Tag: #alive

Alive!

Have you ever felt so alive that you wonder how you could call what you thought was living before actually alive? Lately, I feel like I have come into an epiphany as it relates to my faith. It’s as if I’m reading and hearing Scriptures for the first time which I’ve read and heard my entire life. When I talk with the Lord, it is with more confidence in Him… in His love… in who He has created me to be and in who He has made me into by adopting me as His son.

But to feel this alive comes at a price. It means facing challenges you never foresaw. It means being willing to look at life through a new set of lenses. It means having to… painfully… admit that I had not achieved the fullness God has for me.

This kind of newness of life comes from the passionate, and maybe sometimes even desperate, pursuit of knowing God even more closely, loving Him even more deeply, and serving Him even more sincerely. I may have more answers than I did before, but those answers have opened up a whole new world of questions. And with those questions, I find myself digging deeper into Scripture… making sure I find quality and quantity time to talk with the Lord so I can ask Him about the answers to these new questions… and more quickly moved to shower Him with thanks, gratitude, acknowledgment and adoration.

The result? I am alive!

No, all my challenges have not been overcome. All my problems have not been solved. All my issues have not been resolved. But most of those things are external. What is happening inside of me is overpowering all of that. And soon, if it hasn’t already begun to, it will impact and invade all of that external stuff.

I don’t know what kind of challenges or crises you are facing today, but you don’t have to face them with dullness and lifelessness inside you. Bring your real problems… those authentic questions you’ve been afraid to ask… your frustrations and limitations… bring them all to God. Ask Him to get involved, and you’ll find that He will. As He does, you will begin to experience life seeping back into you. That seeping will turn into a trickle… that turns into a flow… that turns into a flood! You’ll be more alive than you could have imagined before.

Jesus said that He came to give us a full life, an abundant life. Let’s not settle for less!

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Never Let A Dream Die

I sat at the small, stained wooden desk in my bedroom, trying to fill the first page of the spiral notebook’s blue-lined paper with the initial chapter in my first book.  Stuck because of writer’s block and the sense that I had no business writing a book like that at that point in my life, I put the pen down, and closed the cardstock cover on my dream.

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Today, the family joined me in the guest-room-turned-makeshift-writing-studio with video cameras capturing the moment as I sat at another small wooden desk and this time tapped the screen on the iPad to tell the publishing company to begin making my dream… which had been shelved for about thirty years… become reality.  And this Wednesday night at midnight in the Central Time Zone here in America, people will be able to participate in a dream that I had thought might never be.

Oh, it’s not the book I would have written thirty years ago.  In fact, it’s not the book I would have written five years ago. But it IS the first book I’ve completed and had published.  And so I continue to go on and on about this because I want those of you who read this blog to understand how big of a deal this is to me.

And I write about it because I want to put a shining example out there that says, “Hey, regardless of your age or stage in life… whether you think you have what it takes or not… whether you think anyone else will care or not… whether you have dropped the ball once or a thousand times… NEVER LET YOUR DREAM DIE!

This book is a victory in so many ways for me, and I want to be an encouragement to you that you can still accomplish your dreams.  If you’re still alive, then you need to know that God has not given up on you.  So don’t give up on yourself!

I’ve had to learn so much just to be able to do this.  And now I’m about to put this dream to the test in the real world.  But I am more excited than I can possibly explain on so many different levels.

I want you to experience this… this joy… this energizing lift… this sense of completing a quest… this anticipation of what could happen next!  This is the place I believe God wants us to live in… not in the mundane, but in the majestic. He designed us to walk out here in this place of trust and obedience so that we could enjoy life to the fullest.  In fact, in John 10:10, Jesus said that He came so that we would be able to “have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows).”  (Amplified Version)

That is exactly what this moment in my life feels like, and I want you to experience it in your own life.  Late Wednesday night into Thursday morning, as people begin to visit this site and buy this book, they’re going to be adding fuel to the fire of the dream that nearly died at a little wooden desk in the bedroom of a teenage boy thirty years ago, but was resurrected all these years later.

So, what’s your dream? And how long have you had it?  Are you going to let it die?  Or are you going to let a little spark from the fire of my dream land on the tinder of your own dream and begin to set it ablaze once more?  Oh, how I hope you allow it to spring to life once more and chase after it with all you have!  I know that would make God smile.  It would make me smile.  And take it from the guy grinning as he types these words, it’ll make you smile, too!

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