28. April 2011 by BruceSmith.

Bruce Smith

Tornado Outbreak Relief: please go to the following link to help us get books, Soul Storm: finding God amidst disaster, to those in areas affected by the tornadoes. You can order multiple books at a discount to be shipped to those in need of encouragement or donate online. We will be working with several relief groups to get this help in place in the weeks ahead. http://soulstormsite.com/html/order.html

Order the Book-Soul Storm: Finding God Amidst Disaster

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Soul Storm- Finding God Amidst Disaster by Bruce Smith

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25. April 2011 by BruceSmith.

What Happened To Biblical Faith?

Turn on your “christian” television today, show up at your local church, read the typical christian book on the shelf, or talk to your typical christian neighbor, and you might get the sense that christianity is another option on the self-help, self-esteem, feel-good about yourself, and get-rich/healthy menu.  Something is missing in our average “christian community”, I think.  Is this what God intended?  Is not the Gospel much bigger than this?

Now, before you jump the gun and think this is one of those sour-puss, bible-thumping beat-downs, let me make you aware of my general bent.  I think God is for us.  I picture Him longing to smile over his sons and daughters.  I believe He delights in those who know, love and serve Him, even those, all of us, with faults.  That being said, I recognize, biblically, He is a God of Holiness.  Read the Old Testament, read Paul, read the Bible, for goodness sakes, and you cannot come away without a keen since that God is completely pure, holy, righteous, and good.  If you are reading it as it was intended to be read, you cannot come away, additionally, without the compelling call that we, as humans, were called to walk in a similar manner as we walk with Him.  This is how we experience Him in fullness.  Its how others are drawn to Him.

Yet, how many times, when you have done your dead-level best to lovingly encourage another struggling Christian, have you heard words like these, “Don’t judge me!” or “Its just a movie!” or “Its just a song!” or “Its just fun!” or “I’m not like that I just like to hang out there!” or “If you don’t like the way I’m dressed don’t look at me!” or “Who made you God?!” or “Well, I love him/her! And God does not want me to be alone!” or “God wants me to be happy!” or “I don’t have time, I have to…” “That is just the way I am!” or …  The narrative, far too common, is the sad and inept pursuit of a personal journey, a selfish journey, longing to have God embrace anything we want, because we need to know “we are so good deep down inside”.  Nothing can be further from biblical teaching.  God does not view sin as “just …” this or that.  He does not turn a deaf ear or blind eye to the misguided cultural realities that so pervade even the christian church.  We are bombarded with images and messages all day, every day, that could not be more opposite of God’s idea about things.  As a church, we have let it in and ignored its impact.  We have come of short of biblical living and are void of biblical faith and power, and we wonder what is missing.  I believe its biblical teaching and longing.

Again, this is not a pharisee-flavored rant on all that is wrong with the Church.  And I am certainly no perfect example of Christian character and practice.  Moreover, there are things bigger than the movies we watch, the clothes we wear, and similar realities, those these are important cultural signposts that speak volumes about how precious we view God’s truths or not.  We tend to laugh at, enjoy, ignore, emulate so much that is not at all in keeping with life-giving faith.  There are issues of justice, real loving, sacrificial living, lifestyles of prayer, and far more we could speak of.  Of this I am keenly aware.  However, I long to see the community, like that one in the book of Acts, so in love with God, and so compelled that His way is the way, that people who know Him actually look like Him in word, practice, and deed.  The church described in the book of acts brought “awe” to the heart and mind and emotional life of onlookers.  People wanted what they had because it was so clearly different, revolutionary, and beautiful.  I listed a few cultural realities above, not to compile a moral list, but to give a typical cultural response to the reality that biblical teaching actually impacts all we do, say, think, feel, believe and walk out in our lives.  Christian living is not a category biblically speaking.  Its not a place we go.  Its not part of what we do.  It is everything.  At least it should be.

If the truth was meant to set us free, then it was meant, as Jesus suggested, to set us free from the dead end approach of this present culture.  If what God says about sexuality and relationships is true, true Christians won’t attack others for directing their attention to the call of Christ to be pure, align themselves with others who pursue the same things, and long for God’s best.  Those radically in love with God don’t pursue activities and lifestyles based on what will get them in the pearly gates or what will keep them out, they long to please the God who loves them.  Those that have an intimate and abiding love relationship with Jesus spend their time thinking big, audacious, and challenging dreams of Kingdom living.  The idea of romance only excites them when they consider what two God-loving and committed people might experience as they do life together.  They long to be around others of vibrant faith and realize those people are not typically found in the cultural party houses at large.  Biblical living, living with God-directed sacrifice, joy, love, conversation, and purpose, for the true believer, is light years aware in terms of desire and longing from that of the cultural cool.  Those who have truly been found in Him no longer crave the delusional, over-sexualized, over-pleasured, under-thought, greed-driven, falsely emotional, and numb reality of life in this world.  Righteous indignation, largely gone from our present experience in the church, defines a loving believer of Christ.  Those who hunger for His life realities and cultural perspective see the danger lurking in contrary views and are convulsed by that which leads others into a life of death and deceit.  Life in the Kingdom is an utterly different reality that inspires and drives new hungers for the mind, will, emotions, entertainment experiences, love, romantic experience, vocation, friendship, time management, and everything else are lives are made of.  The Gospel touches, infuses, in a literal way, everything we are and experience.  

This is the Gospel which transforms us, our families, our communities, our culture, our world.  It is different from the smiling feel-good proclamations of too many pulpits, books, and christian experiences.  This is a Gospel that at once recognizes we are not perfect and yet births a longing for perfection within us, even as other christians call us to drop the biblical call for holiness and perfected longing.  The true Gospel holds the self-reality of depravity and the call of holiness in a sweet and challenging tension.  We are broken, He calls us to wholeness.  We are sinful, He calls us to goodness (as defined by Him).  We are undeserving (far too many suggest the opposite), and yet He extends abundance to us.  We are full of rage, envy, slander, and all kind of misery in and of ourselves, and yet, He extends and calls us to perfect peace, rest, tenderness, and compassion.  This Gospel is wholly other, and yet personally real.  It is soaringly out of reach and yet very touchable.  He was fully God, Jesus, and yet, fully man!  He is God, wholly other, and yet, the God-man, wholly with us.

Do you long for something more than the television and smiley-God farce?  Don’t you long for someone to tell you the truth about yourself, the danger and deceptions of the enemy who leads our culture?  Don’t you want to see the world from God’s perspective?  Don’t you want to live with every breath full of God-focused anticipation?  Don’t you really want to see God at work in your work, in your love, in your battles, in your joy, in your life completely?  What could be better than that?  Don’t you long to see your personal battles waged with a renewed quality of overcoming power?  Don’t you long to see yourself as you are with clarity and precision and stand in the wondrous light of God’s grace despite who you are rather than lie to yourself and others about your “goodness”?  That is where to power to experience and extend forgiveness comes from.

If this is the life you want, I challenge you to never again view your life or your actions and thoughts as “just…” anything.  All of it is to be lived under the gaze of an audience of One.  It all matters.  It all has the opportunity to bring you untold intimacy with Him.  We live and die on each moment in a real sense.  We draw closer or move further away each step along the way.  Not that He ever leaves us, and not in a checklist sense of things.  He is not the killjoy ruler in the sky waiting for us to fail.  Rather, He is longing for us to walk in perfect intimacy and practice because He knows that is where our hearts will fly like never before.  He, who made us, who fulfills us, who knows our every move and thought, longs to give us life to the full.  It is in Him and according to His ways this comes to fruition.  Its true for kids, tweeners, teens, young adults, adults, middle-agers, boomers, golden-agers, the elderly, the born, the dying, …everyone.  In Him we live and move and have our being.  All the time.  In all things.  That is living.  That is life to the full.  Take up and read … the bible.  It is there you will find the answer to life, to you, the future.  

Go get you some!

Bruce Smith

optimuschoice.com

blog.optimuschoice.com

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23. April 2011 by BruceSmith.

Sunday’s New Wave: the resurrection of a soul surfer

Inspired by the movie Soul Surfer, and reflecting on my life in view of the many “Fridays” and Easter Sunday.

There are moments in life where it appears that all is lost, the clock has expired, the game is over, the dream is dead, the future is hopeless.  If you have not been there yet, hang on, you will be there some day.  A report from the doctor, a call from the police station, the news you never expected, the empty closet, the note left behind, the aching awareness that the decisions you have made relationally or otherwise have set you up for years of misery… the scenarios are endless, the pain the same.  When we reach this place, this dark night of the soul, it helps, somehow, to know that God has not forgotten us.  In fact, as the resurrection implies, it is here that God is most present.  Sunday, despite all appearances to the contrary, cometh.

I have had the good “fortune” of learning early in life that Fridays abound.  As a toddler my mom and dad divorced.  As a pre-teen my step-father died young to cancer.  As a teenager I watched relatives and friends die.  As a late teen aspiring to play big time tennis an unseen, latent, tiny fissure in my L5, which had laid dormant for years, was triggered into painful action and ended my dream and lives with me to this day.  As an adult I have experienced the pain of divorce, seen grandparents die, watched loved ones suffer, lived through economic crisis, raised teens (really scary!), and wage battles in the present on many fronts.  Friday does not leave.  

We are all aware of Friday’s presence.  Global crisis abound, natural disasters rage, epidemics scatter the planet, and our own local newspapers show the impact of Friday’s presence every morning.  Like a surfer scanning the drifting horizon longing for the next wave, our soul’s look longingly for a day when newness and relief will come and we can surf toward more exhilarating shorelines.  

Along the way, of course, there are hints of Sunday’s reality.  The brilliance of a symphony, the heart-enlarging experience of a baby’s smile, the bliss of recognizing innocence and truth in the eyes of another, the tenderness of another extending grace toward us, the wonder and beauty of a snow-covered mountain range.  Glimpses of Sunday give birth to hope as we grope our way through Friday’s loss and fear.  When the relationships around us bring too large a dose of rage, dysfunction, violence, and sorrow, it is the taste of Sunday’s sweetness in the words and spirit of another walking in goodness that serves to remind us of our journey’s quest for fuller day.  When the weight of tragedy grips our experience so profoundly we feel as though we are suffocating, only the touch of grace and the power of purpose stands as a bulwark of Sunday’s incarnation.  It is God who reminds us that even our worst can be used for His best show of redemption.  Our Friday’s are a prelude to his Sunday spectacular.  

We do not choose the Friday experience, and we cannot dwell there in a morbid state of hopelessness, though it is tempting at times.  Friday must be acknowledged as part of our reality.  That reality, we must be aware, for those with the hope of the Gospel, is subject to the larger and fuller reality of Sunday’s victory.  Regardless of the depth of our pain and the severity of our loss or the size of our challenge and regret, we must lock our soul’s vision onto the vista of that new wave which comes though it may not been yet seen.  We must learn to see through the eyes of faith and not merely with the eyes of the flesh, as has been said before.

Yes, we must deal with any part of our story’s darkness which has visited us with such damning horror as a result of our own mistakes and patterns.  To run from our culpability and to call out for Sunday will not suffice.  We must learn from our pain.  We must walk in new ways or else continue to invite more unnecessary Friday’s into our lives.  And we must call out for the grace of God which is extended to the truly repentant heart like the Sunday morning light which awakes us to a new day and a new chance to arise and experience life to the full.  

For those upon whom the Friday’s of life have fallen on them at no fault of their own, Sunday’s truth brings perspective.  The view from Sunday enlarges our understanding, and offers us purpose amidst our climb to the peak of that fresh morning.  Relational missteps are not the end of true meaningful and deep relational interaction.  Financial collapse does not define us.  The loss of a dream does not name us.  The brutality of our past does not have a stranglehold on us.  No Friday can trap us in its teeth as we open our hearts to the transforming love, forgiveness, and remaking power of God through Jesus Christ.

In a moment, from out of the deep, the monstrous reality of life can seize and maim us like a shark ripping through the body of an unsuspecting surfer looking for her bliss.  In the blink of an eye all can seem dark and done.  Yet, in time, with the love, support, grace, direction and sweetness of God-inspired relationships and fuller perspective, resilience, determination, and God-ignited fight can set back in.  The quest can start anew, life can seem more meaningful than ever, and our Friday can become a Sunday for untold lives.

This is the Easter story.  Its bigger, so much bigger than bunnies and candy and marketing.  The message of Easter is the promise of Sunday’s victory over Friday’s threat.  All is not lost.  It never will be.  A new wave can arise and carry us to the shoreline of God’s greatest opportunities.  When we are weakest, most afraid, most frustrated with ourselves and others, most wanting to quit, and most numb, this is when we must cry out for Sunday all the more.  This is when we must believe God has a Sunday tailor-made just for us.  He has not forsaken you.  He never will.  May Easter remind you, Sunday is coming!

Thanks be to God for the gift of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  He lived through his own Friday.  He knows ours.  His Sunday is our Sunday!  Amen. Amen. Amen.

Bruce Smith

optimuslife.org

blog.optimuschoice.com

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14. April 2011 by BruceSmith.

Friends, 

Every now and then inspiration hits, an idea forms, and your pulse picks up when you begin to think through a dream. Sometimes those moments, in the unfolding, turn out to be little more than a fleeting dismissive hint of real reality. 

Several days ago I had one of those ideas, one of those “moments” when I was captured by an idea. God inspired? We will see. But it sure is exciting to think about right now. I’ve thought through various scenarios, tennis-related, before, but this one, this one has legs, as they say. Ultimately, the idea, whether it takes off or not, is dependent upon you and many other like-minded people we know and can inspire. I am coming to you first with the idea, because I hope you will help me discern God’s vision and help me set this thing on a course for a real future and real world impact.

As many of you know, the game of tennis has been a passion of mine since I was a child.  Taught the game by my step-father, Don, a teaching pro and college player, I was mentored by many along the way, but none more important than Mike, my coach through my teen years and my friend to this day.  The game has served me well in so many ways and has taught me so much about life.  I am convinced it offers a magnificent metaphor for life.  I still think of Don often when I play though he died of cancer at only 27 years of age, and my time training with Mike, the Rocky Balboa of tennis, a Florida Gator, certainly guides my tennis to this moment.  I write thinking of Mike today as he is battling a new challenge in his life similar to the one Don faced so many years ago.  The game, the fight in these two men, and my passion to make a difference for the Kingdom, drive this new idea.

So, here is the idea, hinted at in the subject line. 

Tennis For Life(rs)! Its an outreach, tennis driven, God-focused, aimed at going into prison’s, detention centers, etc. and teaching them the game we all love while introducing them to the One who can love them to wholeness and newness of life. The goal, in the end, would be for a new kind of “lifer” focus for those who have little hope and joy left. Inside those walls, behind those bars, amidst the shackles of a broken life, perhaps, just maybe, this game we all have gotten so much from, can be a launch pad to bring people back to life and love again.

We will need passionate and capable tennis pros, players, speakers, those with a passion and a concern for those in tough spots with tough hearts, and much more. We will need to use our gifts, networks, contacts, connections, open doors, resources, and more as the dream unfolds. But I really think this could take on a life, as yet, we can only dream of.

Does it capture you? Are you willing to get in? Can you help spread the word, open doors, bring resources to the table? 

Please, consider offering us your best effort as we seek to bring sight to the blind, comfort to the afflicted, and release from those help in captivity.  The mission of Christ, as He stated it Himself, was to bring newness and joy to those incarcerated by the bondage of sin and failure.  Help us in our journey to see that dream unfold.  

If you have connections to like-minded people, know people who can get us into the system, have political connections we can benefit from, know leaders of other organizations with the ability to help, please, let us know.

We will need racquet donations, funds to set up the 501c3, funding to purchase/build “portable courts”, funds for support of the effort, tennis balls, ball hoppers, video cameras, digital cameras, and much more as the vision begins to unfold.  

Let us know your ideas along the way as you hear and learn more.  We hope to capture the stories of these men and women, bring them a bit of joy, and teach them the game of life in a new way.  In a setting where there is little left to laugh about and find joy in, we believe this game can rekindle a part of them that has gone dark.  We want to introduce them to teaching, relationships, resources, and ongoing programming that can revolutionize their everyday reality.  

I love the idea, and hope you do too.  Give us your feedback.

Tennis Anyone?

Please, let me know your thoughts.

Bruce

P.S. 

pass this on to any and all who may be excited to see this.

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