What Christ means to me.

So I’m ‘Sub-ing’ for Columbia Christian School and I was asked to give a personal testimony of ‘What Christ means to me” to a freshman class looking at the Life of Christ. I thought I would use it as my re-entry into bloglife. Thank you, I’m honored to be back.

I think this came at a good time (providence?) as I feel my relationship to Christ, or perhaps, more accurately, my understanding of Christ is in transition, and so this gives me opportunity to evaluate where I am and where I feel called to go. I am currently fascinated by Paul’s words that “to live is Christ.” That is what I’m currently trying to figure out- what does it mean that my living is Christ? To discover this, I am trying (also according to Paul’s verbage) to “know nothing except Christ and Him crucified” and/or “to know Christ and the power of His resurrection.” More on this later.
I’ve recently read a statement that goes to the tune “it’s not what happens to you that is important, but the meaning you ascribe what happens to you is important.” The crux of the matter is our interpretation of events. So here are some of the events of my life and my interpretation.
I, first and foremost, feel I am called to be an artist. It was like scales falling from my eyes when I saw, completed, one of my first semi-abstract paintings in my first painting class as an art major at Pepperdine University. Art was chosen as a major more because I had always drawn well my entire life and I didn’t know what else to do. But that moment, that came halfway through my Junior year, confirmed my decision- I was going to be an artist for the rest of my life. My initial thought, perhaps also prompted with a lifelong desire to teach, was to become an art teacher and that would give me a steady income to provide my livelihood and give me time (especially during summers) to do my art and become a fabulously famous art star. So I pursued my studies and received my MFA (Master of Fine Arts) so that I could teach at the college level. Graduation day came but there were no teaching jobs on the horizon, and I had already started a family that now, for some reason, needed me to provide for their food, clothing, and shelter. Go figure. So we jump ship to Kentucky to live with my wife’s parents (free shelter and sometimes food) so the financial burden was lighter. A job as a customer service rep for a company that sponsored business leadership seminars provided, somewhat meagerly, for other necessities of life (school loan payments not being one of those necessities- a life of financial hardship had begun). Oddly enough, I was introduced to the ideas of quantum physics while in Kentucky. Many of the leadership material drew lessons from implications of a new understanding of the world afforded by quantum mechanics. Again, more on this later.
The Lord works in mysterious ways. My wife’s parents became missionaries in Croatia and decided to sell the house. Goodbye free rent. But- that same week I received a call from Pepperdine asking me if I wanted to teach on a temporary contract. Cool- my teaching career will begin; I’ll get some teaching experience, I’ll be back in the LA area and can get connected to the art scene; this temporary position will lead to other teaching positions and initial success in the art world- all is coming together.
What started as the hope of three years of teaching ended with only one year (budget constriants, not enough art students to support another faculty member) and things went into emergency mode. (By the way, there are now two children wanting to be fed! Economics- demand increases but the supply was decreasing.) Through some initial contacts throughout the years, I was able to begin teaching, albeit part time, at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, TX. Cross country move #3 in 4 years of marriage- not recommended, by the way.
Abilene was both an incredible blessing and an incredibly difficult period at the same time. (Interesting side note- quantum physics is still rolling through my head and one of the basic starting points was the discovered fact that light is both a particle and a wave. This duality is now played out in my life- blessing and hardship are two sides of the same coin.) I taught, and learned much about art- still believed to be my calling. But the art market in Abilene is a far cry from the environment to accept my ‘difficult’ work (as my wife describes it, mine is the work that people question, “Oh, so that’s art?”) Teaching part time is the interesting combination of working full time but being paid less than minimum wage, if calculated over the entire year. So the financial struggles continued, in fact worsened, as two more children are thrown into the mix. Having failed to secure, twice, a full time teaching position at ACU (for ‘political’ reasons) I was at my wits end. The teaching thing wasn’t working which meant that nothing else was working out either.
In the background, though, was a plan unfolding. Rewind to my wife’s childhood, before we even met. She spent the better part of her growing up in the Pacific Northwest- Vancouver, WA and Portland, OR. Through her connections there she met some people that eventually started an inner city church called PUMP. Melinda has always felt a calling to inner city missions and particularly felt compelled to help pregnant teens. In a moment where I was questioning whether to pursue teaching or try a career change she came to me and said, “Instead of pursuing your career, why don’t we move to Portland and we start a non-profit working with PUMP to help pregnant teens?” I agreed instantly.
Financially we’re not in the clear. We are beginning to fundraise and I’m looking for employment (after a failed attempt at selling mortgages) to pay the bills until we’re on our feet with this and/or other endeavors (the art career is beginning without the aid of teaching). So I can swap tales of woe with some of the best of them. But I’m back to ‘it’s not what happens but the meanings that you attribute to them.’ Again, I feel called to be an artist. That means I need to understand my art, or at least have a notion of what it is about and where I’m trying to go. Every place I’ve been has fed into that. Quantum physics has given me a set of reference points to approach the reasons why things happen. Those cause-effect relationships are what my art is about. And I wouldn’t have known that without Kentucky, and the years teaching at Pepperdine and ACU. Abilene was hard but was a blessing, medically (won’t go into the details here) for some of our children.
So what does it mean to “live is Christ?” Don’t know. But I think maybe part of it is that it is not about me and how (financially) comfortable I am. But it’s about what Christ is trying to teach me. It is about the preparations for the life to which He has called me. There is a power in Christ, signified by His death and especially His resurrection, that I feel is beginning to unfold for me. I don’t feel as focused and compelled as Paul in his quest for understanding, but I feel I’m getting there. It has certainly helped going over my recent history. Because I know there is a God- I don’t believe I would be having these thoughts were He not alive and guiding my thoughts. The fact that I am learning from these events, that I feel there is something to learn and am searching for it, means that He is in me. His power is in me. It’s been guiding me all along, whether I saw it or not. His plan for me has been unfolding. Instead of a life of failure, which I can construe the events to be, it has been a life of preparation. I haven’t missed the boat, I just haven’t reached it yet. Christ means there is something more for me. And there is something more for you.

I’m an avid reader who usually has about 5 or 6 books going at the same time. Here’s what I’m reading now: “Think and Grow Rich” by Napolean Hill, “See You at the Top” by Zig Ziglar, a biography on Jackson Pollock by Naifeh and Smith, “The Heart of Commitment” by Scott Stanley. I also read to my wife each night before bed, which currently we are re-reading the Harry Potter series so we’re on book 5, the Order of the Phoenix. Plus I’m occasionally dipping into Dr. Phil’s “Ultimate Weight Loss Solution,” and “How to Have Power and Confidence in Dealing with People” by Les Giblin. The books themselves help me stretch and grow but the process is intensified when the ideas of one book correlate with those in another. So allow me to give you an example of what I call a ‘cross-pollination’ of ideas I’ve gotten from some of these books.

I’ve been struck by a concept of protecting yourself and your commitment. Consider this statement by Napolean Hill in “Think and Grow Rich:” ‘The conscious faculty serves, therefore, as an outerguard to the approach of the subconcious.’ An ‘outerguard’- protective language. It coincides precisely with Scott Stanley’s observations on commitment in marriage, taken from Malachi 2:15- ‘… So guard yourself in your spirit…’ He explains that the word ‘guard’ in Hebrew literally means to set a hedge of protection around something.” That in turn reminded me of how Dr. Phil related it to weight loss. He talked about structuring your life to fit the commitment. We all have willpower, but we also have a willpower that isn’t so powerful at times. If we rely solely upon our willpower, we will fail miserably when our willpower isn’t strong enough on a particular day. However, if we structure our lives in a way that our commitment is protected, then we ensure our success even in times when we feel weak.
This kind of excites me. You see, I’m a man. And I’ve learned that men are lazy- to a point. You see, we will work our butts off in order to be lazy. You know? We will put far more effort into finding a way to get something done on autopilot, than the amount of energy it takes to actually do the thing we’re trying to do in the first place. So this whole idea of protecting your commitment seems to me to put effort into aspects that will then kind of put you on autopilot. Then you sit back and enjoy the benefits of your successful career, marriage, weight loss program, etc., etc., so on and so forth. Cool.

Sounds like my plans need to include plans for defense, as well as offense; for protection, was well as action.

The problem, I’m discovering are those little voices that claim (1) I deserve to have such and such (or do such and such)- even if it runs counter to what I ultimately want, and (2) that I shouldn’t have to live up to my plans and goals, however good and noble, because I am free to do whatever I want. The curse of freedom: coming soon to a blog near you.

So I was talking not too long ago with someone in my company (I’m a loan officer for a mortgage company) who is more established and thus more successful (proven by the paycheck he showed me that had just arrived, one with significantly more numbers on it than I’m used to seeing on a paycheck) and I inquired about the topic of goal setting. His reply kind of shocked me. “I don’t believe in goals. They don’t do anything for me. I don’t make goals. I make plans.” Internally I had a huge smile because he just articulated something that inherently I somehow knew to be true but could never put my finger on. Granted, he did say that you have to make your plans according to what you want to achieve. And though he did not say the word, it was obvious to me that ‘what you want’ is….well,… a goal. But the point is that the goal is not the end-all-be-all. Where the real rubber meets the road is in the plans you make. I’ve made several goals in my life, few that have been accomplished. Because I merely thought of the goal and thought that was it and the rest would take care of itself. Nope.

A goal is only useful to the extent that it is translated into a plan of action. Sometimes, though, that plan is not readily apparent or not worked out in detail right away. The trick is continually developing the goal into a plan. Sometimes, I find, it takes more effort than I thought to sustain the vision of the goal in my mind. I’m not used to holding an idea for that long. If an idea has stayed around, it is because I have been able to put it to use and reuse- like when I was teaching a class and the thought was reiterated in a couple of lectures. So for me, I’m learning that knowing what I want, what my goal is, can only be achieved by making a plan… a plan to sustain the vision of my goal until my plan to achieve that goal is in place. The plan I’ve adopted is simply reading the goal, and statements that paint a picture of me achieving that goal, everyday. Ideally I read it about 4 times a day, but that doesn’t always happen. So simple, but I can already begin to sense the fruits of this very easy task.

The cool thing that I’m finding is that things come about when you work towards it, but not necassarily as a direct result of your efforts. I find it best stated in a quote from a book called “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” about an artist named Robert Irwin: “Grace-you work and you work and you work at something that then happens of its own accord. It would not have happened without all that work, but the result cannot be accounted for as the product of the work in the sense that an effect is said to be the product of its causes. There is all that preparation- preparation for receptivity- and then ther is something else, beyond that, which is gratis, for free.”

Plans. Plans to succeed. Plans for spending your money (a more preferable way of saying ‘budget’). A plan for learning something new. A plan for salvation. A plan for actively loving your mate. Goals are but dreams. The plan is the key.

So I’ve decided to try this blogging thing. There was a time when I could be quite wordy in print, however, now that the prospect of blogging is upon me I find myself quite unaware of what to write about. Though it is not necessary, perhaps, to enforce any agenda on myself and my writing, by beginning this I willingly put one upon myself. You see, I wanted to begin blogging as a way of improving myself. By writing or typing these things, they become more real, no longer brief flashes of electrical current in my mind, but something that is now out in the world; something that bears witness to me and my actions; something I must reckon with. In my pursuit to improve upon myself, then, I am structuring into my experience a sense of accountability; something that I think we all need.

This is also an attempt to know more deeply. Many of the ideas I present here are but origins that I hope to develop into mature thoughts through the very process of making them known- to others and to myself. As I reflect, then, on some of the new things I have learned in the last couple of months even (which is plenty as I’ll go into more detail in a future blog) I am amazed at the concept of knowing. It seems there are different levels to knowing. I recently read in one of Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rick Dad, Poor Dad” books (he has several, I think I read this in book 2 or 3) that learning something new is really just a matter of expanding your vocabulary. I was struck by how profound this was, because I saw the truth in it. However, it was only a partial truth. Indeed, much of learning something new is learning how it is called, and what that word means. This alone can open up vast new worlds and areas of exploration. However, to truly know requires a depth that goes beyond just the mere understanding of a few words. But rather you begin to see the new concept in all of its fullness. You can imagine it, like a circular globe in space. And you begin to see it in multiple dimensions, how it is interconnected with other concepts you hold. You can visualize the warp and the weave of the fibers that bind it to new experiences and past experiences that you have had. And you begin to see options; no longer does it have a singular meaning, but carries a multiplicity of nuances that vary according to the time and the exact context.

Well, I’ll dispense with the theoretical rhetoric for now and just let it serve as my introduction. In the days and months to come I hope to go into more detail on the things I am learning, how they are interconnected with each other and how sometimes a single idea can run its singular course through seemingly diverse subjects like God, marriage, sales, real estate, art, and physics. All subjects I spend time with. All areas in which my life currently has stakes in. Welcome to my brain.