Part 5: How the Game is Played - No Regrets

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How the Game is Played - No Regrets


In the early 90's Karen and I traveled to Europe. We stayed some time in Munich, saw the sights of Rome, visited my brother and his family in Sicily and spent quite a bit of time in Bavaria, Germany. Neither of us had ever been outside the United States (Canada doesn’t count) and from the moment our adventure began it was clear that our world view had been permanently altered. We saw all of the standard attractions in Rome like the Roman Forum, the Coliseum, St. Peter’s. In Munich we mourned at the Dachau Concentration Camp, and Bavaria we saw Neuschwanstein Castle, Zugspitz Mountain (one location of the Olympics in the 1930’s) and the surrounding towns.

One place we visited was a town called Oberammergau, nestled in the foothills of the German Alps. It is famous for it’s beauty, history, a presentation of the Easter passion play and, like much of Bavaria, for wood carving. Herein lies one of my few regrets in life.

In one of the shops of this little town was an example of the finest wood carving I had ever seen. The intricacy in the wood working was astounding while the figurines and scenes they depicted practically jumped to life. One of these was a statue of Wagner’s hero Lowengren, mounted on his steed slaying the dragon. It was about 14 inches tall and was carved from this beautiful, dark wood. I am a very visual and tactile oriented person. So while I loved looking at this fine piece of art, I was also excited that it was something I could put my hands on.

There was only one problem. It was really expensive and we had no money. We had a credit card, but not cash. After much internal debate I decided not to buy it. As we boarded the bus that would take us back to our hotel, Karen tried one last time to convince me to go ahead and get it. But I said no and we left the statue behind.

I wish I hadn’t done that. In the big scheme of things it isn’t really a big deal that I don’t have that statue sitting on the new mantel I installed over our fireplace. But it sure would look great. We have scores of pictures from our trip, and the memories which we share far outstrip the value of that chunk of wood. But every time I think about it I kick myself. We’ll likely never travel back there. And even if we did, who is to say I’d be able to find a carving that lives up the image in my memory? I regret that I didn’t buy it when I had the chance.

And there, in the second half of that last sentence, is the truth of the matter. Regret always comes to torment us in the recollection of things we either did or didn’t do… when we had the chance.

But the bible tells us that both regret and sorrow, can be good or bad.

Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.
II Corinthians 7:10


Now, whatever you have in your life that you regret, you’re probably a lot like me. Some things are not very important while others have or had the potential for significant impact, bad or good. In any case, sorrow or regret that we feel over those things can only produce one of two things:

Death – regret that lives in the past and torments over what might have been if we had made a different choice or decision.

Salvation – regret that results in a change of direction or character.

In his book, “When the Game is Over it All Goes Back in the Box”, John Ortberg suggests that godly regret will provoke us to do the following:

Love more deeply, laugh more often, give more generously, live more boldly.

Instead of waiting for a crisis to force us to make a change, wouldn’t it be a great idea to just make a decision now to live life in such a way that we have no regrets?

Part 4: The Game In Your Head

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The Game in Your Head

I never liked my name when I was a kid. Let’s face it. There aren’t a lot young men running about with the name “Tracy”, and those of us who are find a lot in common with the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue”. There is a somewhat apocryphal story in our clan that lays the blame for my name on my sister. She got to choose and somehow “Tracy” was on the top of her short list. I was never upset with her over the choice and hold no ill feelings.

However, one thing the name selection did purchase for me was a large amount of teasing from my peers when I was a child. It’s not hard to guess why, since even my own children asked me if “Tracy” was a girl’s name when they were young. I have a whole stable of responses raised over time to answer that question and I trotted them out for the boys. Truth be told, in our culture and modern day, the answer is “yes”. It is generally a girl’s name.

The payoff from this difficulty when I was a kid is that it made me pretty tough. You have to balance out a name like that or the sharks of the schoolyard playground will circle slowly and eventually rip you to tiny bits. So by the time I was in the 4th grade it was generally considered that, unless you wanted to get messed up, you didn’t tease the kid with the girl’s name about his name! The funniest thing about that turns out to be that I rarely ever engaged in actual fisticuffs. (Never in shoving matches, which I found to be silly and unproductive. This is an idea I’ve passed on to my own sons. If you’re going to get in a throw down, let the other kid push you and then KNOCK THE CRAP OUT OF HIM!) Because I oozed this air of craziness and the willingness to go straight to a hundred miles an hour I enjoyed a kind of long term respite from harassment.

Ultimately this attitude came less from the need for protection than it did from an early sense of my own worth. No matter the judgment of my peers, I was not the sum of my name. I made a conscious decision to master the misgivings in my self that arose from ridicule, both external and internal. I wasn’t a big kid. I had long hair and long eyelashes. I had a girl’s name. There were plenty of opportunities both from other people and from my own thoughts to speak poorly of who and what I was.

I really do remember making the conscious decision that I would not give in to those belittling words or thoughts. My family and close friends helped me to know who I really was and instilled in me a healthy self-image. It wasn’t arrogance, but it was value of self. That value was unerringly based in learning what God thought of me and how He wanted me to approach the game of life. In doing so they revealed God’s desires for me when making choices, my reaction to circumstances and how to set my mind in particular directions.

As I grew I found a type of pride in the name that I wrestled with when I was a child. I became grateful to my sister because she bestowed me with a name that people remember. It’s uncommon, and served as a key component in forming the person I am today; how I look at life and approach challenges.

If you want to be a master at the game of life, you have to learn how to master the game in your head. Sometimes we sit around wanting someone else to figure it all out for us, or hoping that others will feel sorry for the mess we’re in. In truth, the solution is much closer to home. Read the following passage from the Bible and consider this: Maybe one way to master the inner game is realize that we will not be destroyed by the shifting shadows of life. But if we expect to enjoy the light, sometimes we just need to suck it up and get on with it already.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.
II Corinthians 4:7-9

Part 3: Keeping Score - Meditation Thoughts

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Keeping Score

I coach kid’s soccer in the summertime. I love almost every moment of it, too. One summer we had two games out of 16 that didn’t rain and I did not love that so much. But I have been coaching my oldest son’s team which is a group of 8 -10 year olds. I determined some time ago that I couldn’t coach kids younger than 8 because it would drive me crazy. It’s more like cat herding than coaching at that age. I’ve also determined that I probably can’t coach much older than 10 either. Oh, they play really well and even get most of the concepts. It’s the wheezing and coughing from the middle aged, portly coach that makes the kids so darned uncomfortable that’s the trouble.

In the league where I coach, and he plays, we have some rules. The man who runs the program is a friend of mine and he’s been at this for a really long time. He decided when he started the program that it would be a skills based educational soccer league. And while we play real games with referees, boundary markers, actual goal boxes, and even ‘off-sides’, we don’t keep score. In other words, it isn’t a ‘competitive’ league.

Right…

Try telling that to twenty 8 -10 year olds. Not a game goes by that one of my players doesn’t turn to me and say, “Coach, what’s the score?” And I reply in the same fashion every time. “We don’t keep score.”

Right…

Without variation my reply will be followed by a chorus of voices that blurts out the current score. Occasionally they will be incorrect and I will consult the surreptitious hash marks I keep in my roster notebook and, very quietly, correct them. Forget about telling twenty 8 – 10 year olds that ‘we don’t keep score’. This 40 year old coach can’t seem to stop marking down each goal either. It’s like we have something wired into the core of our being that says, “Make sure you know whether you’re winning or sucking wind. Second place is just the first loser to cross the finish line.” Sorry to mix sports metaphors but you know what I mean.

I think God keeps score really by just one thing. You know, in the game of life? There has to be some way for a holy God to determine if you and I are worth the effort it requires for Him to love us, right? I mean, ‘love’ is a ‘verb’ and all that. And let’s face it, ‘verbs’ generally require action. And action usually involves time and energy.

So what’s the one thing? (I suddenly feel like Jack Palance in “City Slickers”)

Love.

Seems simple on the page, but in the practice of the game of life it gets more complicated. But, check this scripture out, and then I’ll let you figure out how it applies to your life.

We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother. I John 4:19-21 (NIV)

Part 3: Keeping Score - Video Blog of Sunday Message

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Keeping Score


Okay... so we had trouble with the audio recording of the sermon on January 27th, so for that week I made a video of the whole thing in front of my fireplace. Here's the video if you would like to view it, and I will try and get the meditation thoughts posted soon. There will also be a video of February 3rd and the followup mediation. As I get into the swing of things I am thinking there will be more video on the site and I may split this blog so I can return to the original posting theme... cheers! and thanks for visiting. (BTW, I LOVE the preview image that Google Video chose for me... I'm like, "WHAT?!?!")

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Part 2: What's the Point?

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What’s the Point?

When I was a kid there was a place behind our neighborhood where I and my friends would play. Although we never owned our house where I grew up, my parents were able to rent the same single family home for over 20 years. The street we lived on was a real neighborhood row tucked between apartment complexes and public assistance housing. My best memories are of those long Alaska summer days when the sun was shining, and the grass was tall.I can remember grabbing a stick and running through the waist high, hay-like grass swishing the stick back and forth. I would pretend it was a machete and I was hacking my way through some dense Amazon jungle.

The truth, of course, what that not only did I bear a stick in the northernmost state of the union, but that stick did very little in the way of clearing the brush. At the end of the day the grass was still there, albeit a little more trampled than it was the morning before. But even that would pass overnight as the dew collected the stalks rebounded, and would stand in anticipation of my next adventure.If I’d been a deep thinker as a child I might have seen the metaphor of life in the futile whipping of the grass with my ill suited sword-stick. But doesn’t life see to imitate that scene sometimes? We get up every day and beat at the grasses of responsibility or duty. And while the grass seems to lay a little lower at the end of the day the truth is, that without the proper tools, we’re just beating it about until it rises again the next morning.We all yearn to know if there is really purpose to life.

In last weeks message I talked about finding what really matters in life. Perhaps it is surprising at first to consider that YOU are what matters! Its pretty simple really… you matter to God, and that makes you valuable.Its in this truth the answer to this week’s question is revealed; the “point”, or the purpose of this life, is to live as one who knows they are valuable to God. With this knowledge comes the realization that if you matter to God so does everyone else. When that truth comes home to your heart, you are ready to discover your purpose in life. Just as learning that God loves you can compel you to love Him back (see I John, Chapter 4), the scripture tells us that receiving God’s love will cause us to love others:

"Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." I John 4:11

Jesus said it in His own words when He echoed the command in Deuteronomy 6:4-6;36

"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" 37 Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." Matthew 22:36-40

There’s really no mystery here. People are what really matters. And the purpose of life? Love the people who matter. In doing so, you are loving God. So wherever you are, no matter your occupation or vocation this is THE point of all your life. Love people. Next week I’ll talk about “how”.

If you’ve missed the previous message you can click HERE to listen

Part 1: Finding What Matters Most

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Finding What Really Matters

We find ourselves living today in a culture where so many things compete for the position of “top priority” in our lives. The list may include work, family, friends, money, health, status, education or a million other important things. To complicate matters, different seasons of our lives may juggle our list of priorities more often than we’d like. This can make it really difficult to manage our time and the attention we give to other people and other passions in daily life.The following may seem like a contradiction to what we have come to believe about our relationship to God. It most certainly is something that, at first glance, looks as if it panders to exactly the misplaced focus of our western culture and the “ME” generation we live in.

What would you think if I told you that what matters most… is YOU! That’s right. When put in its proper perspective, the value you assess of yourself places life and the things of God in just the right priority order. Now, I’m not speaking here of the kind of self love that makes you stand in front of the bathroom mirror and tell yourself how great you look. I’m also not writing about the self absorption that tells us we’re better than anyone else, or smarter, happier, wealthier, yada, yada, yada. (You know, you can ‘yada, yada, yada’ almost anything…)

On the contrary, the self love I want you to think about is the kind that God tells us about in scripture over and over. One of my favorite places to find this idea is in Isaiah 45:18

“For this is what the LORD says— he who created the heavens, he is God;He who fashioned and made the earth, he founded it; he did not create it to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited— he says: "I am the LORD, and there is no other.” (NIV – emphasis added)

Isaiah tells us not just his own words, but the words of God who told Isaiah that He formed the world. Not to be a useless space, but to be inhabited. Well… by YOU. God made the earth with the express purpose that you and I, and everyone around us, dwell in it and inhabit its surface. When we know part of God’s purpose in creation, and how it relates to us, we can understand that we are valued by God. Before the great story of Jesus unfolded, before the coming return of the Lord to gather His children to Himself, God was already demonstrating His love for us by creating the earth FOR us. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a great expression of his love to us. And when you love something or someone, you know the true value they carry within themselves.

God is telling us that we matter to him. You are valued. And when you come to know this, you can begin to see how truly special you really are. And you can love yourself. Not in a vain, selfish manner. But as one who finds that they are precious in the sight of God. And that makes you precious indeed.

In his recent song “Everything Glorious”, David Crowder poses the question, “You make everything glorious and I am Yours. What does that make me?”

I hope you know the answer.

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welcome