My Strength Weakness: Meet Jean-Jane Lee [Context]

Well actually just ‘Jane Lee’ but I panic’d and called her ‘Jean’ once and now i’m so confused that i call her Jean-Jane just to cover all the bases. But she is one of my newest friends and a lot of fun [and a worthy adversary at Boggle which is saying a lot!] and is the worship leader at Re:Generation church where i just got involved in youth leadering and she agreed to share this lovely post with us to take it away J… Miss Lee:

During my time as a Sunday School teacher, our pastor encouraged us to take the Strengthsfinder 2.0 test developed by Dr. Donald O. Clifton to be able to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and each other, and learn how to work together better as a team. After an assessment of over 150 questions, the test revealed that one of my biggest strengths is what the book referred to as “Context – people strong in the Context theme enjoy thinking about the past. They understand the present by researching its history.” 

While I had never thought of “Context” as being a strength this did not come as much of a surprise as someone who was a history major in college doing research that focused on collecting oral histories of under-represented Korean diasporic communities. I am a firm believer in the power of history in shaping our present, and the importance of understanding how people, places, concepts, and ideas came to be. Everyone has a story it’s just a matter of unearthing it. It enables me to see the fuller picture, not just fragments of what’s on the surface. This has also come into play in my social activism, taking lessons from the past to identify strategies to create a more just future. 

It definitely had never occurred to me that the value I placed on context and history could be a weakness, but the more I reflected on it, the more I recognized the ways that this had impacted my attitudes toward others, myself, and God. 

Until about four years ago when I encountered God in a tent in Albion (a story for another time), I don’t think I was able to truly receive and accept God’s grace because I was holding on to so many sins of my past, mistakes I’ve made, hurts I’ve experienced/inflicted, getting mired in countless regrets, what if’s, if only’s… This manifested in my tendency to dwell on past relationships, soul ties I had developed in my pursuit of love in the wrong places, and feelings of shame and guilt I had buried deep for all the ways I had disobeyed God in this area.

It’s still a struggle at times, but I’ve since made it a daily practice to let go of my past – to learn from it but not dwell on it. Through Christ Jesus I am a new creation, no longer bound to sin. His mercies are new every morning. He keeps no record of my wrongs. I am redeemed. I am forgiven. I am free – free from my past, free to move forward.

There is an old Sunday School song that I sometimes hum to myself as a reminder of who I am in Christ Jesus. The words are simple but it is a powerful declaration of God’s redeeming grace:

I am a new creation

No more in condemnation

Here in the grace of God I stand

My heart is overflowing

My life just keeps on going

Here in the grace of God I stand

[To head back to the start of this series and hear a whole lot more Strength Weakness testimonies, click here]

It’s simple Maff: the principle of one in, one out…

Two shirts in [thankx Maff, aka my newish friend Adam von Boltenstern, yes that’s a real name!] and two out… instant fashion upgrade.

i really like the principle of deciding on a set number of clothing items you need and then any time you get something new, passing on or recycling something old…

as i have been writing about recently, a group of us have been working through the book, ‘Free: Spending your Time and Money on what matters most’ and it has been interesting, exciting, challenging and in some regards life-transforming.

the last two weeks, one of the experiments has been this thing called ‘Have two, give one’ with the very simple idea that if you have two of something you should give one of them away – so the first week we started with clothes and shoes and invited everyone to go through their closets and bring what they wanted to give away [we adapted it a little for our group – one of the suggestions we gave was that if there is an item you have not worn for a year you can more than likely pass it on] and the following week we moved on to small appliances and kitchen stuff and it can go on to bigger appliances and more. the idea was that if anyone else from the group needed/wanted anything someone was throwing out they could take it [remembering the purpose is to get rid of stuff, not accumulate] and the rest would be sold, passed on to thrift stores etc.

my new friend Maff [who generally has the raddest shirts in town] brought a huge bag of shirts he had decided to give away and made comments to the tune of, ‘Good luck going through that and not keeping half the stuff’ and so i kinda just left the bag to the side with the intention of going through it some time.

and i decided to go through it tonite. but i decided to be hardcore and only take stuff i REALLY wanted and so managed to resist a ‘Monty Python Spamalot show’ shirt and a ‘Darth Vader walking an imperial walker as if it was a dog’ shirt and a bunch of others, and in the end i left with two new [to me] shirts. but i decided to honour the intention of the exercise and went through my drawers and took out two t-shirts and got rid of them, finally [sadly] retiring my Monty Python ‘I fart in your general direction’ shirt which to be honest, had seen better days and had to go.

So why not join us and take the challenge… whether you decide to go for a ‘Have two, Give one’ or a ‘If I haven’t worn/used this for a year, pass it on’ approach, that doesn’t really matter, but make the time to go through your clothes/shoes at least and see if you can do some decluttering as one step towards becoming more free.

 

Cheering Section: the art of mentoring – part mentee

i am participating in NaBloPoMo which is known as National Blog Posting Month in which the invitation or challenge is to post a blog every day [except on day 2 of the month when you are camping in a place with no internet signal even for your cute little hotspot device!] and for this one i decided to take up one of the prompts they provided:

Do you have a mentor? Tell us about him or her. Are you a mentor to someone else? Tell us what that relationship has added to your life.

i wouldn’t say i have a mentor. in fact the only story i tell of having a mentor is one i had for literally five minutes. a great pastory guy by the name of Craig Duvel who i have grown to respect in leaps and bounds over the years but who always lived in a province far away from mine [and since he moved to my province, i moved country so that didn’t help a lot]. i remember sitting with him at a camp and i think it was related to my struggles with pornography/masturbation at the time but his advice was, ‘Keep a Short Account with God’ and i have used that and shared that many times since then. He told a story of how one morning at 3am he was woken up and remembered some unconfessed sin in his life and how he went to the lounge and fell facedown before God and made it right with God… the idea being that you start a new day with a fresh slate not being burdened or judged by your brokenness or any recent mess you may have been the cause of. And it works. When we allow sin to build up, it is like building a tab at a bar – it gets to the point where it is more natural to say, “Stick it on my tab” than it is to really be grieved by it or want to deal with it. So any time you become aware of sin in your life, or anything breaking intimate relationship with Him then right there and then, or as soon as possible, deal with it, make right and if you need to make right with people too, then do it as soon as you can.

so only 5 minutes of mentoring, but it was completely helpful.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE MENTORS GONE?

for me it has usually been a story of either not recognising any older men in the contexts i am in who i respect in the sense that i would want them mentoring me, or that those people who i have seen with those things  just seeming so incredibly busy with so much other stuff that they would not be suitable candidates. i definitely had a mentor in my earliest youth leading role in terms of helping me lead and grow in confidence and maturity in a lot of leadership related areas, but i think to some extent we had a difference of vision and ethos and so it didn’t feel like the kind of mentoring i imagine, but i am completely grateful for his presence in my life back then and owe a lot to him.

but in the absence physical mentors in terms of men who are older than me pouring into my life it has become a combination of literary mentors [so the influence of passionate men of God like Keith Green and John Wimber and others who spoke into my life through the pages of books], peer mentors [so being co-mentored by good friends of a more similar age or even younger like Sean Du Toit, Bruce Collins, Rob Lloyd, Andy Pitt and i could go on] and also through men like Paul and Peter, David and Moses, and of course Jesus Christ. none of these were formal mentoring relationships, but through watching and listening and late night conversations and hearing stories of and from, these people spoke [and continue to speak] loudly into my life.

‘Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.’ [Proverbs 27.6]

i have absolutely loved this verse and i stand by it. if you do not have people in your life who have the invitation to speak honestly [and cause something that feels like a wound cos who likes rebuke ever?] then you are doing yourself an absolute disservice. Rob Lloyd has been one of those voices in my life [his description of me as reminding him of Paul – “passionate yet tactless” – is one that stands strong in my memory] and i have so much love and appreciation towards him for that and taking a quick look over myself, all of those bruises have healed in such a way that i can’t even remember where they were [but the lessons have stuck!]

so be mentored! it is so important – any fool who thinks they can walk this life well by themselves is one. and a good way to start is by asking – is there a man/woman you deeply respect or feel you can learn something from? Ask them if they will have coffee with you once a week, once a month. [hint: pay for it! This is completely something worth investing in – for the price of a regular cup of coffee or breakfast you can have your life revolutionised? seems about right] The worst they can do is say no. [Well, i guess the worst they can do is whip out a swordfish and carve their initials in your face but if that happens it is an indication that they were possibly not the right person to be mentoring you?]

and if you can’t find someone to ask then do what i did in terms of finding mentors and role models elsewhere. be careful not to pedestalise them – the closer you get to those ‘perfect’ people who are so close to God and so good at life, the more flawed you will see them to be, so stay grounded in admiring the Jesus in them and learning from that.

try and be mentored by a diverse crowd. if you are a white male [as i am] and only invite white males to mentor you [through the books you read, music you listen to, preaches you hear] then you are missing out on a whole lot of good life lessoning. invite someone from a different race or culture than your own. from a different gender. from a very different generation. and start with stories – listen to their life, hear lessons they have learned, obstacles they have overcome, failures they have endured and successes they have witnessed and been a part of.

it may not look like you want it to look. but if you are not being mentored it is largely your own fault. do something about it.

and perhaps a great way to start is to find someone who you can mentor, meet with regularly, intentionally pour into… but more of that in my next post…

[And if you have a moment to comment, I would LOVE to hear some stories of people who have mentored you in a way you found helpful]

[To continue to the next part on being a MENTOR, click here]

how to be truly free

so last nite was week 6 of our ‘Free: Spending your Time and Money on what matters most’ book study and we vulnerabled [it’s a verb!] things up a notch as a few of us shared the money plan/budget we had spent this week working on [an interesting point of note was someone realising that it had been all the married couples who had volunteered to share theirs first – don’t worry singles/daters, your time is coming…] and it was such a powerful experience – it is amazing how speaking about money [especially when it becomes personal] has become such a big thing for so many of us – definitely think i want to write a bit more on money soon…

i would highly recommend this book as a catalyst for getting some great, helpful and healthy conversations going [like the big one of DOES THE WAY YOU SPEND YOU TIME AND MONEY REFLECT THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS TO YOU?]

– for married people, especially young [as in recently] married people – the parts on money, budgeting and debt alone are worth it.

– for small groups of people – this is part reading book, part workshopping book and so it has proven really helpful to be working through it with a group of twelve people who committed themselves to the eight week process – so whether a church group or just a group of friends who feel like it’s a good idea, it is.

– for anyone else. it’s just a good solid book.

do i agree with everything in it? absolutely not. but there is enough good stuff to make it worthwhile and some of the stuff you disagree with might make for good conversation and reflection

and there are some great challenges or experiments which i invited a bunch of you to do with me, with some interesting results:

[1] First up was the invitation not to rush – to take a bit of time every day for a week to slow things down and look and listen and just be and a whole bunch of you dived into that one with me and gave some great feedback.

[2] Next up was the Gratitude log where I invited people to join me for ten days of taking time at the beginning or end of a day to write down five different things from the day that you were grateful for and a medium amount of you decided to join me for that one, although there was not quite as much feedback.

[3] Lastly, I invited people to join me in a discipline of contentment, in which you were invited to give up something you liked [I chose coffee] for a week and the response was deafening. I’m sorry, that should read ‘deaf’ – there was the sound of the absence of crickets. Could it be that not rushing and being grateful both feel like things that have an immediate payoff for me, whereas something like fasting [even just one thing for a week] just feels like a bit of work? Interesting.

Which brings me back to the prayer at the start of Mark Scandrette’s book which is called a prayer of abundance and the invitation is to meditate on these words and see if this prayer is or can become true for you as you pray it with me?

I know that I am cared for by an abundant Provider

I choose to be grateful and trusting,

I believe I have enough and that what I need will always be provided.

I choose to be content and generous.

I know that my choices matter for myself, for others and for future generations.

Help me to live consciously and creatively,

celebrating signs of your new creation that is present and coming.

Creator, who made me to seek the greater good of Your kingdom,

Guide me to use my time, talents and resources to pursue what matters most.

Teach me to be free,

to live without worry, fear or greed in the freedom of Your abundance.

Give me my daily bread, as I share with those in need.

Thank You for the precious gift of life.

[From ‘Free: Spending your Time and Money on what matters most’ by Mark Scandrette]

So seriously consider getting hold of this book or maybe a bunch of these books, and your friends or spouse and set aside time to work through it [a slow eight week approach works well – you could even do it regularly around a meal] and then come back here and let me know how it went…

Why wouldn’t you want to be more free than you are now? 

 

My Strength Weakness continued: Meet Howard Fyvie, son of people… [Confidence]

My strength / weakness
– by Howard James Fyvie, the 1st, son of Andrew, son of Raymond

It took me a while in thinking about this topic because I was struggling to actually identify any significant weakness in my life. I mean, obviously I’ve got struggles and battles that I fight on a daily / weekly and sometimes yearly basis – that humans around the world all face. But when it comes to a specific Achilles heal – I was struck without an answer. And I think in that lies my answer: my confidence.

God has given me heaps of confidence.I truly believe that I could do mostly anything.  I think most people can do anything. I believe in the impossible. And I plan on achieving it. If someone challenges me to something, I’d happily go along with that, believing that I’m gonna give my best, and it’s going to work. Whether it’s making a film, leading people, writing music, climbing a mountain, entertaining masses or making a meal: generally, I believe that I can do it. And I jump in with both feet and claim my inevitable victory.

The spin off to this is that sometimes I hit my head hard when I fail. Sometimes I think I can do something, when in actual fact – I’m a long way off. And so this God-given strength of confidence can also be a weakness when I commit to something with all my heart, and then find that I’m actually not going to win. I then crash to the ground in glorious flames.

This has happened on a number of occasions, but probably the most notable was my last relationship. I saw a girl. I had never had a serious girlfriend before because – in my opinion – I was waiting for the right one, and once I saw her, I would make her mine. Duh. That’s how it works. Needless to say – I pursued the girl, at first she said she wasn’t interested, but soon my sheer confidence (and good-looks, obviously) wooed her over, and after no time we were dating. I was sold.

However, things soon began to unravel. Both in my confidence, and in the relationship. After a few months of heart-ache, back and forths, long phone calls and lots of counsel, the relationship ended. I was devastated. I couldn’t understand why it didn’t work. It had to work. Because of my blatant confidence, I was certain we would tie the knot, and had invested my whole heart and mind into the relationship. Today, she’s happily married to her husband, and I learned that not everything in life works out according to my plan. 😉

These days I tend to look at things a bit more realistically. I get some very realistic friends to give me counsel, and I try to listen – now through older and more sensitive ears.

Has my heart changed? No. I still believe in achieving the impossible. I’m still gonna jump in with both feet. I’m still gonna change the world. But I think i’ll just make sure my back-up chute has been double-checked before I jump out the plane.See you in the sky.

Howard James Fyvie,
son of Andrew,
son of Raymond.

[For the next post featuring Jane Lee and her Strength Weakness of Context, click here]

So is it grace OR works? [aka how did i miss that?]

So recently i have been having some interesting conversations with different people in different places [like in the comments section on this blog] about the whole idea of Grace and how it conflicts with or enhances the idea of Works…

There seem to be two extreme groups of people within the larger group of Jesus followers who get caught up in one, often times at the exclusion of the other:

# the ‘Everything is Grace’ people who tend towards living lives where they are free to do whatever they want to because everything is covered and so in the extreme tend to give licence for ways of living that don’t necessarily fall well within the framework of someone saying that they follow Jesus.

# the ‘Everything is Works and Striving’ people [who would NEVER admit to this being who they are] who exist at the opposite end of the spectrum are those who ignore grace completely, at least in practice and focus heavily on works which tends to manifest as a whole lot of rules of what Christians can and can’t do and ends up being quite legalistic and restrictive. These people are often characterised by feelings of guilt or condemnation because they are never doing “quite enough” to live up to the high slash impossible standard that ‘Jesus set’.

It is pretty clear to me that it has to be both – I feel like Scripture is so clear on this – the ‘Everything is Grace’ people have too many passages talking about the need to do things [Love, forgive, make disciples, look after the least of these’ to ever be able to seriously suggest that ‘Everything is Grace’ means i get to sit back and do nothing. And the passages that dig so deeply into Grace and the crucifixion being God’s saving work [not ours, and certainly not anything we could ever get right on our own] cancel any kind of idea that we are responsible or even capable of getting ourselves right with God by anything we do.

And while Ephesians 2.8,9 is always the go to Grace passage which strongly clarifies that side of things:

Ephesians 2.8,9 ‘For it by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is a gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.’

I have always used a number of other passages from different books to back up the importance of our living demonstrating our salvation side of things.

And then last night, in preparation for this morning’s guy’s Quiche and Ephesians session [it’s a thing!] i read this verse that i must have read a hundred times before and just never connected it to the fact that it said so explicitly what i had gone elsewhere to find all these years:

Ephesians 2.10 ‘For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.’

Like, D’uh! Case closed. And it’s not like a revelation of newness for me, but the revelation of not needing to turn so many pages. And kind of a slap to the face and idea that God has probably been lovingly smiling at me all this time while quietly mouthing, ‘Wait, don’t go, don’t turn, it’s right there. Um. Darn.’ Or something.

Grace AND Works. It’s a combo deal. One is the only thing by which salvation is possible. We receive the robes of Jesus’ righteousness over our filthy clothes [or as a complete replacement to] and are made right by His sacrifice. But from then on we are called into a life that looks very much like ‘Denying yourself and taking up your cross daily and following Jesus’ [Luke 9.23 paraphrase] and living out the action of the following of Jesus.

We were “created in Christ Jesus to do good works” – it doesn’t get more easy to understand than that, surely?

Bonhoeffer has some really interesting things to say about grace, including this quite challenging quote:

“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” 
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost Of Discipleship

What has been your understanding of Grace? If you had to identify with one of the two extremes mentioned here, which one have you found the greater pull towards? What helped you to embrace the bothness of the Grace and Works? 

My Strength Weakness continued: Meet Tim Tucker [Multi-tasking]

a year or so ago, i asked a bunch of my friends to write a piece on the topic of ‘My Strength Weakness’ – sharing a little about something in their lives that is viewed as a strength, but which in some cases can also turn about to be a weakness. And these great posts were the result. It was so helpful that i figured it was time to do it again, with a whole different bunch of people, and so here is ‘My Strength Weakness continued’ and we start off with my friend Tim Tucker:

I’m a multi-tasker.

I don’t mean the kind of multi-tasker that can watch TV, have a cup of tea and hold a conversation at the same time. I mean that I thrive on juggling multiple projects simultaneously and love to test how far my capacity can reach.

Often it feels like spinning numerous plates… and having to judge which plates are wobbling and need a bit of attention… and which have enough momentum just to keep on spinning. Maybe this sounds stressful – but I love the challenge.

This becomes a massive weakness though when I accept projects that God has not assigned me to do. On one occasion I received a phone call. I’d said no a few times to a particular position that I was being asked to fill. But an influential person called me and said, “Tim – you are the only person who has the capacity to do this.” They played to my ego with that flattery… and I said “yes”.

You see – multi-taskers can feel invincible and often have a superman complex. The problem is, when there are too many plates starting to wobble… and some start to teeter on the edge – then fall and smash, it can be a pretty spectacular disaster.

Unfortunately this happened as a result of me saying yes on this occasion… And who suffers when this happens… me, my family – my relationship with God… the organisation I worked for… etc. etc. So there are tonnes of lessons I’ve learned through this. God has had to deal with my superman complex and I’ve had to learn to trust him with the things that seem good ideas – but are not the things He’s asked me to do. I’ve had to learn where the edge of my capacity is… and be careful to not step over that – in fact – build in some breathing space… “mind the gap” as they say on the London tube. And most importantly, I’ve had to learn to listen to those around me who see the warning signs. To be accountable.

And to learn the power and freedom of the word “no”.

[Tim Tucker is a family man with 3 kids… committed to working out his faith within the African context as part of The Message. Tim has developed ‘The Leaders’ Table’ as a way of resourcing and connecting with emerging leaders in Africa… to check it out, click here]

[To read the story of Howard Fyvie and his Strength Weakness which is confidence, click here]