The Will to Rise

"Rise and Rise Again

Until Lambs become Lions"

- (from "Robin Hood", 2010)

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A new year.

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A new beginning.

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A new chance to fight a little tougher, hang in there a little longer, rise a little higher, become more like the person we've always wanted to be.

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No, this isn't just some kind of self-help mumbo-jumbo meant to psyche you up for a challenge that you are destined to lose.

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Yes, God does play a crucial role in this whole "becoming something more" thing we call growing into the image of Christ, growing into restored humanity.

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But come on - you're the one living your life: all the theological arguments aside about what part God plays and what part humans play, you know what happens when you let yourself slip into complacency...when you stop chasing this thing called holiness...when you stop fighting for abundant life and intimacy with the Father and power through the Spirit.

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You know what happens.

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Not much.

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There just aren't a whole lot of 'free passes' in the Christian Life. Most mornings God is not going to leave a message for you in your email inbox, so if you run straight into checking your mail and all the rush of the day, He's probably going to let you. It's not that He doesn't care. It just seems to be the rules that govern this particular fairy tale that we have fallen into. There's just a whole lot that's up to us.

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More than we are comfortable admitting, for the most part.

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"Creation seems to be delegation through and through. God, it appears, does nothing on His own that He could possibly delegate to His creatures..."

(C.S. Lewis)

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"Without God we cannot. Without Man, He will not." (Augustine)

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Again, this isn't about 'theology'. This is about what happens when you try it. Spend an hour a day getting alone and quiet and attempting to access the presence of God, and you are likely to find Him...with varying levels of success, admittedly. But spend your whole day on the run from one thing to the next with no time for God and, well...we both know how that works out. It's like the whole supernatural reality can fade into non-existence, begin to feel like a farce and a fantasy.

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So what are we to do? Regardless of the unseen theological mechanisms at work behind the scenes, here at the level of our experience we can't deny that so much appears to basically be up to us. What will we do next? What will we do with this year? With this day? With this moment?? Will we develop a Warrior's spirit? A dogged refusal to stay down in the mud, no matter how many times we've fallen flat on our faces? A unyielding commitment to our own transformation - to the long and brutal training that it may require to turn us from lambs to lions?

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We'll be honest with you: if 2011 felt like you spent more time with your face in the mud than on your feet, you are not alone. We're right with you on this one. No worries that we think anybody who feels like its a fight just to keep moving forward is some sort of failure who just needs to understand their 'victory in Christ Jesus'. No, we know it's not that easy.

Will you walk with us through the year ahead?

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Keep Fighting

“After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again…
The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.”

C.S. Lewis from Mere Christianity.

October 1, 2011 – 5:59AM; 49 degrees; Littleton, Colorado.

It’s dark out and I (David) can still see stars above as I sit wrapped in my sleeping bag out on the deck. Mornings are always chilly at 6,000 ft. and a 40 degree swing during the day is not
unusual here at the base of the Rocky Mountain foothills. There is just the faintest hint of light on
the eastern horizon and everything is quiet and still.

There’s no other way to say it. Yesterday was a disaster. I failed in almost every respect. A mere five days in to our new 90 day challenge and I allowed myself to be crushed by the Enemy. It started with giving into sexual temptation online, which is by far my greatest and most consistent struggle. Then it spiraled out of control from there. I barely managed a double digit point total for the day which is far below our target goal. I went to bed last night dejected and discouraged.

But thank God for his beautiful design where each morning you can start anew. I woke before my alarm with the above quote from C.S. Lewis in my mind - “pick yourself up, and try again.”

So I’m out on the deck on this Saturday morning while most are still sleeping. Just spending time with our Father. Dwelling on His beauty, thanking Him for His forgiveness, and appreciating who He is. I make a conscious decision to forgive myself for the failures of yesterday. The Enemy will try to use our failures and sin as a club to fill us with guilt and shame and convince us to stop fighting. However, I have repented and God has forgiven me and doesn’t even remember my failures of yesterday. So I choose to do the same. I spend 90 minutes with Him, praying, reading I Peter 1, interceding for family and friends and reading a chapter from one of my favorite Brennan Manning books, The Rabbi’s Heartbeat.

I am struck by these words from Manning:

“The Christian commitment is not an abstraction. It is a concrete, visible, courageous, and formidable way of being in the world forged by daily choices consistent with inner truth. A commitment that is not visible in humble service, suffering discipleship, and creative love is an illusion.”

And I am reminded, once again, how important the disciplines are and how important this 90 day challenge is.

I finish my morning time with the Lord and get an enjoyment of beauty point by listening to the fifth movement of Beethoven’s 6^th Symphony while I enjoy the sunrise. Absolutely gorgeous. (6 points; sunrise, time with God (2), intercession, reading, enjoyment of beauty.)

I then take a 25 minute hike before breakfast and get a cardio point. (1 point; cardio.)

The aspens are at the height of their golden beauty in the high mountains and I decide to take my Mom on a color drive. We’re off!

Returning from a few hours enjoying bright yellow aspens among the evergreens with a deep Colorado blue sky in the background, I head to the gym to work out and do a session of kickboxing. (2 points; gym workout, physical warrior training.)

Then, I meet up with my brother-in-law and train him for 45 minutes (he has asked me to help him lose weight and get in shape and he is doing great. Down almost 15 pounds already!) (1 point; random act of generosity (time).)

In the evening after supper I spend some time praying with my Mom who is battling a terrible shingles infection in her eye. She has rather constant nerve pain around her eye and we keep praying for a healing breakthrough. (3 points; battling for someone in prayer.)

By the end of the day I have compiled seven additional points. (7 points; sexual
purity, eating with discipline, vow of poverty, vow of silence, working on
ministry tasks.)

After the disappointment of yesterday, I began the day resolved to fight even harder and had my most successful day yet on the new program – 20 points.

We would love to hear how you are progressing with the new challenge and hope that when you fail, and you will, that you will pick yourself up, set your face like flint, and try again.

Out the Door - the journey begins again

Although the Warrior's Path blog has always been larger than any one (0r two) person's private lives, we thought it might be helpful to walk with you all in a little more intimate way through the "WP90X" challenge of spiritual disciplines that we have undertaken to accomplish between now and Christmas Day:

I awoke on day 1 around 6:30, with plenty of time to catch the sunrise...if only there had been a sunrise. It was a grey morning, and the darkness lingered. I stood by the window for a while staring into the gloom, then wrapped up in a blanket on the couch. It had been a late night and a broken sleep, and the discipline of rising early to be alone with the Lord has always been my greatest weakness. I struggled through 30 minutes of trying to settle in and focus my heart and thoughts on God, but when you are out of practice it can be so hard to slow down the cyclone of thoughts that rush at you as soon as your feet hit the floor. I didn't feel a whole lot of fruit to my prayer attempts, but sometimes setting disciplines in place and committing to "showing up" is all we can hope for. We all know that you "reap what you sow"; but unlike the generations who went before us, we don't have the agricultural experience to know how much hard work goes into sowing...and how much time it takes before you can enjoy the reaping. Once the discipline of "showing up" to be with God takes hold, we will have opened wide the door for Him to "show up" in the days and years ahead. (3 points: sunrise, time with God)

A little after noon I headed out for the nearest chance I had at catching a "beauty point". It was a thirty minute drive to the park, the sky was still overcast, the clouds were misting a light rain across the countryside, and there was (as there always is) a litany of reasons why I ought to "get busy". But the Warrior challenge drove me out there - out of my way, out of my schedule - in search of something that would stir my soul. My car, as always when I am focused, was my chapel, and the conversation with God that had begun in the morning resumed once again in earnest. (1 point - time with God)

The rain cleared out, but the air was wet and the wind was in the trees. It was a lonely, brooding sort of beauty that I found in my favorite part of the park, a small peninsula where you look down from a height past tall tree trunks to the water below, and then beyond it to the dense treeline on the island beyond. I found myself delightfully alone. I walked. I prayed. I stood. I read from Eldredge's book "Walking with God". I listened to some great soundtrack music to help revive my deep longings for more of God, more of Life, more of all that we have once tasted but lost somewhere along the way. (4 points - beauty, time with God, intercession for others, reading)

On the way home I stopped by a store and bought a gift for my wife - something she didn't need or didn't expect. (1 point: random act of kindness or generosity)

Next I swung by my dad's house, where I have all my workout equipment set up in his garage. (You might think he'd like to be parking his car in there at some point, but the old wooden garage door is far too heavy for him to lift, so there isn't much use bothering about whether he would like to park his car in there or not.) It was Spartan 300 day, and I was feeling naseous just at the thought of the workout I had in store. As it turned out, the workout was too much for me on this day, and I was so exhausted I chose to bail out on the last excercise when I saw that there was no way I was going to finish in under 3o minutes. (Yes, you fitness gurus: I know full well that the famed "300" test used in preperation for filming the movie "300" wasn't really fitness training, but a one-time test/challenge given at the end of four months of training. But I like it, and I use it once a week anyway.) (2 points: weightlifting workout and cardio workout)

Several of the points take a whole day to achieve: remaining sexually pure, eating with discipline (all the way til bedtime!), observing a vow of poverty, or silence, etc. (total of 6 points today)

All in all, it was a great day of disciplines - 17 points. Most importantly, it was a day of deliberately seeking time with the Lord - on multiple ocassions - and in the end that is the ultimate priorty. A good day.

And yet...

...it was only the beginning...

How was your score??

WP90"X"

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"Just once in his life,

A Man has his Time.

And that time is Now

I'm comin' Alive...

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I can make it,

I know I can

You broke the Boy in me

But you wont break the Man!"

-Theme from St. Elmo's Fire

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Brothers and Sisters,

We don't know how many of you have ever taken a look at the "Warrior Disciplines Training Chart" that we have posted here on the website (see the navigation bar above, or just click here). The "disciplines" chart is something that we developed a couple of years ago as an expression of the great gap between the way we were living our lives at the time and our personal vision of what qualities would typify our daily lives if we were living as "mighty men of God".

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Yes, we had some pretty bold visions. But then, the goal of this whole shin-dig we're living is to be like Jesus...so having some pretty high standards of the kind of Man you want to become seems resonable, even when highly improbable, if not humanly impossible. Confusing, we know. Quixotic even, to be perfectly honest. But true nonetheless.

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The goal may feel out of reach.

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But it's still the goal.

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"He will be infinitely merciful our repeated failures; I know no promise that He will accept a deliberate compromise." - C.S. Lewis

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In the intervening years since setting out to conform our personal lives more closely to the blueprint of the kind of men we wanted to be, we have found "The Chart" to be an indispensible tool in our spiritual journey.

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The next stage of that Journey begins todoay (Monday, September 26th).

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And we're inviting you to come along.

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We're calling it "90 days to Freedom". Consider it the ultimate Advent season. If you count down 90 days beginning from today you will arrive at the high holy day of Christmas Eve, the night when angels sang of the Great King's disguised appearance on center stage of the Rebel Planet called Earth. And so, in the King's Name, for the next 90 days leading up to Christmas, we will be endeavoring to live the disciplined lives of spiritual warriors, keeping track daily of our successes, and, yes, our failures too.

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It won't be easy. Even aiming for a 10 point daily average (you'll understand when you look at the chart and read the instructions) is setting the bar extremely high. The flesh quails at the very thought of it. It's one thing to walk in obedience to God and in the disciplines of a healthy body, mind and spirit when you are in the mood. It's another thing altogether to stick doggedly to that same Path when you are in the mood to be heading down a slightly different, slightly easier Road. But that is why, after all, they are called disciplines.

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Are you in?

Summoned

"We live, in fact, in a world

starved for solitude, silence, and privacy,

and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship."

- C.S. Lewis "The Weight of Glory and other addresses"

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Ah, to be somewhere "far from the maddening crowd," as the saying goes. Doesn't that sound wonderful right about now? The pace of life is rushing now - rushing, rushing ever faster. Have you noticed in this tendancy towards acceleration in your own life?? The world spins ever faster, and so do our thoughts. There are days where it doesn't feel like there is enough calm at the center of our beings to hold a coherent thought in our mind's eye for more than two minutes together. The 'tyranny of the immediate' jerks and jolts us from one stream of babbling thoughts full of busyness and banality to the next quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.

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When it comes to our internal lives, the life of our deep inner selves, we spend most of the average day utterly helpless and out of control. We are at the mercy of the urgent needs of the moment. We have become slaves to the world of our own making. Maybe the familiar children's song is still true; maybe we really do have "peace like a river" and "joy like a fountain" somewhere deep down in our soul. Maybe it's still there. Who knows? But the reality we do know is that whatever the state of that inner reservoir, we've been too busy to go back to that well in a long, long time.

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We are so busy with our lives that we no longer have the time to Live.

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On the whole, we are, as Lewis pointed out 60 years ago, starved for meditation and for true friendship.

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And the loss is all ours.

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"Come away, come away, come away with me my love;

Come away, from this mess, come away with me my love..."

- Keith Green, "Asleep in the Light"

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"Come away..."

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Who can deny that what we most need right now is to "come away", to come apart from the world for a little while? Can you hear that offer being made to you - this very day? The choice really is there, believe it or not. Of course the stuff that is stealing your hours and whittling away at the days, months, and years of your life feels inescapable -- why would you be doing it all if you didn't have to? I mean, aren't we always saying that we wish we could slow things down, take a few deep breaths, get away for a soul-refreshing retreat somewhere far away from all the noise and clammer?

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And yet...

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When the choice presents itself, what do we usually do??

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We hide.

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Hide in our to-do list. Hide in our busyness. Hide in the demands of the "urgent". Hide in anything and everything that can fill our days with a sense of "doing something" or "getting somewhere".

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Truth be told, we are afraid of the Silence. We have too many unanswered questions, too many unresolved issues, too many unsatisfied longings to actually want to shut down all the outer activity and be truly alone with ourselves, with our God, or with our dearest soul companions.

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And here is the dual-edged sword of truth about our lives: the universe will not fall apart if we get away for a while. You see, there is one part of us that would feel such release and such freedom to finally discover this truth about the little drama we have created for ourselves in which we play Atlas, holding the entire world upon our vast and powerful shoulders. But there is another part that would feel completely cut loose from firm ground and set adrift in a wild ocean of overwhelming loss and confusion, because we do not know ourselves as anything or anyone other than as "the person who MUST take care of this house and teach this Sunday School class and finish this project at work and read that book and get that degree and make these people's lives happy, etc..." And without all that, we fear: who are we anyway? What is left that I can call "me"?

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If we are to answer to summons to "come away", we must overcome the fear of what a shock it will be to our self-esteem to discover that the world will continue spinning without us pedaling the mechanism that makes it go around. We must step out of our routine, maybe even shock, surprise, and inconvenience some people in the process. Certainly this was the warning Jesus gave to those individuals who wanted to follow Him, but felt the tug of responsibility keeping them tied to home. "Leave the harvest to you hired work crew this season, skip that wedding and social event of the decade, let your aging father take care of himself for a little while..." Or, in today's parlance: "Hire a babysitter, take some unpaid leave from the office, leave the backyard renovations for next summer, cancel the marathon training plans this time around, say "no" to people who don't understand and respect your need to 'come away with me'.."

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No more excuses.

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You need this.

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And on top of that, you've been summoned.

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"Come away, come away, come away with me, my love"

Stir it up

From the label of a certain familiar protein drink:

"Shake well:

Settling is natural"

How's that for a deep spiritual truth popping up in the
unlikeliest of places?

It's a great motto, really - serving as both a reminder of
our current predicament, while at the same time offering an incredibly
practical solution to the classic question of "How then, shall we
live?"



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Shake well: Settling is natural.

Yes. Settling is natural. By natural we mean that it is the
natural state of affairs. When things are left to themselves, settling
occurs...

...in a protein drink...

...in a pond....

...and especially in our lives.

Oh, if only we believed that! If only we accepted fully and
unequivically that, if left unwatched and unguarded, the most natural thing in
life is to settle. That unless we are actively doing something to prevent it,
settling simply happens!

It's as unavoidable as the Law of Entropy, as cliche as the
old admonition that "if you aren't growing, you're dying." (Believe
it or not, as distasteful as cliches are to most of us, on ocassion they turn
out to actually be true.) To stand still is to stagnate. To do nothing is to
lose ground. And what's even worse: even trying to maintain your last level of
effort wont be enough.

Settling is natural.

There's another somewhat annoying cliche that says:
"The Christian life is a marathon, not a sprint." Pretty safe bet
you've heard that one. Not ever having been a world class sprinter OR any sort
of a marathoner whatsoever, I can't really vouch for any of that. I know it is
a terrible thing when that cliche is used as an excuse to tell young,
exhuberant Christians to "slow down", as if slackening one's pace in
the Christian life will somehow make it easier to finish the Race in the same
way it might help a runner finish a marathon.

But that cliche aside, there is one truth that a
recreational runner can vouch for: if you set out at a particular pace on the
first lap, and do not progressively increase your effort on each successive
lap, you will, before too long, lose your original pace. It will feel the same
to you. Only the stopwatch will alert you to what is actually happening.

That's the law of entropy in action: things tend to wind
down...come undone...fall apart...settle.

If our assumption of the spiritual life was that it followed
the same rules and natural tendencies, if we decided that the only positive
sign of growth and health was not maintenance, but rather a steady program of
ever-increasing effort...

...what would the honest analysis of your personal spiritual
health be?

Settling is Natural.

Do you see some "settling" in your life at the
moment? Are you settling for a life of busyness when you had really wanted to
live a life of Purpose? Are you settling for "okay" relationships
when you once believed that "amazing" relationships were the greatest
pleasure in life? Are you settling for time alone with the Lord where you
haven't the slightest expectation that He is actually going to meet you there?
Are you settling for the kind of person you have become, so far below the
Christ-likeness you originally set out to possess?

Settling is Natural.

So....Shake well.

Change things up a bit. Change them up a lot. Take a trip.
Get out of Dodge. Get out of that negative relationship that's holding you
down. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Get desperate. Get a
"this has to change NOW" attitude. Re-evaluate your goals. Repent of
the places you've been settling (it's a derogatory shot at God's character when
we settle. It's saying that mediocrity is His plan for us.) to Confess your
"settling" with a brother or sister who might just be crazy enough to
join you in your desire to shake things up. Do something unpredictable,
unexpected. Go on a mission trip. Go on a spiritual retreat (we've got one, if
you're interested!)

Yes, settling is natural.

That doesn't mean you have to put up with it.

Shake well.

Derrick and David

Where The Streets Have No Name

"I want to run,

I want to hide,

I want to tear down the walls

That hold me inside.

I want to reach out

And touch the flame,

Where the streets have no name

I want to feel sunlight on my face

I see the dust cloud disappear

Without a trace..."

-U2, "Where The Streets Have No Name"

The Warrior's Journey is not a child's game - not something to be embarked upon lightly. Even in the best of times it is staggering how quickly a "dust cloud" of doubt, disappointment, abandonment and confusion can rise up and envelope our horizon in a suffocating haze. In but a moment the sunlight that seemed it would never fade can suddenly feel years away...like something from a beautiful dream that was never quite as real as the present cloud.

In those times we find our entire outlook on our lives redefined along the lines of numerous subtle agreements. We don't speak them. We wouldn't admit to them to even our closest friends, because they attach themselves to our hearts at a level lower than conscious thought, and most of the time we do not even know they are there.

Sure, we know that we are currently thinking something different about God than we were a month ago, or five years ago -- but it almost never enters our minds to think that the issue might be that we have made an agreement with a lie. No; we're just calling it like we see it. Don't you dare turn this back on me, we shake our fist to the Heavens, the problem here isn't with me! If I've got some serious doubts about some Scriptural promises, it's only because You haven't been coming through! I'm only responding to the reality of the situation I'm in here!"

It hardly seems fair. Trust me - we know. God's goodness, His heart towards us, His involvment in our small little affairs, His concern for our ultimate joy...most days the bulk of the evidence seems to fall against such wildly happy hopes that this is the fabric from which the Universe has been sewn. And then to be told that our lack of faith and trust is only increasing the desperation of our situation seems...well, a little unfair...and that's putting it politely.

So what are we to do?

"We're not indestructible baby better get that straight

I think it's unbelievable how you give into the hands of fate

Some things are worth fighting for, some feelings never die

I'm not asking for another chance, I just wanna know why?

There's no easy way out, there's no shortcut home

There's no easy way out giving in can't be wrong."

Robert Tepper, "No Easy Way Out"

A great song...with a terrible conclusion. Despite admitting that there really is no "easy way out" from underneath certain dust clouds, and certainly not formulaic "short-cut home" to Life and joy and restoration of spirit, the one thing that our Journey along the Warrior's Path has taught us that can be of help to you in your own Journey it is this:

Giving in is ALWAYS wrong.

"For the eyes of the Lord move to and fro throughout the whole earth

that He may strongly support those whose hearts are

completely His."

- II Chronicles 16:9

There can be no agreements with the dust cloud, no agreements with the "walls that hold you inside." You were meant to tear down that wall; you were meant to reach out and touch the Flame; you were meant to feel the sunlight on your face again. And the process of getting there begins with the breaking and repenting of all the subtle little agreements that have clamped onto our hearts like barnacles.

And that is...so much easier said than done.

There's a reason this Road is called The Warrior's Path.

(In case you've ever wondered...)

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