Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness.

‭‭Acts‬ ‭4‬:‭29‬ ‭NIV‬‬

For so many of us today, this has become our prayer. 

It took the bloody murder of an innocent man for us to realize our best and highest use is to speak the truth into others fearlessly while we still have a voice and they still have time. 

Seize just one opportunity today and share the gospel message of Jesus with someone who needs hope for an eternity. 

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

‭‭Philippians‬ ‭4‬:‭8‬ ‭NIV‬‬

The mind is a terrible thing to waste.

We spend an unholy amount of neurons creating anxieties and emotions based on falsehoods and ignoble self-deceptions. 

We process 74GB of information daily, much of which is phony, false or character-killers. 

As we allow such thoughts to take root, they choke out the possibility that your internal garden will bear any fruitful thing of beauty or utility for you or those around you.

This verse doesn’t advocate a Pollyanna view of life through rose colored glasses. 

It’s more like ‘what you think on, you will become.’

The mind creates thoughts the heart follows and the heart then behaves in turn with anxiety accordingly.

My God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus.

‭‭Philippians‬ ‭4‬:‭19‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Recognize when you need to change your mind and allow God to feed that need. 

Your heart and your relationships will follow suit.

When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.
‭‭Acts‬ ‭4‬:‭13‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Unschooled and ordinary yet courageous.

History remembers these kind of men, their messages, and their ministries.

Yesterday, the world memorialized another modern day martyr, unschooled and ordinary yet whose courage and convictions delivered him into the hands of Jesus.

Like Peter and John, he was not ashamed of the transformative truth that reaches in, grabs hearts of flesh, and delivers souls to crowd the kingdom come.

For the rest of your life, be courageous.

Your reward will be the best rest of your eternal life as you hear his words, well done good and faithful servant.

Be confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

‭‭Philippians‬ ‭1‬:‭6‬ ‭NIV‬‬

If you’re like me, you’re notorious for starting projects and losing time or interest before completing them. 

Something more important or urgent steals away our finite attention until our best intention becomes just another piece of unfinished business we promise ourselves to complete someday. 

Thank God—literally—your salvation is not something He loses interest in because of your lack of participation. 

Once begun by heartful profession of faith, it lands you a place in the center of God’s workbench where you are always worked on even when it doesn’t feel like it. 

This fact usurps your feelings.

Jesus is the completer and finisher of our faith.

But when you reassume a more active role, the progress is evident.

Be confident. He’s not finished with you yet.

In the words of a song by new musical artists Caleb & John:

He’s not done with me

He’s not done with you

No matter what you’re goin through 

Our hope is in 

An empty tomb

And a God who’s still not in it. 

From dope dealing to hope dealing. That’s how I roll now.

We all know at least one still unrecovering addict whether you realize it or not.

Statistically, 12 is the number of addicts you’ll know in your lifetime, probably a lot more.

Some will make it over the addiction hump and sadly, some will be buried under it.

But addiction’s not going anywhere. There’s too much money to be made from it.

The real question is: who do you become when you’re around them?

That depends on a number of variables and your life experiences. So to bring the question closer to home: who are you called to be around them?

Is there any moral or spiritual imperative that supersedes the common, reflexive human emotions of hate, disdain, disgust, or mistrust?

I’ll be first to suggest against wholly trusting an addict.

Addiction 101 clearly taught me that manipulation and lies are the tools along their pathways that lead to using.

However, to maintain hope for all people, we have to believe that all people are redeemable and worthy of redemption en route to getting clean.

That means we addicts need chances at becoming what once and one hundred times in our lives we always wanted to be: clean and sober.

Like “normal” folks, addicts struggle every single day to be better people, some more successfully than others. They are the fortunate few who’ve been surrounded by people of compassion.

To be a people of compassion is our calling.

They are the people of the Second Chance, just as we, ourselves, were once and again given.

“Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
‭‭Philippians‬ ‭1‬:‭2‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Despite how he sounds, Paul was not a nice dude.

While he opened his letters with this signature greeting, he’s best known for the harsh rebukes that followed.

Grace is unmerited favor, something bestowed upon us that we cannot and did not earn apart from our salvation and life in Christ.

Peace is both a feeling and a condition. The feeling of confident assurance while under the condition of our absolute redemption, having made peace with God.

Paul’s greeting IS the gospel in its simplest and most elegant form.

Together, these two are pronouncements from Paul to believers, not wishes for something that might still come to pass. It’s his affirmation of identity of those in earshot of his letters.

Grace and peace are what the world needed most both then and now.

Before you launch into what might be an uncomfortable discussion, it behooves you to first acknowledge the grace and peace we share as brothers and sisters.

Your greeting might be their only takeaway.

Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

‭‭Ephesians‬ ‭6‬:‭11‬-‭12‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Evil almost always manifests in people—those with whom we must encounter and interact. 

It’s not some intangible entity but one sensed and experienced in the presence of someone it inhabits. 

I like to believe most of these people are unaware that what they’re doing or saying is evil but that they are just misled and need a better leader. It helps me to see them as potential captives for God’s kingdom. 

Every single time, my mistake is to try to argue and reason them into their salvation without first calling on the Lord to do a little spiritual warfare in advance to clear the path. 

It’s hard to acknowledge or fight an enemy you can’t see or touch.  I usually jump right in as a kind and concerned adversary using my own skills and tools then wonder why my most persuasive arguments fall on deaf ears. 

Read on in Paul’s letter here, verses 13-17, and the reasons why are crystal clear. 

All are potential partners for the kingdom and worthy of our approach, but like with anytime you’re doing important business, you need to dress appropriately for the meeting. 

Don’t get caught with nothing to wear.

Indeed, it’s a struggle.

There was a point in my 15 year career as a marriage and family therapist when I thought my shit didn’t stink.

My calendar was booked out for weeks, I had a hospital practice and influential private practice referral sources, and I made a lot of money.

I scored high on the licensure exam, my masters thesis was on record as an example for younger students on how it is done, and I was the unanimous staff vote for the top counseling student of the year.

I started on a fast track to success, or so it seemed back then.

It may be true that pride does, indeed, come before a fall.

Despite my subsequent long and painful fall from grace that followed due to my divorce and decade-long addiction to crystal meth which left me penniless, homeless and full of self-hatred and regret for all the relational fallout I had caused, I clawed my way back to sobriety.

Since then, I’ve found that the more life experience I consume, the more prideful and delusional I had been about how good a therapist I’d believed I once was.

It’s taken a lot more than just time and the spending of more years clean and sober than I’d spent in drug and sex addiction.

While I now work in an entirely different profession, once a therapist, always a therapist, the skills of which transcend most others and become most useful when parlayed into the vast self-discovery required in the process of becoming and staying sober.

But sobriety is more than getting and staying off drugs. That’s called being “clean.” Sobriety, once set in motion, is the never-ending process of self-discovery about what makes you tick and why you tick the way that you do.

Sobriety sees the world differently, and years of mental health training and practice help you learn disgusting things about yourself.

Once embraced, that never-ending process is what KEEPS you sober for years to come.

Thanks to sobriety, I’ve recently discovered that as a therapist, my shit stunk to high heaven.

These years, I read articles and listen to podcasts about mental and spiritual health, self-preservation, and insights from practicing professionals whose work is inspirational at the very least and at the most, motivational.

Therapy has come a long way since I was schooled and to a trained eye, the truly insightful and skilled practitioners are as obvious as diamonds in a coal mine.

If I can swing the expense and find a gem of a therapist, I plan to re-enter the field as a client with so much more to learn about myself.

Bad therapy can sour the experience and expense of counseling, but good therapy conducted by a skilled practitioner is worth every session.

In retrospect, I wasn’t such a bad therapist. I was pretty damn good compared to some of my graduate classmates who eventually hung their shingles on counseling center doors around town to begin their careers.

I’d seen them work first-hand in our training and judgingly wondered how they might ever become gainfully employed in this profession.

But from my view these days, I see that poor practice standards aren’t tolerated either in school or by clients anymore and therapeutic skills and interventions are much improved perhaps because more therapists themselves have sought therapy and continue unabated on a course of self discovery.And perhaps best of all, they had accepted early on that their shit stinks just as bad as everyone else’s.

If you can, seek out a good therapist. Ask which books they’ve read, what continuing education courses they have attended, what spiritual orientation they practice. Ask them if they are good therapists and how they arrived at that conclusion. Ask them what they believe they do best in their practice and what they don’t treat in their practice and why.

You may just discover the right fit with someone able to help you discover how to fish yourself out of a toilet of misbeliefs and set you on a better path.

And perhaps ours will cross in the process on our journeys.

Gratitude and agency are key.

Gratitude is the appreciation of the good things in our lives, and agency is the belief that we have the power to make choices and control our own destinies. Both gratitude and agency are essential for success and well-being.

Gratitude can help us to:

Be more positive and engaged in our work.
Build stronger relationships with everyone around us.
Be more resilient in the face of challenges.
Experience greater job and life satisfaction.

Agency helps us to:

Be more proactive and take ownership of our careers.
Set and achieve goals.
Develop new skills and knowledge.
Make a positive impact on our organizations and communities.

Be very careful, then how you live—not as unwise but as wise—making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.
‭‭Ephesians‬ ‭5‬:‭15‬-‭16‬ ‭NIV‬‬

More and more each day, I’m not only convinced the days are evil, but they’re getting moreso by the hour.

As I read and study, I find little hope that our lives as we know them will be as easy to navigate as they are now despite how difficult they might now seem.

War is ugly.

The changes and sacrifices we will need to make to fight and survive are for most, unimaginable. But they are coming.

Being wise and making the most of today’s opportunities constitute our entire action plan if we hope to endure the war.

We know how it ends, and though comforting, between now and then, comfort will be hard to find.

Be careful, be wise, be prepared and make the most of every opportunity.

War is coming and it’s ugly.