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I owe much to my mother but one of the most lasting lessons she taught me is how to appreciate hushed and subtle things. From time to time in my early childhood, my mother would pack us three kids into our yellow 1970-something Honda hatchback and drive us in the direction of tranquility. When we reached some well-wooded spot, she would turn off the engine, roll down the windows and say, “Let’s just listen to the quiet.” As we listened we became aware of the small, uncomplicated wonders that surrounded us. The wind in the leaves. The creaking of elderly branches. The chittering of a hidden bird. “I wonder what it’s saying,” my mother would whisper. And as our minds spun off to consider the language of wild things, the world grew bigger and more wonderful.

Now that I’m grown up, I find that it’s far too easy for me to forget about “listening to the quiet.” I get disoriented within my own crowded mental space. We literally have at our fingertips the most enthralling things our world can offer. All day long I carry a device in my pocket that can feed me an unending stream of breathtaking images from all over the world. I can call up and enjoy the best music ever recorded anytime I want. Literature, philosophy, theology, natural history, it’s all ready to be read, watched, listened to and commented on at my whim. There are so many competing things for me to feed my attention to that sometimes it becomes difficult for me to value any one part of the clamor. My sense of wonder gets stifled in the noise of endless options.

Over the last couple of years The Father has been reminding me to seek out the quiet. Particularly when I’m overwhelmed with life I hear Him calling me, compelling me, to get away to some lonely place. For me that means getting outdoors and into simple, pure nature. I have often found myself interrupting my commute home to park next to the river for five or ten minutes of peace. I have carved out occasional mornings or afternoons to hike a few solitary miles and not for the exercise. I never fully appreciate how much I need a respite until I’m alone with my Father in some hidden place. It’s there that the world regains its context and my heart gains enough space for wonder to dwell.

Wonder is that sense of awe that draws us not just toward beauty but into beauty. It’s one thing to drive past a forest, it’s another to enter the forest and discover its secrets. This is why I so love those sacred set-aside places we have called national parks, national monuments and wildernesses. They are sacred not just because they are pristine; it’s our experiences of wonder that imbue them with value and significance.

They are places, belonging to all of us, where we can go and listen to nature testify about God. They are places where our wonder can grow and compel us to press further up and further into the reality of God.

 

“What brings meaning is when you can combine a sense of wonder, undergirded by truth, experiencing the richness of love with the knowledge of security. Those four components bring genuine meaning to life. And the older you get the more it takes to fill your heart with wonder.”

-Ravi Zacharias

 

The heart of the explorer is in all of us. I sometimes pine after those days when there was still a true frontier and a great unexplored expanse beyond it. I would like to think I could have been one of those companions of Lewis and Clark, pointing my canoe westward through the vast mysterious wild, hopeful to reach the certain shores of the Pacific Ocean. How easily they could have been swallowed up never to be heard from again. Wonder will eventually ask you to risk all.

But our world has been mapped. Every corner has been touched for good or ill by a human foot. Still as we explore these already tread-upon places for ourselves, we can discover windows that look into the untouched lands. The boundless secret countries of our Father, are open to the brave.

Just like those explorers of old who had to conquer their fears of unknown lands, we must conquer our fears of the mysteries of our Father’s lands. The questions we have asked that have not been answered can keep us from venturing beyond our own frontiers.

Wonder is the energy that pushes us forward. Wonder says now is the time, you won’t be disappointed. The answers aren’t on your frontier, the answers are out there in the mystery.

I have come to love those unanswered questions, and I have quite a few of them. Some people talk as if they love mystery just because it is mysterious. But that isn’t enough for the heart filled with wonder.

I love mysteries the way Lewis and Clark loved uncharted rivers. I love mysteries because they are promises of future discovery. It’s true that some things unknown will not be graspable within my 80 or 90 years. But that glory will have to lie in the promise of our good Father.

True wonder, the kind cultivated and breathed to life by God, pushes us past the quiet listening moments we make for it, past the days of discovery here on earth and past the quiet graves we leave behind. Our Father is preparing for us not just houses or estates but, if you will, entire mountain ranges and forests. They are already planted for you. They are growing now, watered with peace, colored in joy. Shading over and clefting in the mysteries that were placed for your discovering.

Quiet now and listen. The wonders of God will point you westward.

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So, you’ve reached the age when time starts speeding up. Days are slow but weeks and months fly by and just forget about years. Life has been galloping circles all around you, and you’re not as good as you used to be at ignoring certain nagging questions. “Am I too old now?” “Did I miss something along the way?” “Are cargo shorts still cool if you live in the Northwest?”

You’ve got all these dreams knocking around inside your head. When you were younger you thought everything would just happen. Your life’s course would unroll before you like a red carpet. Destiny was unstoppable, God had a plan. But wasn’t God supposed to drop that plan into your inbox about ten years ago? You feel like you’re still waiting to get started.

This is not a post about giving up on your dreams. Well, maybe it is just a little bit.

Charlie Peacock has long been one of my favorite artists. He’s an eclectic, imaginative musician whose lyrics are vivid and meaningful. I have fond memories of my teenage self puttering around in my room with his album, Love Life, streaming out of my bulky CD player. You know, the ones with detachable speakers, so great. He is better known today as the producer of bands like Switchfoot, The Civil Wars, and The Lone Bellow.
As I plunge ever deeper into my thirties, one of his songs in particular often plays on my internal soundtrack.

The chorus of William and Maggie goes like this:

     “…I’ve been thinking about you and me, and everybody in between,
      It seems we’ve suffered one too many dreams of things that weren’t so bad,
      It’s just they were never things that we could trust,
      Are we still pretending they’re enough?”

We human beings are natural dreamers. We can’t help it. They start at the earliest age.
“When I grow up…”
Often our youngest dreams are wild, wonderful and unlikely. It’s a hard truth but the fact is, no matter how much we pined away and proclaimed our intentions to the world, Dinosaur Wrangler is just a dead profession.

As we got older, the world came into better focus and our dreams became more realistic, although “beautiful” and “unlikely” were still closely connected elements. Dreams, as they grow, tend to take on an increasingly noble attitude. We discovered that the world needed saving. Our dreams took on more definite shapes. We began to love our dreams, so much so that we infused them with the substance of our identities.
Artist, entrepreneur, athlete, missionary.
The more we dreamed, the more we saw ourselves not just doing these things, but being these things and that’s where the trouble lies. That’s why it can be so terrifying to think about giving up on a dream.

Listen, this is something I have to remind myself of often; we are much more than our occupations. It’s only natural for us to allow our personalities and idiosyncrasies to inform our vocational aspirations but we must not allow our vocations to define who we are. We are relational beings. Relationship is the most fundamental, most valuable thing we are capable of. I am not a minister, a photographer, a worship leader or a tile setter. I am a son, a brother, a husband, a father and a friend.
These roles are infinitely more valuable than the most noble vocation. It’s time we stopped pretending our dreams are enough to define us or justify our lives.
The only thing in life significant enough to give us that definitional gravity is relationship. Ultimately the only titles that can satisfy the questions of our identity are the titles, son of God and daughter of God.

So, time to give it up?

      “Maggie, by whom all hearts were measured, kissed William softly on the cheek and said,
      ‘Sometimes William… William sometimes you’ve got to open up the windows
      And let the wind blow through.'”

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Dreams change over time. Sometimes it’s not the dream itself that changes but the version of the dream that we had been chasing.
For some of us letting the wind blow through means realizing that we have some more subtle dreams, just below the surface. They are so constant that we don’t always realize they are there. It’s time we rediscover the everyday passions that we take for granted. For some of us it may mean an adjustment of scale. Maybe you won’t ever be a rockstar but you may be a wonderful local worship leader. You might not become the nation shaking evangelist but you could become the only christian voice your neighbors are willing to listen to.

     “The famous are rarely significant and the significant are rarely famous”
     -Dennis Prager

Maybe, we need to allow the Father to shed some light on the true motives behind our dreams. If we are willing I believe He will remind us why we love a given dream, or He will reveal what deep internal hole we’ve been trying to fill up with our aspirations.
Perhaps we’ll find we need to dream bigger. God may blow the dust off a dream and say its time to step it up. He might ask us to change a casual pursuit into a set of goals and calculated risks.

Never stop dreaming. Don’t neglect the callings of your life. But from time to time, can we be brave enough to let God’s wind blow through so that those dreams can be dusted off, cleared away, or maybe born again?

     “When your fondest dreams die… Jesus opens up doors to greater glory”
     -George Washington Carver

 

As I write this I have in my mind a small group of guys whom I call brothers. I use the word brothers not friends, I do it on purpose. I’m not sure that I’d be comfortable drawing too fine a definitional border between the words, but in the case of these men, the word friend is overshadowed by the word brother. These are not just guys I enjoy being around. They are not just guys I backpack with, or discuss books with. Not just guys I have known for many years.

These are brothers that I trust.

If one of these brothers brings me a word of criticism, I do not take it with a grain of salt. I take it.
I freely admit to them my faults and my self doubts. They are allowed to call me on my crap – and they know it. They know it because I’ve told them so. We don’t always agree, in fact we’ve had some great arguments, but they are safe arguments. We can be at odds and still honor one another. We can become passionate without attacking one another.

One of these brothers I meet with weekly. Most every Wednesday morning at 6 am we fight over who gets to pay for the cheap mediocre coffee at the local fast food dive. Then we sit, rubbing the sleep from our eyes, and talk. Sometimes we just just shoot the breeze, others we dump a weeks worth of burdens on the table and sort through them together. We encourage one another, we remind each other who we really are and where we’re each heading. We advise one another and pray together.

Now, he would put up an argument about this, but the truth is, I have gained more from him than I have yet been able to give. I have admired this man for more than half of my life. When he compliments me I usually smile and respond with, “I learned it by watching you”, and it’s the truth.

I am grateful, so grateful for this man.

How about you? Does reading this bring to mind your own band of brothers (cadre’ of sisters?) or does it leave you cold? Too many people are going through life without these kinds of relationships. Lacking these close (more than) friendships, they hermit themselves away. To the hermit type this might sound uninteresting or even frightening. Others might genuinely want some brothers of their own but find it difficult to form such close relationships and have given up on the idea. I sympathize, I really do. I can understand how easy it can be to get into either of these ruts. The thing is, remaining in a state where no one truly knows you will leave you stunted. We were created for relationship, true, gritty, naked relationship. Without it we become ingrown and, well… odd.

Ask yourself:

Who is allowed to call you on your crap?
Can anyone speak to you honestly without the threat of your anger, or worse, your cold silence?
Who knows you well enough to encourage you in the ways that really matter?
Who cares enough about you to bare your burdens and your victories as if they were their own?

And on the other hand:

Who trusts you?
Are you able to confront close friends in a humble and truly interested way?
Who are you watching over?
Whose concerns and joys do you carry with you on a regular basis?

 

It’s true that I’m blessed with these relationships, but being blessed doesn’t explain how it happened.
I set out to to find these guys and with great intentionality to form these brotherly relationships. This almost never just happens. As our friendships have formed, I have told each of them in one way or another, specifically what they mean to me and that they are allowed to speak into my life.

Becoming transparent can be frightening and incredibly difficult. But once we are truly known by our brothers and sisters, and even by our fathers and mothers, we enter into a wild and wonderful landscape. We become free to take greater risks because these close ones are there to tell us that we might just pull it off, or to inform us that we’re being plain dumb. Our victories become bigger and our burdens become lighter because they are shared with people who are ultimately always on our side.

So, I encourage you to begin looking for your own brothers. Don’t expect them to fall out of the sky, or pop up out of the carpet in your living room. It’s time to reach out. Ask the Father to give you these kinds of relationships. He will begin to point people out to you with whom you should spend some time. Not everyone will fit. It will take time, but I promise you’ll find your own cadre’. Your Father doesn’t intend for you to go it alone. He wants you in a family. What good father wouldn’t?

 

 

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