I think open office spaces are a good thing, and it’s great that there are lots of opportunities to interact with people all throughout the day… but how do you get a moment to pray?  Figure A – is fine if you can close the door…  Not that I’m ashamed of praying, but I don’t want to make a big show of it either (Jesus said something about that once…) and I also don’t want to make people uncomfortable – I just want a quiet moment to talk to my father.  Figure B – is very effective for me.  And if you work in a place where people show lots of stress, and you’re feeling stressed, the hands over the face prayer works wonders…  But if you’re in a more lighthearted easy-going workplace, people might interrupt you to ask what’s wrong…  

Figure C – is great if your work involves a certain amount of reading and contemplating… It doesn’t have to be a book, it can be a stack of printouts or a quiet moment staring at your computer.  It’s the modern way of saying, “I’m mentally busy at the moment, please come back later.”

Figure D – is either for total slacker workplaces or for college students in the library; nevertheless it’s simple and effective.

And although I’m half-kidding with these (only half), the point is: it ought to be normal for you to steal away a few minutes during the day to talk to God: to vent, to ask, to lean on…This prayer can take the form of an inner dialogue wile going about your work – but sometimes we also need to pull Him aside and say: “i need to talk to you for a sec…” and do things like ask, “what should I do?”

So how do YOU pray during the work day?

Related posts:

1. The heartbreaking work of prayer…
2. Leading in prayer…
3. Does Prayer Work?

No one knows what that word means anymore: it doesn’t mean looking in the mirror and thinking you’re hot.  It means being “empty” or value or thought or purpose.  It’s usually not talking about things that we know don’t mean anything – that we do just for fun…like football: who the heck cares who wins?  It makes no difference in your life down the line – even if you’re a die-hard hard… and probably makes no difference in the world – but we just like it, it’s a game, it’s for fun – and that’s fine.  But vain is a word to highlight things that SEEM meaningful, seem worthy, but are really empty.  So one can work really hard in a career – only to get to the end and realize they are the king of sugar water, and no one cares, and no one should…  Is that too harsh?  I don’t mean to be, but the concept of vanity is that much of the things we go crazy about are really stupid in the end…

It is truly possible to throw yourself into work, killing yourself for stuff that doesn’t matter in the end – and not realize it.  Because while we’re doing the stuff, it seems worthwhile…  Any job that makes money FEELS worthwhile.  Anything that puts your skills to the test SEEMS like a great way to spend your life.  Anything that allows you to struggle and win feels like it’s doing something…even when it’s not.

Now people get nervous when someone talks like this, because they’re afraid that person is talking about them… but we know that we’re accepted by God, completely, radically, lovingly, undeserving-ly… that’s what the Cross is about, so we don’t have to feel judged.  And that frees us to figure out what we’re really doing with our lives…

“Am I loving God, and loving people? Am I actually serving people?  Or is my life in vain?”  How could I love God and love people where I am?  What would I need to do different to do this better?  What would I need to learn, what would I need to confess, or change or grow?

Middle class folks LOVE getting free stuff. I mean, who doesn’t right? So when we give generously to the poor, we think “O man, we just made their day! What great people we are!” And so this is what a lot of good people do or aspire to do… and we don’t understand when people in soup kitchens snicker, or a homeless person doesn’t want your food leftovers. “So ungrateful!” So we take it overseas or across the border to shower our generosity on more deserving poor, who smile as we bring them toilet paper and teach their children Jesus songs – and they bless us in God’s name, but then at some point we sense a hint of resentment, a snicker, or something… What’s going on? If you really just want to make yourself feel better and earn your title of “good person” by your generosity – and that’s all you want, then just keep doing what you’re doing. But if you want to understand why people (sometimes) don’t seem to want your charity, or scam you when they’re clearly in need, or resent your generosity, then read on.

In the public elementary school where I grew up, certain kids qualified to get free breakfasts and lunches. At lunch time they would file in and get their lunches first, and pay nothing; only then could the rest of the kids go get their food. What a great deal right? Free food AND you get to go first while everybody waits! The reality was that those kids did the walk of shame up to the lunch line. Sometimes kids would purposely not eat so that they didn’t have to make that walk. The kids that did get their free food didn’t look like they enjoyed it. Because even in elementary school they felt shame because of their situation… I know it’s not rational, none of the other kids actually worked for their lunches or earned their own money – and yet these kids felt like they were less because their parents couldn’t afford to pay for their meal plans.

Now imagine people coming into your home to bring you food for a Thanksgiving dinner, and your family expressing gratitude for the stuff that you could not provide them. It doesn’t make you feel good, it makes you feel worse. Because being poor is not about not-having-stuff, being poor is about lacking the power or ability to do stuff for yourself. Plenty of “rich” people in history have had less material goods than the “poor” people of today – and yet they felt rich! It’s not just because they compared themselves to neighbors – it’s because the poor lack power.

What happens when you give great free stuff to people who are poor? Free stuff in this context says “you can’t provide for yourself, let me provide for you” – it reinforces the problem of poverty, the inability to do for oneself, a lack of power to shape one’s own life…

I think this is important to understand… because in Jesus’ mind, being poor, or being poor in spirit was the starting point for all his Kingdom wisdom: the poor know stuff that we don’t, and we need to learn and partner with the poor because in God’s book, they’re chosen. Our world “chooses” the rich and gives them a special status; but God chooses the poor…

[Here's an excerpt from Robert Lupton's Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life]

Ancient Hebrew wisdom describes four levels of charity. The highest level is to provide a job for one in need without his knowledge that you provided it. The next lower level is to provide work that the needy one knows you provided. The third level is to give an anonymous gift to meet an immediate need. The lowest level of charity, to be avoided if at all possible, is to give a poor person a gift with his full knowledge that you are the donor.

Perhaps the deepest poverty of all is to have nothing of value to offer in exchange. Charity that fosters such poverty must be challenged. We know from 40 years of failed social policy that welfare depletes self-esteem while honorable work produces dignity. We know that reciprocity builds mutual respect while one-way giving brews contempt. Yet we continue to run clothes closets and free food pantries and give-away benevolence accounts and wonder why the joy is missing.

Perhaps it is our time and place in history to re-implement the wisdom of the ages and fashion contemporary models of thoughtful compassion. Our donated clothes could create thrift stores and job training. Our benevolence dollars could develop mini-economies within the economy — daycare, janitorial, fix-the-widow’s-roof services that would employ the jobless in esteem-building work. “Your work is your calling” declared the reformer Luther. Does not the role of the church in our day include the enabling of the poor to find their calling?

Related posts:

1. Gospel for the poor…
2. The Business of Poverty
3. The thing about being poor…

So here I am, and I’m teaching this series – but when I sat down to think about what I’d like to change and grow – I immediately came up with nothing.  Nada.  Zilch.  So right away I figure that part of the problem here is, not knowing what we need to change and grow…  I mean, I’m sure we see things we’d like to change and grow (at times), but they just seem so impossible, and we’ve been burned so often by our failures in the past, that we quickly file them away an ignore them…

So once we know that real change and growth IS possible, we have trouble accessing those files…  So here’s a little help to jog your memory.  What would you like to change or grow in yourself?

- Are you passionate for God?  Or are you more passionate about clothes, of football, or promotions, or food?

- Are you brave?  Or do you shrink back from things that take you out of your comfort zone?

- Are you kind with a Jesus like kindness?  Or do you settle for being “nice” with a hint of “don’t mess with me.”

- Are you deeply spiritual and joyful?  Or do you just think about food and money and respect like everyone else?

- Do you love people, your neighbors?  Or are you competing against them?

- Is God a daily part of your life, are you walking with Him, is He speaking to you? Or are you just religious?

- Are you setting your hopes on getting more money and promotions in the future?  Or are you trying to get more of God?

- Do you believe that God can really change your life?  That He is an active presence and power in it…  Or are you living on your own?

These are just a few. Feel free to add your own questions to the list in the comments section.

Related posts:

1. Growing vs. Changing
2. Changing and repenting…
3. Growing the Right Way

So it’s the farmers job to till the soil and plant the seed and take care of the garden, but it’s God’s job to make things grow.  A farmer who neglected to till, and plant seed but instead stood around trying to get seedling buds to open would have a crummy harvest…  No matter how hard he tries, he won’t reap a good reward.  And the sooner he throws his hands in the air and says, “I give up” the better!

The same is true with us! A lot of what we do is trying to do God’s part in our lives (managing outcomes)… and we neglect to do the basic things that are solely our responsibility.  So we try to make ourselves happy and patient and kind and successful, and content and to earn human glory and so forth; these are all God’s jobs.

So if you’re hitting a road block, getting to the end of your rope… Maybe it’s a good thing?  God is trying to tell you something.  Go figure out what your part is… What did God tell you is your part, and go do that, while trusting God to do His part.

Related posts:

1. How to Grow
2. Making God the One…
3. Common sources of glory…

Trusting God means that the stuff he wants for me is actually GOOD. Like trusting a chef who says, “I know this looks weird but just taste this…”  Or trusting a surgeon who says, “we’re going to put you under and cut you open to remove something…”  When people really know what they’re doing, and they’re on your side, you can trust them.  If you trust them, then you obey.  If you don’t trust them, you can argue, disagree, and not give them a chance.  But as a student of life, and Scripture, what I’m learning is that God can be trusted.

God is NOT trying to spoil your fun… Even when he says things like no sex outside marriage, or no porn, or no making idols out of work, or to focus more on inner beauty than outer beauty (for women to adorn themselves with good works rather than fine clothes and expensive jewelry).  He says these things so you can know true love, and have a great sex life, and a great career, and really be drop dead gorgeous. [Those aren't the only things God wants you to do, but they're the ones that come up often when people just get started with this.  ]

God isn’t mad at me when I fail; he’s on my side.  So when I do fail in some way I can run to him and ask for help.  I can take a good hard look at my failures, and look at them together with God, because I know he’s not judging me.  And oddly, because I know he’s not judging me (since Jesus has taken all judgment for me), I actually WANT to change.  God is not calling me to holiness (that much maligned English word) to live up to some arbitrary standard; He’s calling me to holiness because holiness and happiness go together!

Happy people are content. Happy people don’t make idols out of career or money.  Happy people are faithful to one another and to God.  Happy people are people who keep their promises and appointments.  Happy people are people who carry other people’s burdens.  Happy people are people who make a difference in this world by living like Jesus…  Because the stuff God wants is actually good for us, and makes life awesome.

Related posts:

1. Change
2. How to pray for personal growth/change…
3. Redefining holiness…

Related posts:

1. Christmas Lessons…2011 edition
2. My dumb valentines post
3. Summer in the City

One reason why Jesus is hard for you to know right now is (probably) because you’re a snob:  You have certain standards for what people need to be in order to be “worthy” of your attention.  You have certain standards of what people need to have in order to be considered “smart” or worth listening to.  And Jesus probably does not have any of those things…  He probably does not look the way you’d like him to look, talk the way you’d like him to talk – or say things that you really want him to say…  And so in our snobbery you filter him out.

Don’t worry, the rest of the world pretty much did the same thing already, so you’re not alone.  It’s really hard to imagine for many people with grad degrees that anyone who never went to college could be smart.  And it’s even more difficult to imagine someone who never finished high school could be smart. Jesus never wrote a book, held an office, earned a degree, taught a class, owned a home, raised a family of his own, or any of the things we spend our lives chasing after… So could you really take relationship advice from someone who’s never been married or financial advice from someone who never made a lot of money?  Or beauty advice from someone who was never considered attractive?  Exactly.

So to get around this we build fake Jesus-es in our mind: Jesus-es that we can more readily accept as the Lord of our lives…  Because if Jesus never had these things (and he could have had them), that means that these things that we spent so much energy chasing after don’t really matter all that much…and we just can’t accept that.

But here’s how you can start getting to know the real Jesus…  Do what you’ve already been doing, studying the Bible, praying, debating ideas at church, reading Christian books…  But first here’s what you need to do different: stop being a snob.  The early church naturally became ethnically diverse and socio-economically diverse – because believers who knew Jesus realized all the stuff that was important to them didn’t matter – and they stopped being snobs.  Knowing Jesus forced them to stop being snobs.  Another word for “stopping snobbiness” is humbling yourself.  The things you think make you so great do not.  Instead knowing Jesus humbles you, and transforms you, and in doing so you actually do become great.

Related posts:

1. Don’t be a snob…
2. The Old Testament Jesus
3. Recognizing Jesus

Here’s a really fascinating talk by Daniel Goldstein dealing with the problems we all face with self control and will power…  Part of you wants to save money, but the other part wants to buy stuff now.  Part of you wants to lose weight and stay on your diet, the other part wants a Shack Stack and a side of curly fries.  The most common way we deal with problems of will power are “commitment devices.”  We can get rid of all the junk food in our house, or lock up our credit cards… and by doing that the “sensible self” is forcing the “other self” to comply.  And although it can work – and sometimes it’s the best we can do – there are fundamental problems with doing this… So if you’re interested in what one brilliant mind in behavioral economics has to say, check out the talk, it’s an interesting 16 minutes – and then read the rest…

So here’s my conclusion when it comes to the will power problem, after listening to the talk… We’re all doomed.  So there are “devices” we can use to help aid our “future selves” make the decisions for us (like “commitment devices” and his program). But if THAT is best that the most intelligent people in our world can offer – we’re doomed!  Because we’ll win some battles, but we’ll lose many as well… And overall, people who don’t save won’t be able to save for the future – and people who have trouble with dieting won’t be able to stick to their diet till the end… we’re doomed.  Our “present selves” our less-responsible, less-rational selves are too strong.  How many times have I said “I’ll never do that again” only to do that again?

Or as Paul says in Romans 7:

I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out…For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.

So here’s the Bible’s solution: instead of using external means to try to curb our irresponsible selves – the Bible’s solution is to go to our ROOT motivations and change them so that we no longer WANT to do those things… So when we overeat, over-spend, over-play, get over-sexed, over-work, over-anything…it’s usually because we want comfort and feeling of significance that comes from it.  But by accepting Jesus’ message, and *believing* it, we get that which Martin Luther called “a wholly alien righteousness” given to us as a gift – a significance and a glory that outshines the best of what money or food or sex or earthly applause can offer.

Instead of trying to fix a broken machine (which is us) by attaching other mechanisms to the outside of it (like commitment devices, and web apps) – God’s plan is to open us up and give us a new way of thinking that comes from believing we’re sinners saved by grace.  If this intrigues you, if this sounds like something that you need, then join us in learning about God’s message…

Related posts:

1. Why save money? (outrageous idea part 2)
2. The power of plausibility…
3. The 3C’s…

10. Get a great routine… The most important parts of your life is not the things you do once in a while, it’s the stuff you do regularly.  Make church a regular part of your life.  Take a class, get season tickets to something and do that every year.

9. Throw out your television, you don’t need one.  If you have must-watch shows, use tivo or DVD’s – that way your life doesn’t revolve around the network’s schedule.

8. Stop trying to make long distance friends a regular part of your life – instead invest in the people you have here… (Okay I know that one can come across wrong – but the people who are most miserable where they are, tend to be people who’s closest friends are living in different time zones.  Live where you are, not where you’re not.)

7. Set up a Wednesday night dinner (or something like that) where you meet up with friends on a regular basis.  Find friends that live close enough that they can do this…  find someplace cheap to eat where they’ll let you sit around and not have to buy lots of drinks…

6. Stop telling yourself you’re moving someplace else next year.  Maybe you will, later, but right now you’re here.  As long as you’re here you need to build your life here… Otherwise when you move there, you’ll eventually do the same thing.

5. Spend time in God’s Word. Learn it.  Own it.  Live it.

4. Get in touch with your body.  Notice how what you eat affects your moods and energy levels.  Notice how right amounts of sleep and exercise helps change your energy levels in the following days.  This requires a scientific mindset because cause and effect are usually not immediate.  Take a multivitamin, don’t eat instant foods, get plenty of sleep, exercise.

3. Forgive people. This is not only for God’s sake, and it’s not only for the sake of the person you’re forgiving – but it will take a load off your emotional burdens.  And long term it will teach you what it means that you too are forgiven.

2. Read good books. Read some Christian books too.  I’ve always read a bit… but I never thought it was “mandatory” for other people – but I notice that people who grow usually read.  People who stay the same either read only trashy books, or don’t read at all.  So read something that will be worth reading in 200 years.  Or, if it’s Christian literature, and you’re able, read stuff that is really really often  read AND really really old.

1. Invest in your church. Make it (in a sense) your surrogate for God… Not that you should listen to your church “as though it were God…” no, that’s the mistake the Medieval Church made…  Instead, take your love and devotion for God and direct it toward the people and the work of the Church.  That’s what Jesus meant (I think) when he asked Peter “do you love me?” And then said… “feed my sheep.”

Got any other suggestions?  Share the wealth in the comments section!

Related posts:

1. How to Get the Most Out of Life
2. Making friends in a church…
3. Sharing your life…