The journey

A boy born a bastard child, his dad left his mother at age 5 and left him and his 2 year old sister in the care of his unemployed mum who with a grade 4 education worked low paying jobs, suffered rejection and ridicule from family,  just to make ends meet…

He lived in terrible conditions growing up often having to share a house with 4 other families each occupying a room which was there world… all through his childhood. After meeting many itinerant evangelists, A dream was born of being a missionary for God, travelling the country sharing Jesus. He dreamt of going to the Olympics after watching Carl Lewis shatter the 100m record.  No godly role models, lack of affection from parents lead him to seek love and acceptance in people that didn’t have his best interests at heart… this took him away from his dream but deep inside the seed was planted…

At age 8 he gave his heart to the Lord, this was the start of the journey that made him who he is. In school he played every sport excelled in athletics and team sports… later this would open the door to him fulfilling his dream… in the teenage years he followed the crowd just to fit in, but deep inside he felt empty and lost the only thing that gave him joy was when he did what was his passion, "leading people to Christ". The grace of God kept him safe all through year’s dangerous and reckless living till the day he reached the point where he couldn’t continue living double life, of acting like a godly Christian and  reckless ungodly living. After a shooting accident, in a hospital room he rededicated his life to God, and made a covenant with God that he will at age 30 dedicate his life to service of the kingdom. And started the long hard journey of fulfilling the God given destiny…

As time passed he reunited with his mum, started the relationship with his absent dad and fulfilled his lifelong dream of being at the Olympics and God used his love of sport and the love of souls to reach the lost at the games while enjoying the dream. His journey has not been easy; the demons of his past has constantly come back to haunt him and destroy the hard work but God kept picking him up every time he fell.

The journey became tougher when he found the love of his life, the constant struggle to be a husband and a father, after having no earthly role models crushed him many times over. The only solace he found was the example of fatherhood by father God this is what helped him be strong and persevere on this journey. It hasn’t been easy but was worth every tear shed.

A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.
Mohandas Gandhi

The journey continues…

Four Stages of Spiritual Maturity

As simple as they are, I found these concepts to be wonderfully helpful in my understanding of what the heck is going on in the world of human religion. Mark K. also seemed to sense their value, and so encouraged me to share them with y’all. I stumbled upon a good synopsis by Len Hjalmarson at his interesting web site: http://www.nextreformation.com/html/...s/holistic.htm
and hope that he will forgive me for reprinting it here:

Scott Peck, in The Different Drum, (1987,) advances a useful growth typology. He discerns four stages in spiritual growth: (though he notes that they shade into one another)

· Stage I: Chaotic, antisocial
· Stage II: Formal, institutional
· Stage III: Skeptic, individual
· Stage IV: Mystic, communal

Peck places all young children and one in five adults in Stage I. This is undeveloped spirituality, which he terms antisocial because those adults who are in it are generally incapable of loving others. Although they may seem loving, their relationships with others are essentially manipulative and self-serving.

Peck terms these people chaotic because they are unprincipled; nothing governs them except their own will. If these people get in touch with the chaos of their being it is extremely painful; some ride it out, some commit suicide, and some move to stage II.

Stage II people are attached to the form, as opposed to the essence, of religion. They oppose change because it is the forms which liberate them from the chaos of their lives. Their vision of God will be that of an external, transcendent being. They may consider Him loving, but also fear His punitive power.

Some stage II people have become institutionalized because they need an external and imposed order to survive. Whether it is prison or the military or a strict religious structure, these people need structure.

If two Stage II people marry and have children, the children tend to absorb the principles of their parents. Once these are internalized, the children are self-governing human beings, and are no longer dependent upon the institution for order. They begin to convert to Stage III -- skeptic, individual -- often becoming atheists or agnostics. Although individualistic, they are not antisocial. They are usually highly principled and independent thinkers. Advanced Stage III people are active truth seekers.

If people in Stage III search for truth for long enough, they find what they are looking for. Like pieces of a puzzle things begin to make sense, and they begin their conversion to Stage IV (the mystic communal stage).

Stage IV people have a sense of the connectedness of all things. They see themselves as good and evil, and recognize that truly "no man is an island, of itself entire." In some mysterious way we share in the destiny of the cosmos.

Moreover, the more we grow in understanding, the more we have a sense of knowing nothing. While people in other stages often seek religion in order to escape from mystery, people in Stage IV seek to approach it. Thus Stage IV people value emptiness, the ability to move beyond pre-conceptions and even rationality to perceive the fabric of reality apart from boundaries and form.

I rehearse Peck's stages to point out the similarity in this progression to the stages of normal psychic development. The infant exists in undifferentiated chaos (psychologists term it symbiotic or primary narcissism); there is no sense where "I" ends and "other" begins. If the home is relatively stable the child forms boundaries and internalizes the expectations and values of the parents. He learns right from wrong and recognize that self and other are a mixture of good and evil and that only God is perfect.

If the child is valued as an individual and taught to think for herself she begins to question her parents' values and faith and becomes a skeptic (a process which makes the teen years more turbulent). If she continues to experience grace and search for truth she begins to understand the meaning and spirit of the law...

What's In Your Heart?

"The good man brings good things

out of the good stored up in his heart,

and the evil man brings evil things

out of the evil stored up in his heart.

For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks."

Luke 6:45 (NIV)

Jesus here likened the heart to a storehouse. The heart is a place where things can actually be stored. Every day we either make worthy or unworthy deposits into the storehouse that is our heart. If we liken our heart to a financial institution, then we can imagine that it contains different accounts. Every account has a balance from which we can make withdrawals. Some accounts may be solvent while others may be the verge of insolvency. The health of an account is largely up to the depositor.

According to our text, a man can only bring out of his heart what he has put into his heart. A man can draw no more out of an account than what is deposited there. It is not

possible to bring out what was never put in. In light of this, it is imperative that we discipline ourselves to systematically and consistently deposit good things into our hearts. This will insure that we will have a balance from which to draw when called upon to invest in the lives of others. If we have nothing to give, it is only because we failed to make the necessary deposits into the account from which we seek to draw. You cannot fill needs in the lives of others by trying to make withdrawals from an empty heart.

Our hearts can become empty when we spend without saving. Sometimes we are so

busy spending and investing in the lives of others that we forget to replenish the accounts in our hearts. If we continue to spend without saving we will soon find ourselves in a bankrupt condition, with an empty heart. In such a state we can either take the time to replenish the supply or to continue on by faking it. The problem with faking it however is that we are sooner or later caught in a web of debt and deceit that costs us infinitely more than we could have imagined.

Our hearts can be filled when we systematically and consistently make deposits. When we discipline ourselves to store away a little every day, over a period of time we will find that our hearts have an abundance from which we can draw to share with others. This should motivate us to discipline ourselves to daily store away good things in our hearts. Only then will we reach the point where we can share out of our overflow or abundance.