Warriors Don't Run From Suffering*

* Because it makes them stronger

The US Marines say it this way... "Pain is weakness leaving the body"

Finding life, finding yourself, finding Christ involves pain. But, so does just living. You are going to experience pain in this life. When it comes don't waste it by trying to run from it. Instead, embrace it and let it bring you life.

Then Jesus went to work on his disciples. "Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You're not in the driver's seat; I am. Don't run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I'll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for? Mat 16:24-26

Here is the formula if you truly want to find yourself (life, freedom, joy, peace, fulfillment)

"If you don't go all the way with me, through thick and thin, you don't deserve me. If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you'll find both yourself and me. Mat 10:38-39

There Is No Spoon

Your enemy (devil/world/flesh) wants you to think that you can become right with God by following the rules, but that is impossible. "If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily." Gal 2:21

You can not become righteous by trying to be righteous. Jesus said that in order to achieve righteousness in your own strength you would have to mutilate yourself. (read Mat 5:29-30)

Instead, only try to realize the truth... You are already righteous. Then you will see that it is not you that makes yourself righteous, it is Christ.

Simple Clarity? - Guest blog by Gary Barkalow

I remember one evening watching a nature show about lions in Africa. It was one of those amazing productions where you observed a lion's life from birth through adulthood. I watched the lion as a cub rolling in the grass, wrestling with his siblings, pouncing on his father, his mother grooming him. As the cub got older, I watch him on his initial hunts with some success, but mostly failure. In the lion's later life, he found a mate and had his own cubs. His days consisted of guiltlessly resting in the shade in the heat of the day, confidently hunting for food and valiantly defending his family from predators. Something about the simple clarity of his life and the sense of "being", untouched by the nagging, shaming question of, "who am I" and "what should I be doing with my life" stirred a type of jealousy in me. It wasn't necessarily a simple life that I was wanting, but instead it was his simple clarity - he was just being what he was ...a lion. If we were created to be something, to do something, to contribute something why is it so hard then to figure out what that is?

In C.S. Lewis', The Chronicles of Narnia, we read of a great prince who had been imprisoned under an enchantment by a witch. While under her spell Prince Rilian would lose all recollection of who he was and where he came from - "while I was enchanted I could not remember my true self." And during his brief moments of clarity, being told that those moments were actually times of insanity, the prince would be voluntarily bound to a chair until he would come back into his "right mind" which he later described as a "heavy, tangled, cold, clammy web of evil magic."

This is how life feels for most of us - we are lost in a fog of confusion and dullness with brief moments of clarity and desire which seem so hard to hold on to. And when we are able to capture those moments that have a ring of authenticity about them, we quickly start to doubt their legitimacy. Could we be under some web of evil magic?

"I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the wonderful future he has promised to those he called. I want you to realize what a rich and glorious inheritance he has given to his people." Eph. 1:18 NLV

"I press on (strenuously pursue) to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me." Phil. 3:12 NIV

In the pursuit with you,

Gary

For further information about Gary or The Noble Heart go to http://www.thenobleheart.com

What's A Boy To Do?

Mat Kearney
What's A Boy To Do

I'm sure that I'm moving to St. Louis
Three long years wandering here in New York City
I guess I'm looking for the right way to do this
I guess I'm looking for the right things to call pretty

Young boys playing in the park
Turning their backs to take a shot
You know I'll stay sharp around here
'Cause they're stoning and leaving type
It's the kind of love that comes and goes
When there's company coming around

What's a boy to do who knows no man now
What's a boy to do who knows no man now

Daddy's been looking down his nose at all of them
And I've been looking 'round for someone to tell me who I am
He kept saying I was too young to finish a fight
I'd die each time they came
I never got to draw my knife

Well it was just a pair of shoes in a middle school room
With the world watching in
An angel is crying
I'm dying just a little inside as they ran away
Funny which words stick around twenty years down
When you're driving alone

What's a boy to do when there's no man at home
What's a boy to do when there's no man at home

Well I'll stack all my books into perfect rows
From the biggest down to the smallest ones
And I buy all the perfect clothes
Bullet proof and black
Where I look like a son

Well it was just a rainy night at his house
A bottle spinning around the room
And everybody's singing
And slipping down the bottom of a halfway rush of blood
And I was grabbing Missy but I was trying to find the light switch in the dark

What's a boy to do with no man in his heart
What's a boy to do with no man in his heart

It's all quiet for the first time
With no voices left to fall
I saw a boy at the bottom of the bridge
His car was left there on the top

It's four o'clock in the morning
Didn't need to be like this
There's a white sheet left to cover up what should have been a holy kiss

It's not like those days
It's not like I'm scared of you

What's the Son of Man and a boy to do
What's the Son of Man and a boy to you

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Would You Be A Man?

From the movie Australia

At some point in a boy's life he must leave his mother and enter the company of men. As John Eldredge says, masculinity is imparted to a boy in the company of men.

"The ancient societies believe that a boy becomes a man only through ritual and effort-only through the 'active intervention of older men,'" Bly reminds us. The father or another man must actively intervene, and the mother must let go. Bly tells the story of one tribal ritual, which involves as they all do the men taking the boy away for initiation. But in this case, when he returns, the boy's mother pretends not to know him. She asks to be introduced to "the young man." That is a beautiful picture of how a mother can cooporate in her son's passage to the father's world. (From Wild at Heart by John Eldredge page 67-68)

We live in an age of uninitiated men. We are not sure that we are men because we have not been tested. Most of us are walking around looking for the answer to our question... Am I a man? Do I have what it takes?

Keeping The Rules

Here is an idea that you could try...

Beat yourself into submission, follow all the rules,
duty, obligation,
behavior modification.
Submit to peer pressure - join an accountability group.
You know - Moral striving.
But that will not take you on the journey that God has for you. That is a futile journey. It leads to guilt, shame and a hidden life. Life like a bug in a bottle.

The real journey, the one that leads to life, joy, fulfillment, significance and peace comes by walking with God in honesty, vulnerability and transparency.

Galatians 2:19-21 (The Message)

^19-21What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn't work. So I quit being a "law man" so that I could be God's man. Christ's life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not "mine," but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that.

Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God's grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.

Mantopia Life- Resurrecting The Masculine Heart

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Henry David Thoreau - Walden

No-one wants to remain a prisoner of an unlived life. John O'Donohue - Beauty

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