The beloved

I realize I've often forgotten and misconstrued how a person comes to love God and become a Christian. I think I've been focusing too much on the end goal/result instead of accepting the fact that love is a movement...it's a process...from one place to another. Yeah, ultimately I just really want to see my friends and family in heaven, but to focus solely on that desire is to miss out on the real 'meat' of the process of loving.
Telling a nonbeliever to love God and to devote his life to Him is like telling a guy to love and passionately pursue a girl he's never met. It's just illogical and unnatural to expect people to latch onto something they have never fully experienced or to which they haven't been properly introduced. As a man needs a proper and positive introduction to a woman, so nonbelievers need a proper and positive introduction to the God who died for their souls.
So while my end goal is for a person to love, I need to remind myself that introduction is the first step. I hope I'm able to deliver a proper and positive one to anyone I meet.

Light and water

It was pretty cloudy this morning. While driving to work I noticed that it was actually more of a layered fog than clouds, because I would drift in and out of the gray areas. Anyways, the weather made me think...
The sun is 92.9 million miles away. Its light and heat hit the earth's atmosphere about 8 minutes after it leaves the sun's surface. Pretty crazy. That's some intense energy to be able to travel that far, and yet it's still able to provide enough warmth for life here. But the thing that really struck me this morning, as I was driving under and through clouds, is how the sun's light can be completely diffused by our atmosphere. The light consistently travels 92 million miles to earth, but then it's vulnerable enough to be scattered by a few thousand feet of water! Light can be diffused to the point where, on a cloudy day, we have no idea where the sun is in the sky. Water, the same liquid that is essential for life, can also virtually hide the sun.
Then we have God's Word, which has traveled down the centuries and across continents and literally into our hands. Its power is greatly underestimated, and it offers the energy and motivation for life. It has come a long ways, and now it is our choice of whether to take hold of (and put to good use) the truth and life that Scripture embodies. We can 'water' it down and make it out to be something less than it is. We can allow it to be scattered and distorted. We can choose to live under the shallow layer of clouds that makes us disoriented and causes us to lose sight of the powerful Son that is essential for abundant life.
Choose light.

Motives

There are a lot more factors in my decision-making process now than when I was younger. I now have the fingers of a crowd of obligations, responsibilities, personal desires, and notions of political correctness tapping on my back every time I move to make a decision. Children speak and act selfishly...and honestly. When they give feet and hands to their emotions, their actions are fueled by a relatively pure set of motives, even if the scope of the motives fits a world with a smaller diameter. And now, though my deepest desire is to first and foremost allow God's truth and love to flow from my life, so much of my output seems to be a product of an inner dialogue question: "which of my responses would be viewed as most proper and least offensive?". Not that analysis is bad, but it feels like virtually every decision nowadays is squeezed through a cold and unemotional propriety factory, and a neatly packaged but ultimately bland little solution comes out of the other end. My desires are pretty squelched, in the name of selflessness. Granted, selflessness should be one of the characteristics of a life enthralled by the person of Jesus; but feelings of bitterness or resentment should defnitely not be lingering anywhere nearby. So I continue to realize how much I suck at letting God take me over. I'm still trying to make myself change, instead of letting His life and righteousness be mine.
At the end of the day, I'm still a sinner who is learning immense lessons from my own children.

I like Jon Foreman. I appreciate his attitude towards reality...and how it's not perfect. Reactions to situations are not perfect. Every day I am running into more and more discontented souls. Everyone is wronged. Everyone is a victim. Everyone's voice has not been heard and acknowledged properly. Everyone deserves better than their current lifestyle. Contentment is a choice.

Oi. I do one post and all of a sudden my blog profile has been identified as a spam source. Whatever.

So about the blog name...

'notpit' is just 'tipton' spelled backwards, and it seems like everywhere I try to get a username, 'tipton' or 'mtipton' is already taken, so I started using 'mnotpit' as an alternative. That's that.