Why do bad things Happen?

This is a difficult thing to try to tackle.  It’s easy to say what’s the right way to go about things, but in the heat of the moment, nothing seems to make sense.  I know that this is tough for alot of people.  Sometimes even a deal breaker with non-Christians.  “How could a good and loving God let this happen to good people?” 

Let’s say a 17 year old little girl gets raped on her way home from school.  How could this possible be ok or rationalized as a “good thing”?  What if, this 17 year old girl, because of her circumstance, is able to help others who have gone through the same thing.  She might be able to help 20 other girls who have gone through the this.  Alot of times, people going through these issues don’t fully recover.  Sometimes it ends in suicide.  What if that 17 year old girl who was brutally raped and abused is able to help those other 20 girls into getting back onto their feet and showing them that this one event doesn’t have to ruin/take their life.  It’s a bad, that we couldn’t possible understand how it could be used for good, and yet it can.  It can be used as a way to share God with the hurt, lost, or broken.  They could go on to live a life that they never would have been able to because they might not have seen the need for it before. 

When you lose someone close to you, it’s hard to see that it’s a good thing.  We never know the condition of the heart.  Maybe by you losing someone, your uncle comes into town and you ask him to accompany you to church to just comfort you.  When he’s their, maybe God is working on his heart and he gets saved.  Then, from him getting saved, his kids and grandkids are saved.  Maybe he’s the next Billy Graham.  Let me ask you, who was the person who saved the person, who saved Billy Graham?  I don’t know either.  Through every little situation, we could help thousands of others. 

Try to Trust that whatever happens, it can be used to glorify God.  John 11:40 “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the Glory of God”  Believe that everything is in God’s hands and that is the best place for things to be. 

Trust in God

This has been an area of my life that God has really developed.  I wouldn’t say that I’ve really struggled with trust, but it’s become a big part of who I am.  I haven’t read through the Bible or done studies on alot of the books of the Bible, but I know my relationship with God.  I know that He has the best in store for me and I trust that He’s leading me in the direction I need to be going.

Trust is a difficult thing though.  Alot of Christians think that they’ve trusted God in situations, but they’ve been let down.  I get a little frustrated with this.  If you truly understand that we are the clay and He is the potter, how can you question anything that God does?  I’m in this world to follow God with everything that I do.  I hesitate to say that sometimes, because when the time comes, that could mean giving up my house, my job, and worst of all my COMFORT.

If you think about it, how couldn’t you trust in God.  He has all the power and control.  You can decide if you’re going to follow God or not, but if you understand who God is, why wouldn’t you want to follow Him?  Here’s how I see it, I am a do’er.  Someone gives me a task and I do it.  I need that someone to give me the task though.  The way I live my life is God gives me tasks to do, and I try to do them.  It’s hard sometimes to trust that God seperating Danielle and I was a beneficial thing.  We trusted that God had the best in mind for us, and it turned out to be an incredible opportunity for God to do an amazing work in my life.

Also, it’s easy to try to take things into your own hands.  It’s hard to trust it to someone else.  Take for example money.  This is an area that I would like to get better in.  I trust God for everything.  When it comes to money though, I think “How could God help me?”  He’s not going to magically put money in your account or help you win the lottery.  He wants you to give to Him to show your trust and submission to Him, and He’ll give you what you need.  Not what you want.  Money does not ensure anything.  You can’t pray to your money and have it comfort you in your time of need.  You can’t trust in your money to bring his friends and have a shindig when you need it.  It doesn’t work that way.  If it does, let me know and I’ll be right over to see it.  Then we can both go to a mental health facility.  If you have a hard time trusting in God for your financial issues, then go ahead and look to your money for help and see what it says.

Laughing at Laughter

Laughter has got to be one of the greatest gifts God has given us. I was just watching a video on some of the stupidest people. People are stupid sometimes. We are always jumping off things and doing stupid stunts just for entertainment. I tell you what, I’ve definitely enjoyed our stupidity. I caught myself a few times laughing out loud uncontrollably because of it. I think Laughter has got to be one of the funnest things I do on a regular basis.

Now, I’m known for being the YouTube guy and I’ve always tried to defend myself, but screw it. I love YouTube. Where else can you watch a monkey sniff it’s own butt and pass out to people lighting themselves on fire? What’s not to love?

Danielle was telling me the other day how happy she is that we can be the only two people in the room and still laugh at with other. I think Laughter is the one thing that we’ll always be able to enjoy. Everyone knows the body fades after a while, the feeling of love comes in waves, friends come and go, but Laughter will always be around.

 If you can keep the Laughter going in your relationship, you’ll always enjoy spending time together.  If you can laugh at the situations you get yourself in, there will never be a dull moment.  If you can Laugh, you’re blessed.

 

When I was a bit younger and in my high school days, I was “the man”.  I was suave with the ladies, outran the jocks, and was smarter than….why are you laughing?  (corny right) As long as you’re laughing, who cares.  Laugh at yourselves, me, and the world.  Laughter makes the world go round, not money.   

Looking to Hire?

I think I’ve found the perfect job for me. The only problem is, I don’t know who’s hiring or if it’s even a real position.

I’ve been thinking about the perfect job for me ever since I’ve found out that my job is in question.  I’ve come to realize that I want to be the full time fellowship, servant, motivation, inspiration pastor. I don’t actually know if this position exists yet, but if not, I’m going to create it.

I want to be available to people, Christians or non-Christians, that need some extra help. If someone needs some yard work done and can’t because they’re elderly / hurt / don’t know how, I want to be available to them. While I’m doing whatever they need me to do, it gives me a great opportunity to fellowship with them, and listen to them, and ask, “How’s Life?”. I want to be able to help when people need a little encouraging, or motivation. I want to be there when people want to bounce some ideas off someone. I just want to be available to people.

In addition to that, I would like to plan events for charities that everyone can get excited about. A charity bowling tournament, where businesses in the area get involved to help out the local people in their community. Maybe Host a carnival/movie night for the Homeless.

I feel that I need to just getting involved and Love people as we are called to do.  I see a need for Love in the community. I’m guilty of overlooking people in need of Love even moreso than most, because I constantly see the need, but hesitate to meet it. I want to be a full time Christian. I want to make that my Occupation.

I would compare this to something that we all dislike doing, but love the results. Who likes to clean the house? I haven’t met a person yet that just begs to clean house. I haven’t heard of someone that asks, “Can I clean your pee drenched, poo smell embedded toilet?” (That could just be the toilets that I’ve used) Some people see that it needs to be done and they just do it, but most of us hope that someone else will do it. I want to be the one who cleans up His House.  I want to be the one who visit’s the elderly in the hospital, and picks weeds at a single mom’s house, or just hang out with the “Why” kid that asks, “Why?” when you say, “the sky is blue”.  Doesn’t it make you want to tape “BECAUSE!” over his mouth. (maybe that is also just me). It’s not always the easiest thing to do, but when you realize that someone needs to do it, that doesn’t matter.  Don’t get me wrong, I am not the best when it comes to being compassionate, I don’t want to go visit the elderly, but I just know that it blesses God and it needs to be done.

Matthew 25:40 “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”

I don’t want to look back at my life and wish that I had helped out more when I could. I want to Love people and make my time His time. There’s alot of hurting and needy people to Love on…SO, WHO’S WITH ME!?

P.S. if you know of any Full time Inspirmotivfellowservantship Position available Let me know.

Life is Good

Life is Good. I think that people under estimate how good we really have it. I’m not going to get into the whole, “there’s kids in Africa dying” thing which is a whole other level, but if you really look at your life, I’d guess that there is alot of stuff that we take for granted. I would probably estimate 95% of the things we have, we actually take for granted.

Do you have a car? Do you have a home? Do you have a job? Those are the pretty easy ones to recognize. Do you have a family who loves you? I know that I take my family for granted alot. I don’t realized how blessed I am to be able to go to my parents house, grab a quick meal, and head over to my brother’s house to hang out. I’m sure alot of people don’t have that. What about having friends? I have a bunch of friends that love and would care for me if something were to happen to me. What about a church family? Do you have a group of believers to help you in hard times, whether it be finances or marital stress or maybe just depression? Do you have In-laws that you love and get along with? Danielle and I constantly recognize how blessed we are to have in-laws that we Love as if they were our own family.

How blessed we are to have these things, and yet we overlook them on a daily basis. It kind of ties back to the expectations thing I was talking about earlier. If you take away all the expectations of your life, and look at how many blessings you have, you’d be amazed.

Imagine starting out your day, and not expecting your car to start right up, and yet it does. Imagine not expecting your boss to let you work another day, and yet they commend you on a good day’s work. Imagine coming home and not expecting anyone to be there, and instead, your Husband/Wife comes to the door and greets you with a kiss and asks you how your day was. Also, just try to imagine, going to your pantry, and expecting no food to be there, but instead, it’s full of those nasty can’s of green beans and corn, soups and chili’s, chips and Minute Rice. Be thankful, that you have made it this far in life without depression, hunger, lonliness, solitude, or disease taking everything from you.

Appreciate the little things, forget the bad things, and Love everything. Everything is determined by your outlook.

Now let me ask you….How’s Life?

Are you arguing or discussing?

Last night, my wife and I were driving home and discussing the possibility of going on vacation with her family.  The only problem was that she could either go for 3 days, or go for 5 and miss one class.  Early in the day, we were discussing her bad day at school was and how frustrated she was with it.  This is where the problem came in. 

Before I get to that though, let me elaborate on the Arguing part of it.  We were driving home and talking about her missing a class and what that could possibly mean.  So here I am getting frustrated because she wants to miss a class, when she just got done venting about how she’s frustrated with one of her classes and how the staff is riding her now.  She was getting frustrated because she needs to take a vacation and get the stress out.  So here inlies the problem.                                       

We kept arguing back and forth, we weren’t actually getting anywhere with it.  At one point Danielle stopped me, and said, “Before you say anything, are you going to say anything new?”  I thought about it and said, “No”, but I wanted to make my point anyways.  Instead, I stopped and thought about it.  This is a key point that we’ve learned over the last few years.  Dont’ have the circular argument.  You keep saying the same things back and forth and it get’s you nowhere.  You’re chasing your own tails.  One good way to recognize this argument, “you’re not understanding what I’m saying”.  Yeah, they do, but they think that their own point is better or more correct. 

At this point, I stopped and told Danielle, ok, I just need to think for a few minutes.  Luckily, we live in the middle of nowhere, so I had plenty of time to think and say what I wanted to say, while she was stuck in the car.  I started thinking about the “real Issue’.  We learned that in most arguments, couples start arguing against EACH other instead of resolving the ACTUAL ISSUE. 

Through discussing it further, we discovered that the actual problem was the difference between men and women.  I was hoping she wouldn’t miss a class because she’s already “on their List” according to what I got out of our earlier discussion.  What she was trying to get across to me in that discussion, is that she’s very frustrated with the staff and that’s she’s not doing as good as she normally does.  So it comes down to the fact that she wanted to vent her frustrations to me and that girls often exaggerate things in order to fully describe how emotionally distraught she was.  As a guy, I took it as a serious problem that needs a solution, and my solution was to be extremely safe and cautious and not try to rock the boat.  My initial reaction was to not rock the boat as well, instead, just blow it up (also a guys reaction, no problem is too big for explosives).  In the end, we worked together and came up with the real issue and solved it together, as opposed to fighting each other.  So, try to…

 Go from this      

To this   

By working like this

The tendency in relationships, married or not married, is to win the discussion/argument.  The only true way to solve the issue, is to solve the issue and not win the argument.  We’ve all heard that “you’re not arguing over that, it’s something else that’s turned into this” and that is completely true.  Next time your going through the circular argument, stop and try to find out what’s really the problem.

Friends are Golden, and yet Priceless

Friends are an inmeasureable pleasure.  They can be the difference between life and death and they can be overlooked and unnoticed.  Maybe I’m the only one that thinks this way, but I feel very passionately about it. 

My friends that I’ve had for a long time, are absolutely priceless to me.  I have a group of buddies that I’ve had since 7th or 8th grade, and are still big parts of my life.  One of my buddies I’ve known since 3rd grade, and although we aren’t as close as we have been, I know that at any moment he’ll do anything for me and he know’s I’d do the same.  That’s true friendship.  He can talk to me about things that he can’t talk to his wife about and I can do the same.  When I say that these are the people that can save your life, I know alot of people going through depression that could use some friends.  Friends that occupy their time, and let them know that they are loved and cherished.  Friends that know when something’s off in their life by the way they’re acting.  Friends that truely and deeply care for them.  That’s what I mean when I say “Friends are Golden, and yet Priceless”.  They are precious and should be cherished, and yet their is no price high enough to trade for those Friendships.

If you don’t have too many of these friends, you might want to take a look at why.  If you aren’t able to call anybody, at 3 in the morning, stranded on the side of the road, 30 miles away, then you don’t have any of these “Golden Friends”.  Maybe I’m crazy, or maybe I’m crazy like a fox.  You be the Judge.  Kirby Out!

Does Being A Christian Play A Role In Marriage?

It seems like a pretty dumb question.  Everyone has these pre-concieved notions that because Christians are against divorce, their marriages last.  I think this is more popular in the Christian culture more so than the Non-Christian culture.  Until recently, Christian marriages on average stayed together longer than Non-Christian marriage.  Now, they are about the same.  Why? I’m sure there are plenty of reasons, people are selfish, divorce is more acceptable, and people have started turning to Dr. Phil more often than God.

When Danielle and I were seperated, Danielle told me, “You and I need to be content with our relationship with God, before we can work on our relationship.”  Sounded like a cop-out to me. 

Well Danielle and I have made it through one of our tough times, and now we’re happier now than we’ve ever been.  But, when I was sitting at home, and Danielle was at her parents house, I couldn’t have felt anymore alone than I did at that time.  I felt that I couldn’t talk to anyone, because no one knew my situation.  No one but God, and that’s who I had to turn to.  Which is what God wanted and I needed.  Eventually, I was turning to God with every little care and concern, talking to God 5-10 times a day, and I started to turn around.  I was happy, and started running to get in shape, cleaned up the house and loved coming home.  Which was a huge change, because when this all started, home reminded me of Danielle and all the fun times we used to have.  Danielle and I still talked everyday and still loved each other very much, but I was getting to the point where I wasn’t missing her near as much because I developed a very strong relationship with God.  This is when I realized that Danielle had been right all along.  I needed God in my Marriage more than I needed Danielle in my Marriage.  Once I gave up on fixing my marriage myself, and letting God do his thing, everything turned around.  I believe that this is the design for Marriage.  It needs to be constructed on, and directed by God.

If you were blind folded and walking in a mine field, would you tell the guy with the map of the mine field to shut up when he yelling instructions to you?  This is exactly what we as Christians do when we try to fix our marriage on our own.  God created Marriage (the map to the mine field) and He wants to guide us through to safety.  As we are guided through that mine field, each mine that you pass makes you stronger and gives you joy and love.  Doing Marriage God’s way is the only way to ”True” happiness. 

Marriage isn’t something you do.  It’s a commitment you’ve made or will make, to show God’s infinite love to your Husband/Wife.  Show God’s love to everyone, and God will give you His abundant Love. 

Hopelessly in Love…or Hopelessly in Marriage?

I never thought about the statement “Hopelessly in Love” before now.  What does it really mean? There’s no hope in Love? Do you hope to get out of Love?  I just don’t get it. 

What do you do when you feel like your “Hopelessly in Marriage”?  As in, all hope is lost for a great marriage.  When things are kind of stale and one or both partners are tired of working at it.  What do you do?

I think that you need to start viewing things differently.  Check the alternatives for your life.  You could get a divorce, Hopefully find a “better Spouse” just to realize that they have the same if not worse problems.  Besides, you made a “COMMITMENT” to your current spouse.  So what do you do?  You need to have a renewing of your mind!

No matter what you can’t change your spouse, and besides would you really want to?  Think about when you first met, and think about the things that attracted you the most to them.  I almost guarantee it’s the same thing that annoy’s you the most now.  You need to make changes by leading.  Lead by example.  Be the first to say, “I love you” and the last to bless your spouse before you go to bed.  Then, get up the next morning and be the first to say, “I love you” again, regardless of whether or not your Significant Other (S.O.) returns the favor.  Remember that your Spouse doesn’t owe you a thing.  They don’t need to do anything for you.  IF you do this, ANYTHING your Spouse does for you is a BLESSING.

Once you start to do this, you’ll start to see things turn around.  Don’t expect it, but notice when it does happen.  Always HOPE that things will get better.  When you lose HOPE, it’s kind of like going into a pitch black cave with a flashlight.  You can’t see that far into the cave, but you can see enough to get to your next step.  As long as you can see your next step, and you know it’s safe, you can keep moving forward.  As soon as you drop that flashlight, your walking blind in a dangerous and dark place.  You don’t know where you’re going, or if your next step is safe or not.  When you’re in a dark point in your marriage, don’t drop the flashlight.  Just keep taking that next step and keep moving forward.  Before you know it you’re out of that cave, and your life is brighter and happier than ever.