A Six-Pointer The Hard Way

Did you see THIS article? That's a little too much like Open Season!

Greg Vincent thought he was kidding when he told his 13-year-old son and a nephew that he could use his hunting knife to handle a snorting buck that was about to charge them....

"I took out my knife and jokingly told the boys I would take care of the deer if it attacked," he said. Then the animal lowered its head, shook its antlers, snorted, pawed the ground and advanced on them.

It got close to Kyle, and that's when Vincent rushed the animal. He grabbed the antlers, jerked the deer's head around and stabbed it in the ribs. Vincent said he hoped that would make the animal run away, but the animal kept struggling.

Vincent hung onto the deer's neck as they tumbled into a creek and he dropped the knife. He yelled for the boys to find the knife, and nephew Dillon Vincent placed the knife in his uncle's hand.

"When I stabbed the neck, I pulled the knife as hard as I could," Greg Vincent said, ripping a large gash that probably would have been fatal. The deer continued to struggle but was growing weaker. Vincent, who was a competitive weightlifter in high school, was tiring, too. Within moments, his father, Harvey Vincent, finished off the animal with a shot from Kyle's rifle.

That'll be one deer story they never forget!

One Of Those Days...

I hate to lose. I mean I REALLY HATE to lose. You might not know it from my mild mannered alter ego but it is very true. In fact, deep down, I'm so competitive that I don't much like the fellow I become when I lose. Over the years I have developed ways to cope with this dark little me. Most of them have involved locking competitive me away in a dark dungeon and not giving him an opportunity to come out and do his thing.

It is a poor solution, really, because I have allowed myself to shut away one of my most masculine traits merely because it is dangerous. If you subscribe to John Eldredge's view of masculinity, you know that that is a cardinal sin. But I digress. See, this post isn't about how I have managed this aspect of my life so much as it is about the spiritual warfare that Christians find themselves engaged in constantly and more particularly about the warfare in which I found myself yesterday.

One of the neat things about being a Christian is the foregone certainty that we are on a winning team. While this is true, it is also very true that our sanctification doesn't occur overnight. The reality is that we struggle against our flesh for the remainder of our days. Until we die we will contend against its desires. Our enemy does his part too to make sure that we trip often.

As a young Christian I had great success in the battle against the flesh initially. Quite a few of my more fleshly habits dropped to the wayside very easily. However, there came a time in my life (and from my observation the lives of all Christians) where the Lord allowed the enemy to start fighting back. This generally comes as a shock to new believers, and the real hard work of sanctification is begun.

Over the years you become more accustomed to the fight. Indeed, you can even get in the habit of winning these skirmishes with the enemy. Then God takes you to a new place where the demons that you are battling have entrenched themselves deep in the areas of your personality that are so close to your perception of who you are that it feels like the guns of heaven, the blasts of the enemy, and even your own weapons are turned upon you. The very things that we are fighting are the attitudes and mechanisms that we have used to protect ourselves from the wounds that we have received throughout our lives. These defenses were adopted as means of the flesh to survive the awful attack of an enemy who sought to destroy us even before we came to know Jesus the Savior. The difficulty of this part of the fight is that the habits are so deeply ingrained that we often do them without even realizing that we are doing them.

Such is the battle that I have been fighting. Recently, the Lord began to show me that the very root of all of the sinful manifestations that I have been resisting for all of my Christian life are bound up in one thing: FEAR. He has begun to show me through the Scriptures that if we truly know Him and truly understand the relationship that He wants to have with us then we need fear nothing. When we have acknowledged Him as Lord and are submitted to His will for our lives then we have nothing to fear in all of creation.

I pretty well have this down in my mind. I understand the theology behind it. I assent to the logic of it. I believe it is right. And yet I discovered yesterday that there is a big difference between knowledge and true belief. Knowing your enemy does not guarantee victory over him.

Yesterday I had to deal with a financial matter that had been looming for several months. I knew that I needed to work on it, but really wasn't that afraid of it. I wasn't afraid, that is, until I sat down to start working on it. It was then that the enemy hit me with everything that he had, and I found myself resorting to all of my old tricks. In short, I totally blew it, even though I knew what was going on, and even though I knew to fight, I found myself totally overwhelmed.

I hate losing. And by God's grace, in the next battle it will be the enemy licking his wounds, not me.

Quote Of the Day

"Life is the living of The Mystery. As one Greek Orthodox theologian put it, 'We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.' What are doctrines but vestibules to the mysteries? To follow Jesus is not a paint-by-numbers path. To follow Jesus is to live the adventure and experience the mystery of faith."

-Leonard Sweet, Jesus Drives Me Crazy!

A Pretty Good Day

As I am winding down tonight, I can't help but think that it's been a pretty good day. The temperatures in lovely China Grove remained reasonable for early September and my air conditioning was able to keep up. I was given a reprieve on some work that I was doing that made me want to pull my hair out. I enjoyed some pretty good food. I got to spend some time talking and praying with my pastor. I got to blog. And I got to play my guitar.

I haven't played my guitar so much in a long time. I have been trying to learn some new stuff, and that always necessitates a little practice. I haven't had to work this hard at anything (on guitar) in quite a while, though, so it is really rewarding.

I remember all those days back in college when I had my guitar out all the time trying to learn how to play. Somewhere along the way I guess I decided that I played pretty well and there wasn't any point in working at it so hard. Kind of a bummer making that decision. I might have been really good if I had kept pushing forward.

I suppose after a while you get to the point where no one is really teaching you anything any more. If you have ever played guitar with people who can play, you will agree that they rarely do much teaching, but they do a whole lot of playing. This is especially problematic if you are trying to share one guitar during the "lesson."

Anyway, last year (I think) sometime I bought an instructional DVD for worship guitar. I messed with it a little bit, but really didn't take the time to really learn the things that I didn't already know. Well, I did manage to learn the first pentatonic scale form and worked through the others, but never worked at learning the other forms.

For the past few days I have been working on the second form. It is from the devil! It has been really hard to teach my fingers to do that, but I think that they are slowly being driven into submission. It is amazing how out of shape the muscles in my hand and arm have gotten - even with the regular playing I am doing for church. Of course, the truth may be that since I have never really learned scales that I have never worked these muscles this way.

Oh well! Whatever the case is, I have made a concerted effort to take my playing up a notch. I have never ventured out on lead much, but I am hoping that learning these scales will be a path towards learning how to do that more and learning how to play electric guitar. I play acoustic pretty exclusively.

It should also help me when I am playing bass. I have pretty well always done that by ear, but knowing the scales should take me up quite a few notches there too if I can ever get an opportunity to use my bassing.

Playing last night I came up with a possible new song. It uses the same chord progression as the verse of Blessed Be Your Name, but has a much different tune. I think that the lyric will be a fusion of the Doxology and Gloria Patri

I heard a worship leader named Ashlie Rice use Doxology in her worship set. It was really cool. I have wanted to use it myself, but I didn't want to just copy it from her. She is hopefully going to be coming to our church in a couple of weeks and will hopefully be leading worship some in my place. I hope she will do it then so that she will get the credit for coming up with the idea if I do it in the future.

I guess I've never really mentioned it in this forum before, but I do lead worship at my church. I've been doing it now for 2 years... I think. It is either 2 or 3. This is definitely the longest time that I have been responsible for leading worship for a church. In the past it got really weighty, but it hasn't been too bad this time around. I have had a real grace for it. Not to mention that I really enjoy hanging around with all of the characters in my band. We have a couple vocalists and a piano/keyboard player, a bass player, and me on guitar. It would be nice to have some percussion, but that would also add a whole new set of challenges that we don't have to deal with right now.

Another thing that I never mentioned here is that I started seminary last fall. Well, kind of. I took my first class in the fall of last year. Subsequent financial challenges and a season in God's crucible have put that pursuit on hold for the time being, but I am really looking forward to getting back to my studies. I go to Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte. It is an excellent school. I can't wait to get back. I'll have to devote a post to the story of how I ended up bagging the real estate business and going to seminary some time soon.

Anyway, I guess that is enough for now. Suffice it to say that it has been a very good day.

Quote of The Day

Spiritual growth thrives in the midst of our problems, not in their absence. Spiritual growth occurs in the trenches of life, not in the classroom. We don't grow while studying the definition of consistency; we grow when we try to be consistent in an inconsistent world.

-Mike Yaconelli, Messy Spirituality: God's Annoying Love for Imperfect People

Check It Out

This is by far the most engaging thing that I have been reading lately. Just in case you haven't seen the earlier posting that I did, my friend DavidP has left on a one month quest to seek the Lord's will about a possible redeployment to Japan for his family. His daily blog entries have chronicled this journey. It is a fascinating, exciting read with discussions about the culture, God's direction while he has been there, and deeper questions and revelations that he has encountered on his quest. Check it out!

David P's Mobile Blog

Freedom

Wade's comment on the quote of the day has set me to thinking about freedom. The whole westward expansion was about freedom, and the American dream, and the possibility of self determination. There is certainly something romantic (not in the ushy gushy sense of the word) about the whole cowboy ethos: no attachments, no rules, no fences. You spend your days on the prairie and your nights beneath the stars. You drink and fight and love like there is no tomorrow, because there may not be. You live by your wits, your fists, and the six-shooter slung on your hip.

Terry, a close friend of mine and I were discussing the whole Pirates of the Caribbean franchise the other day. There really isn't that much different between the image they portrayed of the pirate's life and that of the cowboy's. The prairie and the pirate's ship represent the same thing - freedom. I guess that is why we are as enamoured of pirate legends as we are of cowboy stories. Anyway, Terry and I were discussing the way that the pirates in the movie used their freedom - lying, cheating, stealing, whoring, killing. Really and truly, they were the bad guys. So why did we pull for them and cheer when they won? Why do we love John Wayne's, or Bruce Willis', or Clint Eastwood's characters? They all played heroes with at least as many vices as virtues.

Perhaps they remind us of ourselves in some way. Though they are all scalawags, as Jack Sparrow would put it, in spite of themselves and though they might deny it, they still manage to do something good occasionally. I guess it gives us hope - though we are incredibly flawed, we hope that somehow that spark of the Divine will shine out from us.

I think, of course, that the other part of it comes from our desire to be dangerous. John Eldredge hit it on the head when he identified men's need to be dangerous. Who wants to be good according to society's definition? Bor-ing. But a man who is good and dangerous - now that is interesting. It's exciting. It's not safe. It is living outside of the fences.

The funny thing is that someone who is living according to the Spirit of God really isn't living outside of a moral fence - quite the opposite - but he is living free. He is living outside of the pens that the enemy would put him in - pens of guilt and shame. The free man doesn't need to indulge in the forbidden foods given to those locked in their pens who are being fattened for destruction.

The past 12 months have been for me an exercise in living on the edge. I am by no means and adrenaline junkie. I always evaluate risks before I act. But God has taken me on a faith journey this year that has tested my nerves like never before. I have been taken to the brink quite a few times, only to see the Lord step in at just the right time. The ride has been wilder than any roller-coaster that I have ever ridden. It has been exhilarating and exhausting all at the same time. And for the first time in my life, I am beginning to see the world outside of the barn.

Into the Great Wide Open

Today, my best friend from college has left on a quest to discover God's will for him and his family... in Japan. I think that this is the coolest thing.

I always believed that he was called to some kind of vocational ministry, but worried that he either didn't see it or had indefinitely postponed it when he got married. I guess that is why I was so jazzed when he told me what he was about to do.

It takes all kinds of moxy to just pack up and leave your family for a month and go to the other side of the world just to hear what God will say to you. It is bold and daring. I can't wait to hear what the Lord tells him to do.

DavidP tells me that he is going to be blogging about his experiences while he is there. I have linked to his blog here and also have it posted under "Good Reading." Check it out!