Posts Tagged ‘sacrifice’

What is Love?

// March 17th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // My Thoughts

Don’t be fooled… Love is pain… plain and simple…if you don’t agree then check with the creator of the universe…I am sure he can arrange some learning experiences.   There is an interesting facet of love though… the things that we love are the things that we devote our time to…the things we sacrifice for… the people we love are the people we devote our time to… and sacrifice for… so what happens when we begin to focus on other things… and other people?

A key principal of love is found in Matthew 6:24

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

so we love one and hate the other… strong stuff and a lot of people only apply this verse to money or worldliness… oh contrare!   this applies to ANY  two objects of desire that are comprised of opposing qualities. Whatever your focus… that is where your energies will be spent… plain and simple…

Couple with relationship difficulties

We give our energies to the things we choose to love

  • Dark Chocolate or White Chocolate
  • Rice or Potatoes
  • Boobs or Butt
  • Baked or Fried
  • Work or family
  • God or Money
  • Video Games or Wife
  • Wife or Girlfriend? (yep I said it!)
  • Wife or Porn?  (yep that too!!)

Do I have your attention yet?   all of these things are vying for our affections!  The sad truth is that often we trade one for the other and slowly! Its a slow fade when you give yourself away! We cannot help who we are and how we are made… we love attention and we love pleasure and our one desire is to heap as much of it onto ourselves that we can stand!  The devastating effect of love is that human love that is injured looks exactly like hate. We lash out and begin to destroy each other and cut ties and alienate each other… entire families are destroyed because relationships are allowed to break down and people begin to choose to love something else… Why would you choose that?!?   Its not that we consciously choose to destroy relationships… its just that we choose other relationships… relationships that make  us feel better and are not so much work… relationships that are more convenient… relationships that stimulate our minds… relationships that stimulate our emotions… and ultimately at some point … because we are finite beings… we choose to love the one… and hate the other…
Next Stop – Heartbreak Hotel…

The balance point has shifted… you have moved your allegiances… the things you once valued now are worth nothing! suddenly you can recognize with clarity that all of your sacrifice and hardship for the thing that you once loved are so worthless… and there is a measure of truth to that… the people that we sacrifice the most for in love… become the people we detest the most!  Once we cancel our “love contract” (I call it the “Injured Love Paradox”)  hearts are walled up and even reasonable attempts to re-ignite love are stopped at the gate.  When you decide that all of your sacrifices for the sake of love are no longer of value you are practically laying a stick of dynamite at the base of the dam… and lighting the fuse… The dam breaks and all those devalued sacrifices rush downstream and carry you away in the debris. I cannot say this strongly enough…If you decide to devalue the sacrifices you have made in the name of love -by abandoning love- you are effectively turning the keys to all of those sacrifices to satan himself!

If you decide to devalue the sacrifices you have made in the name of love -by abandoning love- you are effectively turning the keys to all of those sacrifices to satan himself!

and he will not hesitate to use each and every sacrifice to cut you deeply and painfully… his goal is for you to abandon love… to lose hope… to reject the idea of sacrificial love… because if he can convince you that the sacrifices are not worth the pain… you become self serving rather than Christ Serving… and his battle is won…

What is love???   Love is pain… love is heartbreak… love is watching everybody close up shop and go home… and holding out… hoping that someone out there still needs you to sacrifice  your needs … for them.

Tags: Love, Marriage, relationship, sacrifice

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Finding The Strength To Be Radical

// February 19th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // My Life, My Thoughts

Most of the time I feel like an average guy… in fact almost all the time I feel like for some reason or other I actually fall below average… I am petty, egotistical, boisterous, insensitive, and childish. But deep in my heart there is a strong desire to be remarkable… to be above average…to live without the handicaps that I so often place upon myself.  Unfortunately what comes out of me often feels like a lumbering Ox trying to escape a yoke that just does not- seem- to fit!  I look at life in a simplistic manner… it is an adventure…that we should embrace and own in every way… the good and the bad.  But somehow jobs, and rules and societies “norms”, keeping up with the joneses,  comes and steals away the adventure of life.  And we often get convinced that all we really need is a bigger TV, a new vehicle, a better house.  What we don’t realize is that all of those things can form a prison that forces us to take the good paying, stressful jobs that end up sucking the life out of  us…. and we end up as mindless drones cranking out an existence, wondering whatever happened to the spark of life… when do we get to relax?  or better yet how do we relax?  We are so close to multi-tasking ourselves out of existence that we can’t even realize that almost every part of our lives are crumbling around us…It has taken me the better part of 34 years to figure out that all of the things that I thought were important actually don’t matter at all.  Many people talk about being radical but I don’t witness it very often in real life,  I often see people “acting” radical but they only go far enough to make a splash.  I decided a while back that I want out of this rat race lifestyle driven by a never ending hunger for more money and more stuff… I started analyzing my buying habits and my motives for spending money. I decided to get out of debt and I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.  But more than that I am finding the strength to be radical in my commitment to become a more focused child of God. I am seeing the benefits of turning my back on materialism and thoughtless living. The further I walk away from the ideals of materialism the more power and authority I gain over my life to actually live in freedom.

So what about you?  have your found the strength to be radical in your life? Have you sacrificed any earthly comforts or amenities to reap spiritual or lifestyle benefits?

Tags: materialism, sacrifice

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Wasted, Totally Wasted

// December 8th, 2009 // No Comments » // My Thoughts

Wasted Life... Wasted Perfume

Wasted Life... Wasted Perfume

How typical!… that whore just wasted a whole bottle of perfume! What good does that do?  The fragrance is so strong at first that you have to breathe cautiously lest you gag on it.  Think of all the beggars that would love to have a meal and here she is wasting this valuable perfume as if it is nothing.  Oh now she is wailing and crying… this is so embarrassing! like Jesus would want a whore to be touching him and rubbing his feet with her hair… who knows who else she has done that to just today alone!?

How many of us are so like this woman… self serving, sexually immoral, gaudy, loud, embarrassing…  yet would we dare to waste the most precious things we have, even our lives… as a sacrifice to honor Jesus.  That we would break our hearts, like she broke the jar of perfume and waste the contents on our Savior!

I say “Waste” for several reasons… My hearts desire is to daily be able to waste myself on others with abandon… with no thought as to the value of the gift! We so easily “Waste” money and time and effort on things that mean so little yet when there is a sacrifice to make for the sake of others… we would suddenly have the urge to be wise and discerning.  It is a lie… but we have told it to ourselves for so long that we truly believe it!

I do not choose to live my life with caution… I have a strong aversion to the status quo… The older I get the more I desire to be earthy and wild and rough around the edges. To embrace my humanity from the perspective of grace,  rather than to beat it into moral submission.  I am learning to love the man that God has created in me… and learning to let me… be me… in his grace…rather than pretending to be perfect.

I say “Waste” because even our entire lives poured out with abandon does not qualify as a “token effort”
I say “Waste” because we should dash our hearts against the earth like the old bottles that we waste when we throw them away… without a care for their well being… because our love is not contained in our hearts… it flows down from God.
I say “Waste” because we should be so generous that it would sicken those who would feel satisfied with tokens of morality
I say “Waste” because anything that has not been poured out on every speck of humanity at the end of our days… would be more of a waste.

What stirs my heart more than anything is the desire to learn to  “Waste” myself for the sake of the name of Jesus… because I have already wasted so much on so many other things…

Luke 7

36One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to have dinner with him, so Jesus went to his home and sat down to eat.h 37When a certain immoral woman from that city heard he was eating there, she brought a beautiful alabaster jar filled with expensive perfume. 38Then she knelt behind him at his feet, weeping. Her tears fell on his feet, and she wiped them off with her hair. Then she kept kissing his feet and putting perfume on them.
39When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know what kind of woman is touching him. She’s a sinner!”

Mark 14
Jesus Anointed at Bethany
1Now the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were only two days away, and the chief priests and the teachers of the law were looking for some sly way to arrest Jesus and kill him. 2″But not during the Feast,” they said, “or the people may riot.”

3While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.

4Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? 5It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages[a] and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly.

6″Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 7The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me. 8She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. 9I tell you the truth, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

Tags: jesus, Perfume, sacrifice, waste, wasteful, woman

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Friends

// October 13th, 2009 // 4 Comments » // My Life

I’m a lover… not a fighter.   it’s true! anyone that knows me well will tell you…  I may be a serious looking bald guy but I am just a big ole teddy bear.  I tend to make friends easily… and.. I take people at face value.  I always give people the benefit of the doubt, (some would say to my detriment) and as much as my mind tells me otherwise, my heart always believes that most people will put others before themselves.  All of that being said, it sometimes feels incredibly difficult for me to maintain solid mutual friendships.  I am not talking about the shallow friendships you make at work or the occasional buddy that shows up to borrow a tool.  I am talking about a friendship that goes both ways… you would do anything for each other, and no matter how busy you are you would drop what you are doing to help each other out.  But even deeper than that a friendship where you can trust each other, for honesty, and for the hard questions.  These days people seem to be just too busy to be good friends, so absorbed in their own lives and taking care of themselves that there is little time to actually take the time to be a friend. Maybe I am spoiled because of my best friend Jonathan, even though we are 16 hours apart, we still talk on a regular basis. Jonathan has often been more of a friend to me than I could have ever expected. He has sacrificed his time and money and his heart as my friend.  Together we have walked through some hard places, and he has been everything you could ask for as a friend. As I look through the people in my life, everyone that I have loved as friends, I find that Jonathan stands alone as a truly loyal friend. At the same time I find that I have become jaded and less open to friendships because so many friends have really only been there as friends while it benefited them.  Is it really that hard to find people like Jonathan?   I think it is really detrimental to our overall well being if strong solid friendships are so few and far between.

Take the time to invest in a real friendship, make some sacrifices, pick up the phone, or just show up  in peoples lives more often.  How good of a friend are you to your friends?

Tags: friends, relationships, sacrifice

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Make the Choice you Have

// October 4th, 2009 // 4 Comments » // My Life, My Thoughts

I have spent most of my life saying things like “if only ___fill in the blank_________ then I could _____fill in the blank___ .   We often try to see our life as we think it should be and not as it actually is.  The problem with constantly looking at our lives in this way is that we never truly face the reality of what our life actually is.  It is not very exciting and romantic to see our lives this way but it makes it very difficult for us to make excuses.  I will give you an example.  We have recently experienced a terrific strain on our finances, and I found myself making excuses for why I could not do anything about it… I kept looking into the future saying ” When I get the money then I will pay off these bills that are putting so much pressure on me.”  Not a bad sentiment really but I suddenly saw myself in a year saying the same thing..and still under the thumb of these credit cards!  I realized that it is easy for me to put off making sacrifices when I can push them into future indefinitely.  And the thought came to my mind,  why don’t you make the choices you have now… not the ones you think you will have in the future. The more I thought about it the more I realized how I could completely avoid living my life and just make excuses for the rest of my life because I never had the choices that I thought I should have.  Ultimately I decided to pay off my bills quickly and  I have to make some big sacrifices and rent a much smaller place and put some of my dreams on hold for a while… but it was the right choice to make… because it was MY choice!  It was immediately liberating  and exciting because just by making that simple choice I am living MY LIFE again!  I see people every day that make excuses for why they don’t do things differently and ultimately it comes down to the simple fact that most of them just don’t want to make the sacrifices required to do things differently… so just by making the decision that it IS worth the sacrifice, and following through-  my life will change and theirs will remain the same…

You can only make the choices you have

You can only make the choices you have

It’s simple really… if you have the choice of  red or black licorice whips common sense tells you that you cannot choose blue licorice whips!  chocolate and bubble gum are pretty much out too…   even if the guy right next to you has the choice of chocolate or bubblegum  you still do not have that choice available to you… now once you have made your choice and he has made his… maybe you can trade with him… but only if he wants to.  So don’t try to Make the choices that you don’t have …   Make the choices you have.

Tags: choice, responsibility, sacrifice

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Waiver of Parental Rights

// August 31st, 2009 // 6 Comments » // My Confessions, My Life

I am thinking tonight about Abraham, walking up the hill to sacrifice his firstborn son, his only heir. These days God doesn’t just stop by for a visit and start up the conversation “I need you to make a sacrifice for me”, there are no stone altars, or rams caught in the thicket in the nick of time. There are lawyers and loafers, children and adults, men, and women, all in some way seeking their own interests. These days the issues are clouded and principals are less important. Being right, or winning, or out maneuvering your opponent is more important. These days if you do something wrong, just be sure you file the paperwork right and everything will be easy like butter. What you don’t say is more important than what you do say, and how you don’t say it is even more important! It is not doing the right thing but looking like you are doing the right thing while you are cashing out on someone else’s misfortune.

As I looked at the “waiver of parental rights” affidavit that old feeling came over me… the cold clammy fingers of fear and dread gripped over my heart squeezing it until my throat felt like I was swallowing a baseball. “It has come to this…” I breathed. There are really no words to express the feeling of being asked to sign a piece of paper that legally divorces you from your own child. The reality is that there are no words for these types of things at all… How horrible of a parent do you have to be for such a document to be necessary? Where is the rope that you grab to keep you from falling further down the nightmarish rabbit hole, where big is little and up is down? Perspective is all a matter of reality suddenly… the reality is that you have to make a choice… you have to think about “that which you would never willingly conceive of in your mind”… I am a man of reason, so how do you list your priorities and mark them off until you reach a reasonable decision? How… How do you even think about trying to choose?

The phone rings…he says it is what he wants, I will still be his dad… just not on paper.
I look at the paper… everyone says… fight! and win! God is for you! but the many years of seemingly good choices are dulled by a foggy perception…It is like looking back on a mine field where I stepped on every single mine and somehow survived. How can any choice be a good choice once you make the choice to walk through a minefield? I put my hand up to the past and turn away… “no” I cannot go there… others claim to remember it better than I do… and different… so different that I doubt myself… I wonder how my heart can be so sincere and yet so faulty… as faulty as my memory? The phone rings… he has questions… why I made choices… why I didn’t make others… I honestly don’t know… The questions are perfect and concise…. the type that don’t need answers… just delivery.

I sit… I sign. I sign the “waiver of parental rights” I go see a notary and look for the judgement on his face as he notarizes the “waiver of parental rights” I go to the post office and the postal worker drags the “waiver of parental rights” out of my resistant hand with a quizzical look. As the envelope leaves my hand my mind hears the deafening chorus of the abandoned as they scream at me of the fear of the unknown. I smile at the postal worker like a victim with a gun in his back as I swipe my card to pay the postage for the “waiver of parental rights”

The phone rings… people say… “you did the right thing” some of them are the same people that said “fight and win!” I think about all the times I have ignored the council of “Job’s Friends” thinking to have done the right thing, only to be found here apparently winning their approval… I value it little.. I value it less than little. I close my eyes to imagine a simpler time when life was catching toads and building forts.

(This post is a very real and honest post that describes the events surrounding the day that I actually did sign a “waiver of parental rights” for my first born son Collin James Carroll. My Ex-wife continues to actively read this blog and pass along my confessions that are meant for your encouragement as information that causes him to question my character and loyalty to him. My reasons for this post are not for the sake of drama, or sympathy, or counsel. I am simply hoping that through this post that you gain an insight and understanding possibly an empathy for those that are facing similar issues in life.)

Tags: Art, blog, choice, choices, dad, doing the right thing, dread, fear, friends, God, perception, perspective, sacrifice, sin, the past

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