Am I an Idiot?

Do you ever have those times in your life where you just feel crazy? You wonder how you got here. Trying to figure out if there is actual purpose to your position or it was just bad decisions? Man, condemnation comes quick doesn’t it? Looking for its opportunity, ready to pounce. It also leaves me wondering what we are doing in our lives to counteract those bad voices. Do we have just as many of those voices of encouragement and affirmation speaking to us? I know I don’t. I am very quick to point out in my own life where I could be doing better, but very slow to ask others for words of value.

Another thought about having those voices of encouragement; Do I feel shame for needing those good voices in my life? Does that make me too needy? I don’t hear anyone else asking for those good voices. Maybe I just need to be more gutsy in asking those that are close for words of love.

Living in Retrospect

I’m not sure how it works for a woman but it feels like most older men I talk to their perspective on life is addressing success and failure through looking back, not engaging the present. They say things like, I should have worked less and spent more time with the kids, or, I didn’t see this event coming and I should have changed things earlier. Or they talk about the good old days….

To be honest it feels like a cruel joke. Its like saying you wont feel 70% of what you are going through until you are on the other side. Or maybe that is the challenge of life, living in the present, feeling what is going on right now.

And maybe that’s where listening to older men comes in. They now what they have missed out on, or capitalized on. So why not listen to them? I know we rarely do, but maybe its time to stop and listen.

Take Out The Males

15 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, 16 “When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.”
-Exodus 1

I know there are so many voices out there talking about how men in general are under assault. Men being passive on and on. I don’t want to sound like another one of those voices. But this passage caught my attention. No other passage has caught my attention like this; about the flagrant assault to completely take out a race. And to take out a race you take out the males, not the females. It made me think on a larger scale, on a higher level. How are we as men being taken out before we even get a chance to “become” men? And what race would the enemy be taking out now?

Being Misunderstood

What if you went most of your life being misunderstood? You’d say one thing, people would think something different. You would perform an act for a certain purpose and people would interpret in a totally different manner. I feel that way sometime. I take a young man out fishing and people think its about the fishing, heck or that its even about catching a fish yet it is not. Fishing or catching fish is just a context not the end goal.

I can almost guarantee that Jesus felt this way 99% of the time. Misunderstood by the teachers, his disciples, and his people. Jesus says he has to go to the cross, Peter is there to tell him no way. People think he is the messiah that will come and squash the Roman Empire and restore Israel, he goes to the cross. It makes me sad to think how much I do this to him. How much is he trying to show me one thing and I see it incorrectly? And yet the misunderstood is misunderstanding. Father, have mercy on me as I don’t get it and help me have mercy on those that don’t get me.