My Name Is Four

"Behold, children are a gift of the LORD; The fruit of the womb is a reward." - Psalm 127:3

Recently my wife returned to the world of full time work. It's been a transition in our household, with tasks and chores being shifted around, schedules being changed and a little unexpected chaos as the Captain of the U.S.S. Casa-Faggioli has been forced to leave by 7:30am each morning.

The kids and I braced for this change. None of us knew what to make of it, with Dad doing a school drop-off here or there, almost all the school pickups and - joy of all joys - the kids learning that having a self-employed father means, well, you get to go back to work with him after school for three hours each day.  God willing we'll be staffed back up in my office soon but until then, each day as we load up into my car after school I call a huddle, hands to the center, and the kids and I give a shout out as to how many days we have "survived" this routine. Yesterday was "10".

I feared this change would be a burden. Instead the Lord has made it a blessing. It's been revealed to me that before I wasn't just missing out on some things in my children's lives, but a lot of things. For example, I never knew what a zombie Sophia was when waking up every morning for school and I have taken great pleasure in doing the "good morning" dance for her each day, complete with out-of-key singing (most of you will have a hard time picturing me singing and dancing...trust me, you don't want to, it's pretty bad). If this doesn't work I flick the lightswitch on and off until she flies out of bed with her little paws up for a fight. She LITERALLY growls at me, with her hair in fifty directions and her eyes all puffy. Then, in spite of herself, she starts to laugh.

I also love hearing about their day; the way the girl that Anthony has a crush on perplexes him ("Dad, why is it that girls act differently around their friends than they do when it's just you and them?"), or what Sophia really thinks about this whole "color card" system in kindergarten ("It's not that hard Dad, you just don't get in trouble. But there's this one boy, he just doooooeeeesn't get it.").

I now get the chance to slip a little note in Sophie's lunch box or pep-talk Anthony the morning before a big test. They, in turn, can give me a head start on my day as well. Like yesterday, when I was leaving the house early and I saw a post-it note from Sophia that read : MY NAME IS FOUR. I had no idea what she was talking about, or what it meant, but it made me chuckle nearly the whole drive to work. 

Do Not Go Gently...

"Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you." - Matthew 20

How firm, how strong, how rooted is your faith? Some of you who read this blog have a faith that is strong, others a faith that is holding the line, and others a faith that is, well, dormant. A faith that is strong need only hold the line. A faith that is holding on need only persevere.  But a faith that is dormant is a faith in trouble. It is, by definition, alive at some level, but not growing.

A dormant faith is asleep. If this is your faith then know this: you must wake up. A faith that is asleep too long runs the very real risk of dying. Don't let that happen. Wake up. If not for yourself, then for those around you.

Right now in your community 1 out of 4 children is skipping lunch at school because their parents can't afford it. In the United States a rape is reported every 5 minutes. That's a scary number. Until you realize that only 16% of rapes are ever reported in the first place. Last night anywhere from 2-4 babies were born immaturely and are fighting this very moment for their little lives at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. That's only one out of over 1300 NICU's in the country.

My point is this: there is hurting all around you and people you don't even know, whom you haven't even met yet, who need you. How can you be there for people you don't even know in circumstances you have no idea how to handle without faith? How? It simply isn't possible. Because those people need hope. They need love. They need you.

Do not go gently into that deep responsibility. Rush in. Respond. Reach out. Use the hurts the world has thrust upon you to help others overcome their hurts and realize that as you do God is pulling for your glory.

Rocky

"Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses." - 1Timothy 6:12

There is a pattern to life; peaks and valleys. We have songs and poems that tell us of this pattern. We have books and movies too. The tendency for most of us is to duck in the valleys and stand tall on the peaks and, as such, we miss most of the scenery. There is a type of blindness to both places. At the summit everything below you is too small to really see and when you are hiding your head in the valley you can't see anything at all. On the peaks of life we can lose perspective and in the valleys we can lose hope.

I know I am dating myself a bit here but one of the reasons why I loved the movie Rocky was that he got it. He really did. He was just as happy drinking raw eggs and training until he collapsed as he was in the ring, advancing like a wounded bull at Apollo Creed in glorious combat. It wasn't that Rocky wouldn't go down, it's that he already had been down. It was a place he knew and was not afraid of anymore. So he kept advancing, taking shot after shot and giving in return. It wasn't the crowd or even Adrian, there in the front row, that kept him going. It was his heart.

Remember that the air is thin on the peaks. You can get dizzy and start seeing things that aren't really there. The same is true in the valleys, where it gets awful dark and the shadows can be misleading. None of it is important. Not a bit. Enjoy life, yes, but don't forget that you weren't created solely for this Earth, this place that is all peaks and valleys. If you were then you'd never be leaving it.

But someday, you will. There must be a reason for that. So keep your gloves up, stay true to your heart and remember that above all peaks and above all valleys there is a very big sky.

An Army of Sum

"Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up." - Ecclesiastes 4:9

One of the greatest lies ever told by the evil in this universe is that you are alone.

Part of the human experience is that first moment of self-actualization when you realize you are a being unto yourself, with a mind and thoughts all your own. At some point shortly thereafter you realize that it can get lonely in your head. No one knows you like you, and there is an inherent risk in reaching out to others, who may accept you or - just as easily - may flat out reject you.

I'm not talking about matters of love. The heart is a subject worthy of its own blog. I'm specifically focused today on our minds. After all, scripture tells us that this is the place where all the wars for your soul are fought. Who in their right mind (no pun intended) would fight a war alone? Especially against an adversary that has been taking out souls left and right for thousands of years.

When Jesus came to this earth what's one of the first things he did? He recruited the twelve disciples. Did Jesus, as God himself, need the twelve? Of course not. But like almost everything else in his short ministry he was teaching us how we should approach life. The lesson was clear: you need your own posse, as it were. You should not go it alone. The only time we find Jesus truly alone in the Bible, who was there, almost immediately? Satan. This, too, is a lesson. If evil was unafraid to come after Jesus how much bolder will it be to come after you?

Look around you, though. How many people has God placed in your life to keep you going on this journey? You are not alone. In your neighborhood, in your family, and amongst your friends are allies in faith who can come to your side. This is also why it's so important to go to church and to be a part of a small group, as this can only multiply those people in your life who can help to keep you grounded in hope and lifted in perseverance. 

How many allies do you need? It doesn't matter. You simply need an army of sum. So get out of your head and away from your fear of rejection. Gather your own little army to help in the challenges you will face in life, face in time and face in faith.

Sleep...Sleep Tonight

"Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones. And when you have finished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake." - Victor Hugo

God never sleeps. There should be comfort in that but I had a friend today relay the news that neither the combined efforts of her tea, her melatonin pill and her Ambein was a guarantee that she would get any sleep tonight. I had another friend tell me just last week that he is averaging only three hours of shut-eye per night. I will admit that I am sometimes no stranger to the world of 3:00 am myself. It happens. Life happens. Bills happen. Problems happen. We are surrounded by these happenings and the first thing to go out the window is our peace. Peace of mind. Peace of spirit. Peace of being.

Our pastor at church lately has taken hold of a passage of scripture and refused to let go of it: 

"Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."  - Phillipians 3:13-14

For weeks now he has been hammering it home. Sometimes to begin the service, sometimes to end it, sometimes repeatedly in between.  Scripture constantly reminds us to strive, to strain, to seek, to pursue. These are all very active verbs and their goal is always God...and the peace of God...which transcends all understanding. If you believe the bible then if you aren't at peace it's because you aren't seeking God, or you're seeking him in the wrong ways or you've gotten lost somehow, as we all do from time to time. Believers, non-believers or kinda-believers...it's all the same. We all have to decide whether or not we will dwell in midst of sleepless nights or instead, lying in the hands of God, we will close our eyes and surrender our worries, like the weightless things they are, to the winds of faith.

My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken. - Psalm 62:1-2

There's Blood in the Water

Jesus answered and said unto her, "Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." - John 4:13-14

There's a Dave Matthews song called "Don't Drink the Water". In it he portrays the persecution of the American Indians by the settlers of those days and tells of the oppression and crimes committed against them in lyrics that show the cruelty of the times. "Don't drink the water...there's blood in the water..." It is song of remembrance so that, as a nation, we will not forget what we did, and how we did it and why we can never do it again.

But there's also a danger in going from not forgetting...to also not forgiving.  This is true of us as a nation but even more so of us as individuals.  Let me ask you: how much blood is in your water?

You may not know this but you were born with a well of fresh, cool water to draw upon, there within you, for the life ahead of you, and as soon as you were able to you began to poison it. It's that whole "free will" thing. How can it not lead to sin when you have no clue how to wield it when you first realize you have it? Some people are truly blessed by the Holy Spirit at a young age and they avoid a lot of the bad choices some of us make, but I can tell you that....my well? It was a bloody mess. How about yours?

In the scripture above Jesus is addressing the woman at the well. She is a sinner, like you and me and she is lost, like you and me. But Jesus senses that she is also like you and me in another way: she wants to be found. He speaks of the water in the well in a literal sense (drink all you want, someday you will drink your last, you are only mortal after all) but also in a figurative sense (quit drinking the water of this world and drink the water of salvation, the only water that offers eternal life and can quench that burning fire within you of frustration, sorrow and hopelessness).

In June of 2008 I stopped drinking from my own well. All that blood was making me sick. As I was baptized I came up through cool water into the open face of a brilliantly blue sky and that well within me? It ran clean once again. I'm a billion miles from perfect. I am a man of many wounds. But the water I drink now? It heals me.

Triumphant Faith

You may not want to hear this but faith, true faith, is often predicated by defeat.

In the Western World, where "winning" is everything, this is a very hard concept to grasp. But I can tell you that even in something as simple as learning how to a hit a baseball I had to miss, whiff...fail, dozens of times before I finally learned how to get it right. It took hundreds of more attempts to get it right consistently. That's a baseball. Life and God are much bigger than a baseball.

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell presents study after study that prove that before anyone can truly have any hope of becoming an "expert" at something they must try it a minimum of (are you ready for this?) 10,000 times! 

The truth is that life is frustrating. If we're not careful we can misplace that frustration and start blaming God.  It's not unlike the painting telling the artist that it's not very happy with how things are looking when, first of all, the painting can only see within the frame of its own existence and, most importantly, the painting isn't even finished yet.

When you are frustrated with God ask yourself how many times have you prayed to him, spoken to him, confided in him in your life?  Is it at least 10,000 times?  If not then I've got news for you: you better keep praying. Only then will you find a faith that is not only solid, but triumphant.