Choices “I am working on a major project that requires my time right now, and it’s really important and strategic to the company. I will have to work late again tonight. I’m sorry, but the company needs me right now. Can you leave my dinner in the microwave and tell the kids that I love them before you put them to bed?” Distracted as I hang up the phone, I slip back into my blind devotion to the needs of the company, convincing myself that I am really doing this for my family so I can provide a better life for them. Looking for my value, my self-worth, and my identity with position and success, I would always choose a safe retreat into my hiding place of counterfeit affirmation—selling my soul to my work. Receiving the glory of man through the recognition of another successful project; earning more money; advancing to that next, higher title on the corporate ladder, I continued to retreat from the pain and insecurities of my fractured life, protecting my empire as I chased my American dream with a blind devotion. The dream of this empire was something I wanted so badly that I failed to listen to that little voice inside trying to warn me that I was walking down a bad path. I would continue to perform on the world stage desperately trying to gain my identity. Ignoring the inner sadness slowly tightening around me, I didn’t realize that underneath this drive was a deep desire to just be accepted. I became a slave to my own empire, running without a purpose, and I didn’t even know it. Have you ever heard that we all have a story to tell? Do you believe it? Do you think you have a story that anyone else would really want to hear or really even care about? Relentlessly pursuing me my whole life the Lord would speak to me, but the storm inside of me and noise around me would always drown out His voice. Well, one day, somehow, I was able to hear and listen to His voice. He began to whisper to my heart to share my story. Writing not being close to anything that resembles a talent of mine, my initial reaction was, “You want me to do what?” God was calling me to the ridiculous. Maya Angelou captures it best when she said: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” I kind of liked the idea that my story was untold, but it was hard to wrap my head around the idea that the Creator of the universe seriously wanted me to write my story and share it. I tried really hard to convince Him that He had the wrong guy and that writing a book was a really bad idea, but His answer to all my excuses was always the same, “Nevertheless, I will be with you!” God calling people when they are not ready is a consistent theme throughout scripture and I think He does this on purpose. OK, so back to the story… Sooner or later, we all come to crossroads in our life where we will be given the opportunity to keep the pen and continue writing our own story or to put it down and let God write us into His story. This is a place where we will have a head-on collision with ourselves, a place where we will be forced to look into the mirror and confront ourselves to see the stuff that we are really made of. It’s a place where we are faced with the piercing question: Are we having an impact on our world? Or is it having an impact on us? This world is not our final destination—it is our journey! His word, or what I like to call His redemptive love letter, tells us that before He shaped us in the womb He knew all about us. Did you catch that? God knew everything about us before He created us! Life has a way of blinding us to the reality that our very existence is His miracle. We soon discover that our journey in this world has so many competing demands distracting us from our true destination that we usually miss both the journey and the destination all together. Consumed with my empire building, I lost sight of what was important in life and sadly “arriving” became more important than “becoming.” Because I was so focused on what was next, I was never able to enjoy living in the moment. How much of the journey do we miss because we are so focused only on the destination? Our choices, our idols, and the stuff we covet have significant impact on us. What we fail to see is that God is more concerned with who we are becoming than with our empire building. Oddly enough, so are our wives and kids. Power to choose; why does God allow this? Have you ever given much thought to why God gave us the ability to make choices? Are you like me with a record breaking number of wrong choices? Have you ever thought about the impact of your choices when you barely escaped with your life on the back side of one of life’s storms? I wonder if God wrestled with the idea of giving us the freedom to make choices when He created us. He may have, but He created us out of love…to love Him…and love is a choice! So the power to choose was given to us. Journeying through life with this power to choose I would listen to every voice available to me except the voice of Truth. My misguided seeking opened the door for the enemy to come in and wreak havoc in my life. There were many things competing to become the god of my life, but unfortunately I won and I became that god. Newton’s third law of motion profoundly states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So when we ignore the truth of God’s word and choose to live life our own way, for ourselves, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The corruption of this world, our self-centeredness, and the enemy of our soul rob us of the truth, which slowly drags us to our place of bondage, far from the freedom we could have. There is that unmistakable pull of human nature that always wants to draw us back toward dysfunction. This is satan’s plan, and when he is given the opportunity, he will steal everything from us because it is his nature. I have allowed him to take much from me! How about you? Jesus says in the tenth chapter of John that “the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” Choices. Ignoring the Lord, I became more and more blinded by my self-righteousness and foolish pride. Living life my way and making more poor choices, I eventually lost myself along the way. Sadly, I know what it feels like to stand at life’s edge and not know myself anymore—to be lost in my own misery. I know how much it hurts to pretend that I don’t feel life’s pains anymore and how numbing it is to experience the crushing anguish of hitting rock bottom. This is the shattered reality that I chose when it was all left up to me. I was desperately lost. The good news is that my circumstances were not hopeless, and neither is yours. By the endless magnitude of His Grace and through the power of His spirit, hope does eclipse hopelessness. The questions before me were not easy! King Solomon, a man who had experienced everything, challenges us with a piercing question of vivid clarity: “What does it profit us if we gain the whole world and lose our soul? My vanity of vanities chasing down the winds has left me so empty inside.” This empty darkness consumes our hearts until we come to that day of hope when we allow His light to shine upon us. My life is still messy, and I don’t have it all figured out, but even though that’s my reality, my hope is to be a voice through all the noise. This is my story, my testimony, His story. We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us! —1 Corinthians 13:12 (MSG) Defeated, broken, and numbed by a quiet desperation, I hid my face in my hands, fighting to hold back the tears. It was on a curbside at a Promise Keepers event in Albany, New York, in 2004, where the Lord prearranged a divine appointment with one of the pastors in our group. “Tell me what’s going on,” he said. So I began to paint for him my life canvas titled Misery. “To be honest,” I said, “my wife wants a divorce, and I feel that God has completely abandoned me! I feel like I have failed as a husband, as a father to my kids, and as an executive in the workplace. I failed myself as someone who calls himself a Christian.” With trembling lips, I looked up at him and began to weep. I had lived behind a mask watching people labor through life’s difficult circumstances with an empty compassion; never offering much grace. With a distorted myopic view of my present reality, I chose to see people going through the motions of life expecting sympathy without any hope of a new tomorrow. I had convinced myself that they followed some scripted destiny with hopeless desperation. My perspective was so distorted. With self-righteous arrogance, I would judge people because of the reckless choices they made, always offering condemnation instead of my love. Over time, my inside reality became rooted with a deep contempt fueled at the expense of others. No one could have ever convinced me that my problems resulted from reckless choices I had made, as I silenced any criticism from others. I was about to look into the mirror and confront the real me. I never realized that the imposter was me. My soul was about to have a midnight. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going. —John 12:35 (ESV) My kids would call me at work and ask me if I could come to one of their events, and I always responded with an excuse, telling them that my work was really important. I would get calls from my wife wondering if I would be home to eat dinner with the family or hoping that I wouldn’t be working late again. My weekends were wasted as I spent more time in the office giving more of myself to the taskmasters. I would find more and more to do to feed on the empty acceptance which never seemed to satisfy. Business trips required me to start traveling internationally, and I would always choose to travel alone without any thought of inviting my family. I would come home from a late night at the office and selfishly choose a silent retreat right into the home office to continue my work, further isolating my wife and kids. What I didn’t see was the contempt that began to take root between my wife and me. My family was slowly slipping away, and I was letting it. Acting from a self-authored script on my own stage of life, I foolishly performed to the audience of this world, only seeing Jesus as a supplement to the playbill. I never knew the world looked at me through stained-glass eyes as it observed the apex of my achievements. I convinced everyone that my marriage was perfect, that my success in the corporate world was the greatest achievement ever, and that the material stuff and the financial success I obtained somehow made me someone. I convinced myself that I was in complete control of the world I created and that I was absolutely untouchable as long as I had my stuff to hide behind. With broad brushstrokes, I painted this far-fetched illusion that I alone was the motivating force behind all this success. Arrogantly striving to live up to the expectations of this performance-oriented view of the world, I built a present-day tower of Babel with my own hands—stone by stone. I learned the difficult lesson that a preoccupation with “self” distorts our perspective to view everything and everyone primarily based on the way they affect us in the moment. My relationships became more and more self-serving, and success, position, and material possessions became my security and my reality. The extent of this foolishness did not leave much space for my family and God in my fractured and fragmented life. At this stage in my life, God was simply a convenience, and I hid behind the misused word Christian as so many of us do. James Hudson Taylor, the English missionary to China, tells it like it is, “Christ is either Lord of all, or He is not Lord at all.” Our internal and external reality must be centered in God. With this foolish and self-centered attitude, I created a god that only met my selfish needs, and sadly enough, I was OK with that for much of my life. We have our iPods, our iPads and sadly we have our iGods. I was completely consumed by the disease of self, and it raced through my veins, eating away at my very soul like cancer. Good understanding wins favor, but the way of the unfaithful is hard. —Proverbs 13:15 (NIV) We grumble that living life God’s way is too tough, too boring, or for some reason, we will miss out on something while we destroy ourselves walking the road of the devil. The natural life in each of us is something self-centered, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe. —C. S. Lewis If you start thinking to yourselves, “I did all this. And all by myself. I’m rich. It’s all mine!”—well, think again. Remember that GOD, your God, gave you the strength to produce all this wealth so as to confirm the covenant that he promised to your ancestors—as it is today. If you forget, forget GOD, your God, and start taking up with other gods, serving and worshiping them, I’m on record right now as giving you firm warning: that will be the end of you; I mean it—destruction. You’ll go to your doom—the same as the nations GOD is destroying before you; doom because you wouldn’t obey the Voice of GOD, your God. —Deuteronomy 8:17–20 (MSG) Why is it that most of us become spiritually lazy as we accept and embrace a passive existence stumbling through the shadows of life looking for love and acceptance? Have you ever noticed that we actually go out of our way to stay off the rough roads of life? It seems that our primary objectives become securing a peaceful retreat from the world, thinking only about ourselves, and finding a hiding place from the turbulence of life. We all seem to find it so much easier to simply go along with the status quo, which over time actually leads to a life of heart-numbing mediocrity, and we settle for something less than God’s best. Does God share with us in His word some thoughts about this? I think He does. Consider the story of Moses. God heard the cries of the oppressed Israelite slaves, and He enters history to deliver them from the tyranny of Pharaoh and the bondage of Egypt. After the captives have been set free from Egypt, God meets with them in the wilderness to make them His people. They enter into a covenant with God promising to love and to serve Him in response to His gracious acts of deliverance. God then promises them a land in which they could be His people. God actually hangs out with these people wanting to connect with them in a loving relationship. Can you imagine that? That would be awesome! If that happened to us, we would be convinced! Convinced for life! Wouldn’t we? Well, let’s see what happens… When the Israelites entered into the Promised Land, they built altars and sanctuaries to worship God and began living as His people. Years passed, they settled into the land and became way too comfortable drinking from the fountains of complacency. The passion they had once celebrated for their deliverance out of bondage slowly began to fade. Sound familiar? Many of us serve God as long as it’s convenient. For many of us, this transformation unravels from Sunday to Monday. The priests tried to maintain the sanctuaries throughout the land and to keep the worship alive, but the people could see little advantage in serving God from their places of comfort and prosperity. They became so absorbed with their own self-interests that their commitment to God faded away. In time, their hearts became divided, and they began to worship other gods. Like so many of us today, they never totally abandoned the worship of the God who brought them out of Egypt; they simply added into that worship all the other gods they wanted to serve. They gradually began to forget who they were as God’s people and the new generation of children growing up had finally abandoned God for pursuit of their own pleasure. The book of Judges ends with one of the most chilling verses in the Bible: People did whatever they felt like doing. (MSG) They lost perspective of God… Does this sound vaguely familiar? Are you getting this? When we substitute a life with God with the deceptions and promises this world has to offer, all of our dreams will fade and the mighty walls of our storehouses will come crashing down, but we never know when. Continues... | 
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