So I'm on a walk and, uh, it's crisp tonight, but I've just been thinking. And so I'm gonna use this, um, sort of like a, a journal, you know, of just what I've been chewing on. Joy in the suffering. Beauty in the suffering. Beautiful suffering. It's like an oxymoron, like who puts that together? Why is that? Who would ever say that? I mean, stuff we hear at church are reading books. You sort of just maybe nod along, but deep down you're like, oh, no, I don't want that. Who wants suffering? Who wants pain? Who wants hard times? We all don't. I don't. And then to be bold enough to slap the label, be beautiful, beautiful suffering. I think the reason. We would say that is that when you're going through something, when you're in the middle of something, is where you actually grow. It's where you change. It's where transformation, it's where it's the, it's the cocoon stage, right? It's not the caterpillar, it's not the butterfly. It's the changing part. So that's why it's beautiful. There's something really beautiful. About the cocoon stage.'cause something's going on on the inside. If we'll pay attention, if we'll pause, if we'll let it be, if we'll embrace it. What starts to happen is like we gain these sort of, I've been calling them like life hacks or level ups or wisdom, like they just feel like wisdom, like your life gets better. Like there's a new way. There's like an unlock. Unlock the cheat code, and now you get to play certain parts of the game on easy mode. What does that mean to me in my journey recently? It just means you get to trust a little more. You get to stretch that muscle. You get to learn how to be a better listener. What I mean by that is like you don't come in with like a head of steam or blame. You just learn to listen. Be present and listen. The sense of like learning to be more present. Literally, you know, we have this tendency as humans to slice and dice and judge and rank and score everything that comes our way. Everything, every meal was good or bad, was better or worse was up or down. You know, every person is on our team or not with us or against us. Good or bad winners or losers. Republicans are Democrats saved, not saved, pagan, sacred, holy, evil. Always. Everything is divided or, or ranked at least, right? Every vacation you go on, you come home. Well, that was good, but it wasn't as good as this. It's this like we have this built in tendency to judge and divide and rank and score everything. It's a very dualistic approach. Dualistic meaning one of two choices, this or that, this or that. Yes or no. And so one of the things that happens is when you go through some of these hard times, what I call suffering, and that can look like a lot of different things, but in you, when you're in it, you know it, let's just say that. But when you're in one of those periods. One of the things I've been learning, one of my unlocks is learning to, to not judge, to, to judge a less, I should say, to be aware that I'm always judging everything and every one. And what it does is like it takes you out of the moment. It's like this literal background software running in our brains, and it literally takes you out of the moment. So you can't be there to see, to notice, to savor, to respect, to love, to just soak it in. To be grateful for whatever it is happening right in front of you on the movie screen of your eyes, whatever it is. Just being there and seeing it actually being present to reality in front of us. I've been learning to do that more. I've got a long way to go. I'm for sure just getting the early cheat code, so to speak. But I'm starting to see, and I'm starting to notice how much I judge and rank everything. You know, Jesus says, do not judge Jesus God. Deity in the flesh came down, moved into the neighborhood. God, the one we claim to know and to follow as church people. Says, do not judge. And I think most of my life that's been do not judge other people when they're bad. You know, like that's on them and you got your own thing. I think that's maybe a small part of it, but what I'm starting to realize, I think it's much bigger than that. I think Jesus is inviting us, instructing us, pointing us into a such a much, such a richer experience of life, of what it really means to be human and divine, to live out our God identity. To be free from this software that's running our mind and our culture of up or down, in or out. This dualistic mindset, non-dual thinking. That's what I want more of. Understanding and realizing that life is so much richer, that reality is so much, so much more a spectrum. That everything doesn't fit in every box. It's not all tidy like that. Just not how it works. And then when we start to realize that, being amazed by that, being in wonder of that not fighting it, not pressing against it, not running from it, nothing denying it, just being in awe of the fact that there's so much that is and can be and will be, that we don't know, that we can't sense. It. It's like freeing. I literally, I know this sounds, you're gonna, you might say, this sounds hippie-ish, or, I don't know, eastern mystic. I don't know. You can call it whatever you want, but the reality is it starts to really open your mind to see reality, to see life and people in this earth, and time and humanity and your story. Start to see in this almost like this real rich 3D way. Way like, like black and white becomes color, and you don't have to constantly put up this front of judging everybody and putting them in a box of dismissing them or embracing them, you know, trying to decide everything. You have this head space, this mind space opened up to be present and to just appreciate and to notice, and to love. Well, to me, that's what love looks like so much of the time. Just seeing someone and not ranking and scoring and judging them, just loving them. Who are they? What's their story? Noticing that they're divine. They're literally the divine image of God sitting before you. That changes everything. They're not just another person on another team. They're not just some other thing. They're connected to you. They're you with everybody else. With all of creation. Paul says Christ is all in. In all. Like you have to see that it's all over. Paul in the New Testament talks about it all the time. Jesus talks about it all the time. Anyway, that is one of the things I'm learning is to step away from the dualistic mind and start to see things in color, like that movie Pleasantville, where you know, it just becomes this rich new picture, this rich new way to experience life and God and people and our neighbors. And suddenly what I'm discovering is all the stuff that we thought was this box or this box, this side or this side. It really wasn't. It really isn't. And when you don't have to carry that and, and carry that logbook around of the of, of scores, you know, when you don't have to literally carry that scoreboard around. And everyone's just free to be who they are in that moment. Good or bad, hard or easy, nice or nasty. They're just allowed to be. I don't know that that feels more like what Jesus did for people, feels more like the life that we're called and invited into. So that's what I think beautiful suffering is about. It's about those spaces, those hard chapters in life where things aren't super clear and the future is questionable. And. You've made mistakes and your heart hurts and you don't know what to do, and you're super confused. All those dark spots, like I said, when you're in those, you know that you're in those, and they can take a lot of different shapes, but this is what I'm learning, maybe getting a little wiser, getting a little older. We can lean into the fact that instead of running, hating, denying, regretting those, we can say, wait on this is, this is what that meant. This is this beautiful suffering because it's a cocoon stage and something's happening. It's a chance for me to change in some way. And this is the thing, it's not just change for change's sake.'cause like, you know, you could be a caterpillar and be like, I don't, I'm pretty good man. I like these leaves. I don't need to be anything else. But it's like once you know how much different and how much better. God's kingdom is like the real reason we're here as humans. Once you get a glimpse of that, oh man, everything else pales in comparison. The old system, the old rules, the old dualistic system just looks so in inept, so ill-equipped. Because it is. It just, it just is. So I'm learning to, to discover that even in those hard times, I'm gonna celebrate. I'm gonna smile. I'm gonna believe that God is doing something amazing. I might not be able to see it. I might not know or sense it at this moment, but I know it's all working out and I know it's all working out for my good. I know. Even though I'm pretty comfortable as a caterpillar, there's something on the other side I can't even maybe dream. You think a caterpillar really knows what a butterfly is? Think about that furry little caterpillar munching on a leaf. Does he have this concept that in a few days or weeks he's gonna be flying around the same bush with these things called wings and he's gonna be these crazy colors? Do you think he knows that? I don't know. I don't know about that. My guess is probably not, and I think the same is true for us. I don't think we even understand the things God has. We can't even start to comprehend. So sometimes when the Caterpillar stage feels comfortable, just trust. The wisdom on the life hack that I'm learning is to trust that something else. Awesome, beautiful, rich, killer, undeniable. It's coming. It's on its way. And once I get a taste of it, I will never want to go back to Caterpillar stage. Never. I'm not going back there. Once I'm flying around. And that's what I think these unlocks are. We start to get these new, I don't know, this, almost this new shift in consciousness, if you will. And I know Christians don't like when you talk like that. It makes everybody nervous for some reason. But Jesus talked about it all the time. Literally. I'm not making that go read. The Gospels of Jesus, especially John, all the time. He's saying stuff about himself. And also, I just thought of this verse. No, I think it's Paul that writes it. No mind has imagined or thought, no eye has seen what God has prepared. Like you can't even conceive. You can't even start to grasp what it is that God's got ahead, what God's working out inside of you. So that's the hope. That's the hope I'm leaning into. Of just believing that this cocoon stage leads to something awesome and beautiful. And I think, you know, when I was younger, I just didn't realize that. And now I'm starting to realize that, and I still have these old tracks, these old habits, these old grooves in my mind that are so well worn that I don't necessarily even realize that it's the same script playing over and over. A fear or condemnation or regret or shame or doubts. All the things that. Are not in God's kingdom. All the things that are not fruit of the spirit, but it's human nature. It just, I just think it's how we're wired or trained or domesticated or the agreements we learn just from our culture. So that's why I think it's so clear in the Bible over and over that we're called to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Be transformed. Be changed. Take a different shape, look and act and be a different thing than you were before. How by the renewing of your mind, the way you think about life and about people and about God and about yourself has to change. You have to renew that. You have to make it new again, renew. Go back to how it used to be. Go back to who you really are, who you've always been. Who you will never not be The very identity of God is in you. The divine DNA lives in your essence. You are created in God's image from the beginning, deeply, deeply, loved, never a minute or a second of your life. Unloved. Never out, never rejected, always in. We realize we renew our mind to remember who we are. And who God is and the beautiful work that he's doing. And so the, that scripture comes to mind a lot because renewing your mind to me is a lot about, about what I'm talking about. It is a lot about these life hacks, these upgrades of a new way to think, a new way to see, a new way to just exist in reality, a new way to literally be present and to be astonished and amazed. I, I just tell you like, life just changes. I'm so grateful. I, I'm just so grateful for, for. Starting to be able to see like this, and it's true. I don't want to go back. I don't want to go back to the box. I don't want to go back to this or that. I want Yes and right, not this or that. You have to be framed into one of those both and Yes. And either, and it's like. Uh, just, I think part of it for me has been like unlocking what I've always known, rock solid known and saying maybe what I've known isn't what I've known. Like what, what if it's just stuff that I was taught, agreements that I was handed. What if I don't wanna throw'em out? I, I, I don't want to get rid of them, I just want to re-look at them with my own adult mind. I just want what's true. I wanna lean into what's true. That's all I want. I want the absolute purest truth. I wanna live. The life Jesus invited us into. That's what I want. And if in any way that has been muddied changed, watered down, shifted out of proportion, out of balance, too far this way, locked down this way, whatever, whatever has been molded or shaped over time, I want to get back to the essence of what is real. What is really real. What is true. So what I want to do, what I've been trying to do, I'm not throwing out the baby with the bath water. I'm not having. A crisis of faith. Someone said that to me. Uh, to me, what I'm doing is taking every agreement I have and just putting it in the light of what Jesus says in the scripture. Or what the Holy Spirit, what the life of God is doing inside of me. My personal experience of just listening to what God is doing and I'm reexamining them. I'm giving each one time under the light. And I, I, if it's, if it's true and it's real and it's authentic and it's life giving, I wanna double down. But when it's not, I want to start it. I don't want to stay in the same pattern just because it's the wrong pattern that I happen to be started in. That doesn't make any sense. I don't want that. And it's scary. I will tell you this. It is scary to step outside of that. I get it. It is. It is a bit frightening. It feels a lot of different ways. A lot of different times. Sometimes it feels like you're a heretic. You're bad for thinking this. How dare you feel Like maybe you've gone too far, you've crossed too many lines. Um, you, you feel like maybe you're crazy. Maybe you're just losing your mind. Maybe you're taking something the wrong direction. But I just tell you, I just read the scriptures and I just take the words of Jesus as the words of Jesus. And there's so much I'm discovering that we did not learn in traditional church, an evangelical church. If you grew up in the seventies. Thousands. Even right now, you, you're not learn, you're not. Very few church I'd ever been part of a church that has taught this stuff in the way that I'm learning and understanding. Now, I don't know what to really call this, but I call it like maybe it's starting to wake up a bit. Not keeping anything, it's just waking up and seeing. Waking up from, from being asleep for so long and, and realizing who you really are, who you've always been, and how God has worked in the world. And then when you start to see and understand that God is in everything, everybody that changes the, that changes the big time because all of a sudden everyone is your brother and your sister. Not your enemy, not a different party, not a different group, not a different sexual orientation, not a different team. Everyone is your brother and your sister because all the body of God, all the body of Christ, all connected together and it's not because here's the important piece that I know people are not gonna like, I got red, red, red alert be in my mind when I go too far because I have so well trained this. And this is one of them I going off right now, but it's not about some prayer that you say by secrets of words. It's not about sinners prayer, it's about waking up and realizing that you. That you have are our divine, sacred, objectively true child of God, that the DNA of God lives in you because he created you, created you in his image. In fact, that's how the whole book starts. The whole Bible, the whole thing starts with that as if, Hey guys, this is important. This is who you are. This is why you're here. This is what it's about. But it's interesting over all the years how we've whittled things down. We've, we, I don't know what we've got. We have this an rule based sin management policy agreement, sinners prayer Christianity. Oh, who wants that? I'm just telling you who to those of you who are so stuck in it, if you're being honest. If you wanna play the game hard or you're just so deeply sleeping, fine, that's, that's fine. But if we're being honest, it's not compelling. It's not brought people in. It's not showing people the good news. It's not, it's not reflecting any joy, goodness. That's why no one wants to be part of. It's just coming across as anger, coming across as judgment. Remember Jesus, do not judge. Do not decide what is right and wrong all the time. Turn that part of yourself off. Do not do it. He doesn't say reduce it. He says, don't do it. So what if you showed up and you just stopped judging everybody. You stop judging gay people. You stop judging black people. You stop judging Ukrainians or Russians or Venezuelans or brown people or lesbians or old people or Canadians. God bless'em. Who doesn't love Canadians? If you just stopped that, Jesus says, do not judge, but you have to change. You have to be transformed. Remember how? By the renewing of your mind, you have to start to think different. These mental grooves that have been there for so long, you gotta, you gotta realize that, oh, I'm in it again and I gotta step out and I gotta remember reality. I gotta remember. What this really is and who I really am and where this is all heading. It's not a planet of doom and destruction, it's a, it's life and renewal that God cares about this earth and he cares about humanity and he's in intimately entwined in all of it. Like his very essence is dripping out of everything. How do you not love that? How can you not see that? Believe that and respond to that in a way that is not loving you will, that's, that's being in Christ, that's being connected to the vine. That's literally living the way Jesus asked us to live, right? Yes. To follow him, and we've done this thing, this weird sort of worship thing. We've turned the instruction to follow me and to worship me. You know, Jesus never once ever asked us to worship him like he could have easily. All the other leaders and kings and rulers always say, worship me. Jesus didn't say worship me. He said, follow me. You believe how I believe. You see God in yourself. You see yourself as divinely connected, that you and the father are connected in one, that there's no separation, that you're not separate from God. You've never been separate from God. Live like that. Guess what? When we start showing up like that in small groups, things start to change, and that's what the church is. That's what the church is supposed to be. Back in the early church, that's what it was. We've gotten so sickly and twisted and entwined. In politics as if this kingdom, right now the United States is God's kingdom, his ultimate kingdom, like he's tied down or, or somehow subjective or intertwined with what happens in the United States of America. I don't know. I think I'm rambling a bit here. I'm getting cold out here. It's crisp and beautiful. But anyway, I just want to drop my thoughts. I think the story is bigger and better, and I just want to tell you this. I've been in church my whole life and I've served as a pastor for 10 years, almost 10 years. So I've been really intimately involved in what it is to be an evangelical Christian in Western American culture. I'm an expert in it. I'm not speaking or pointing fingers to anybody but myself. So with that deep knowledge, I'm telling you what I'm experiencing and walking into now is so much better. It feels like for the first time, for the very first time, the real thing, the thing that you would give your life for, the thing that changes everything, this awakening, this understanding. It's like that worship song opened the eyes of my heart. Like, what if that really happened? What if it wasn't just a song that's, I'm telling you what this starts to feel like. So if, if you're living in any way close to that, if you sense that if there's any amount of fringe part of Christianity or not and you, that is interesting, I just encourage you and invite you to lean into that. I know it can be scary. I know it can be nervous. I know there's hard, deep grooves in our mind that have decades of being built up, very fortified, but I'm telling you, take the risk. Take the risk, and lean into something new. Trust what we gotta say. Trust your personal experience. That's okay. It's like we've been told never to trust our personal experience. Which is ironic because every time God does something and all through the Bible, all the Bible heroes that we admire our kids about in Sunday school, they did something about personal experience, was doing something unique in them right now sometimes that went against their whole background, their whole tradition and their whole religion. And yet that's who we tell stories about because guess what, friends? I think that's what faith is, a little scary mix of knowing and. It's like the sureness, but I can't prove it. Right. Validation of sureness, but in way I prove it to you. We've gotten so caught up in proving things as if that matters to me. That's what faith is. A little bit scary. That's the invitation. That's the call. Say, if you're sensing that, lean into it. Lean into it. Take your foot and step out of the bowl. It is scary, but guess what? There's, I can't imagine that, right? Caterpillar's becoming butterflies. People stuff is different when your mind starts to be renewed, when the spirit starts to bring life inside of you. When you unlearn echo of some of the things that you've been so programmed to agree to, and some of that is our own egos wanting to protect it. Some of you maybe listening right now, you're so. Just ask yourself, is that, is that ego is that you protecting or projecting or whatever it is? I, it's just something you've always been taught. I'm just asking you bring everything back into the light, reexamine it in, light in, let in light of what God's doing on the inside of you doesn't work. We don't wanna be. We don't want to be babies anymore. Right? Also stuck on the milk of a baby. You're still in preschool. Like that's where we all start. There's no, there's nothing wrong with that, but we don't want to stay there. We don't wanna stay there. From what I see just in Church in America culture, 90% of us. Or in preschool, kindergarten, it's like we just say dualist Christianity. I don't wanna live anymore. I do not live there anymore. I'm not on that team longer. And I know some people will be sad, upset, disappointed, think that I've, you know, gone astray, whatever. I know the whole script because I've been on the inside of the script, spoken the script about others, so I, I get it. I get it. But guess what? The ship has sailed. I'm inviting you to sail away with me. So you would step in, you'd step in and you'd take a risk and you'd explore something beautiful and something new. A lot of times here, a lot of times, it's easiest to do this when we're in that stage of beautiful suffering, when things are tricky. Or unknown or difficult or painful or stressful in these low moments. That's a lot of times where these happens. So I'm just asking you and nudging to lean into that. Thanks for walking with me and uh, as always, my email is also emails that have come in. I would love to hear your thoughts. And, uh, love to hear any questions. Thanks so much. Check you next time.