIVING ME CRAZY! I wanted to see these amazing, super-human tough vampires go to action. And it finally came……..in the last couple of chapters. My thoughts of the book? Sappy and disappointing.
She seems to have all her stuff together. She’s a beautiful young girl. She’s very personal and doesn’t lack friends. When we talk, she makes sure she tells me about how she told someone about her faith. She lets me know what book of the Bible she’s reading. Every Wednesday she’s one of the few girls who bring her Bible. But every now and then I have to approach her with something I’ve heard. Parties where she’s wasted. Several guys that she’s crossed boundaries with. Smoking weed. She is a young gal that is trying to do the Jesus thing, but has a problem of being transparent. She feels that her job is to make people believe her life is good, but has not come to understand that being a Christian means that we’re just not good.

One of the most exciting youths in our youth group is a young gentleman named Brian. If one was to look at him, they would probably be scared out of their pants because he has a pretty rough image. He has a head full of crazy out of control hair. He has a tough (yet handsome)mug on his face that looks like he could chew your face off. He’s not a small guy. He dresses to his own liking, not to impress anyone. And he has his own rock band. But if you were to have one conversation with this young man, you’d thing you just had a conversation with someone that has the heart of Mother Teresa. He’s by far one of the most loving gentlemen I have ever known. He goes out of his way to make his beautiful girlfriend know she's loved by him. He asks the serious questions. He wants to grow deeper but recognizes his struggles. When we worship, he’s screaming off the top of his lungs. This youth gets all the leaders excited and has much potential (along with his girlfriend Candace) to do great things for the kingdom of God.

We hear and see things and we assume it’s true. We see a book and we figure it has to be good because it looks good or that’s what people are saying. But sometimes we pick it up and read it and it is nothing we were expecting. We judge to quickly. We need to make sure that we don’t assume the book is good or bad until you know for yourself. The hearts of each individual has its own motives, and we don’t know what it is. All we can do is see the fruit of someone and let it be what it is.

“Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men's hearts. At that time each will receive his praise from God.” 1Cor. 4:5