My Identity in Christ

I’ve had Lysa Terkeurst book Made to Crave sitting around for a while now.  I’ve been meaning to read it. But when Proverbs 31 announced they were doing a Made to Crave online bible study, I knew it was God working through these women to give me the push I had been needing.

We are nearing the end of week 2 and working through Chapter 5, where the book is, yet again, challenging me to look at the false statements I use to identify myself.

Catherine, the girl who never made the choices that would make her parents proud.

Catherine, the girl who wasn’t good in school like her sister.

Catherine, the girl who always seemed to get in trouble.

Catherine, the girl who was young and married the bad boy.

Catherine, the girl who had babies young and thought that would help the bad boy grow up with her.

Catherine, the girl who was foolish enough to think the bad boy would take care of her and never leave her.

Catherine, the girl who never planned or prepared for her future and had no way to support her kids.

Catherine, the girl who lost all the weight and gained it back.

Catherine, the girl who is foolish enough to get married again and think it will be easier this time.

Catherine, the girl who has too many kids and will never be a good enough mom.

Some of these I have kept buried deep and it’s like undergoing surgery to expose them and remove these cancers that have taken up residence in me and grown too big. So big they have crowded out what God says about me.  It’s time to remove these false statements from my soul and replace them with Truth. God’s truth! 

I am the forgiven child of God (Romans 3:24). God knows every sin I have ever committed and yet he has forgiven them all. 

I am the accepted child of God (1 Corinthians 1:2). He knows all my mess ups and knows all the mess ups yet to come but He still accepts me as His child.

I am the loved child of God (Ephesians 1:4). God gives me unconditional love that does not change based on how badly I react to my circumstances and He gives me that love knowing that I will never be able to return that same love.

I am the close child of God (Ephesians 2:13). God is always pursuing me. Drawing me closer!  He is never far away and ever by my side. 

I am the victorious child of God (Romans 8:37). With Christ I can face any trial or struggle.  And no trial or struggle will ever separate me from the love of God.

When I remove these false identity statements and replace them with God’s amazing truth I know I have what I need to overcome my circumstances. And with God’s grace and guidance I will. 

I am more than my current situation. I am a child of God and he has a purpose for my life. I can’t allow my current struggle to keep me away from that purpose. I am Made for More.

Dealing with Grief

What I am about to share is something that I have not shared except with those within my family and church community. It is something that I have talked about as little as possible or with very little detail about how I dealt with grief. However, there comes a time when you have to come out of your shell a little more and hope that you can help someone else out through your own personal experience.

At some time in our life, we will grieve for some form of loss in our life. It can come in any form such as the death of a loved one or the loss of a job. How we react to that loss can impact of life for years to come in either a positive way or negative. Ask yourself one question, would God approve of my grief process?

It is not as simple as that! I know and I speak from experience. On June 6, 1990, I was 20 years old when my father died. It was just 39 days before my 21st birthday but more importantly, 3 days before my younger brother was to graduate from high school. Decision time: grieve in sorrow or step up and be a man and do what needs to be done.  

In 1990, I did not know any better.  I had to step into a role that I was not ready for or at least I did not think I was ready for. I knew my mother needed a support network around her to help her get through this time. I knew my brother, who was very vocal about not attending his high school graduation, needed friends around him to walk across that stage and receive his diploma. All I knew was it had to happen and I was going to do everything I can to make it happen. In that process, I shut down my grief process. I went into take charge and get it done mode!

A year after my dad’s death, I moved away from Florida and back to Connecticut where I was born. Things needed to change; I could not live in where I grew up. I hid from what I needed to face and that was I lost a loved one and I did not grieve that loss. And in the end it made it difficult for me to face June 6 and December 3. 

It wasn’t until after my wife and I started attending our current church that I faced this problem head on. It was during one of the church sermons that I heard one of the Pastors speaking about his father who was a famous announcer for NASCAR racing in the 1980’s. It was during this message that he told of the loss of his father and how to work through the grief process. It was a difficult message, that I could not sit entirely through but it was enough of a push for me to seek out some guidance. It led me to Grief Share at my church.

What I learned in that 13 week support group is that I am not alone. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to grieve. The right way is to seek God’s wisdom and guidance through this process.  Until I started this process, I was doing it the wrong way. It takes time to grieve and what I learned along the way is that I cannot shut out what God’s plan is for life in general. This is something to be learned during the grief process. That is easier said than done when you have lost someone that you love. In the end, I gained a new perspective and a new outlook on life in general.

One of the things I seem to always come back to on some of my posts on our family blog is something that I learned from the movie courageous.  For this post, I feel that this is appropriate:

"There needs to be a grieving process, and the Lords the one who carries you through it. It takes time. It takes time for healing. I've heard many people say who've lost a loved one, that in some ways, it's like learning to live with an amputation. You do heal, but you're never the same. I would also say, that those who go through this and trust in the Lord discover a comfort and an intimacy with God that most people never experience. He doesn't promise an explanation, but He does promise to walk with us through the pain. And the hard choice for you is whether or not your going to be angry for the time you didn't have..., or grateful for the time that you did have."

As I move forward, I intend to reflect on each of my 13 weeks in the TCC Grief Share program. I hope and pray that my experience will help guide you through these tough times. You can also find additional information at the following link:

TCC Grief Share

John's Identity Statement

Recently my wife stepped out of her comfort zone and began posting on our family blog site with two posts in the same day. One of those blog posts she shared on proverbs 31 as part of her bible study. This morning, she showed me a blog post that I read from Mandisa which caught my attention and opened my mind to some of my inner demons so to speak. 

My biggest issue that I have battled over the years is the feeling of not being good enough and always beating myself up when I do not succeed.  When things do not go the way that I want, I shut myself down and throw my own little pity party about how my objective failed. I question myself and my abilities! Why can’t I have the success that everyone else has? What am I suppose to be doing with my life? These are all fairly simple questions, right? 

John, the loser that will not succeed.

John, the boy always picked last because you’re not good enough.

Here are some things about me that you need to know and how in some ways I have tried to make some changes in my life. First, I did not grow up going to church and had no spiritual life until I met my wife Catherine in 2006. And there is a funny thing about what men will do just to be with someone. I started going to church with Catherine and was baptized that same year.  I started to see a change in my life, slowly at first but it was gradual. I still fight the battle of pity parties but not as much as before I got involved with church. 

However, it was not until September of 2008 that I got a real wake up call. The guys at our church had gotten together for a movie night out and saw the movie Courageous. Talk about a slap in the face! I thought I had started getting things right in my life but I was far from it. I had made mistakes in my adult life that I know I am going to have to answer for. We all will when we are called “HOME”. What I realized is that I have to be that spiritual leader for my house. I have children that I can either allow to float through life like I did and have to learn about God and Jesus Christ, our Savior as an adult or I can get them involved now and teach them to love God. In the end, I said “I will” and I meant it. 

Shortly after that movie I started this blog as a way for me to reach out to other men in hopes that they will have the same resolve I have and that they will identify themselves as the Spiritual Leader in their home. My identity statement:

“As for me and my house, We will serve the Lord” –Joshua 24:15 

It is important for my children to grow up with a better spiritual background that I did. I already see it in all of my children, the older three are involved in their own church functions and my five year old sometimes begs me to let her say the “amen’s” instead of her daddy. And she immediately steps in when Daddy is not at home. I need them to love God more than anything else. As a father with four girls and one boy in the house it is that important because if they love God more than themselves, they will be in a better place than I was at their age. And they do not have to play catch up.

So the questions I asked earlier are really not that simple. Why can’t I have the success that everyone else has? To whose standards am I measuring myself? The only standard I should measure up to is Jesus Christ. That in itself is a hard standard to follow. Instead we should be doing everything to live our life as Christ-like as possible and remember that sin will always be knocking at our door. What am I supposed to be doing with my life? The better question should be, am I doing what God wants me to do? In the end, it is His plan for us and we have to accept it, whether we agree with it or not. 

John, the confident child of God (Ephesians 3:12)

John, the victorious child of God (Romans 8:37)

This song best identifies how I want to live my life and is the best influence on me:

Conformation

Romans 12:2 says “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”

We all want to conform to what others want us to be. Had I read Romans 12:2 when I was still in high school, I may have stuck around and continued to be involved in the theater.  What I did do is respected my father’s wishes and gave it up. Where would I have been had I stuck with it? I have no clue. I guess I had two passions: Theater and law enforcement. And today I am thankful that I have a degree in Criminal Justice and work in a career field that allows me to have a law enforcement involvement while hoping to provide some valuable guidance to those that have made bad choices in their lives. I hope and pray that I can be that good influence that they truly need.

Chapter 1: “The Greatest Challenge in the World: A Call To Holiness More Than Happiness”

Here is a simple question: Why did you choose to get married? Before reading chapter one I thought I had all the answers. It wasn’t until I read chapter one that I realized that I was totally wrong. I admit that I made mistakes in my life. I have not lived up to what God has expected of me or followed the proper view on marriage at all. You see, I am working on my third marriage. The first, I was blinded by what I thought was love. How wrong was I there! And I learned a valuable lesson. The second was a rebound and should have never been a marriage to begin with. We both had different goals for our lives. She wanted to focus on her career and I do not find fault in that at all. I wanted a family and she was not interested in that either. There was one common factor in both of these marriages. Neither marriage had any sense of spiritual guidance once so ever. It wasn’t until I met Catherine that I started to get a sense of Christianity. Even then, I was still testing the waters. I did not grow up in a Christian home or at the least we weren’t involved in church or pray. What I do know is that I found someone that I really liked and if I wanted to continue this relationship, I also had to start a new chapter in my life. This one had to include God. Catherine and I have been married 6 years know and there have been many struggles along the way. The one thing that we have made sure of for a fact is that God is foremost important in our family’s life and that we place glory to Him through our marriage.

Some in our society have a wrong interpretation of marriage and some of this comes from what is shown on television. I will not name any shows that give this poor view and make it a point to avoid having that as part of our daily life. This is NOT what God wants us to view in the way of marriage. It wasn’t until reading this first chapter that I realized that I need to get on board with the biblical view of marriage. What set of values do we want for our children to view on marriage? Do we want them to feel as if relationships are a go with the flow and date whomever we want at the moment and if our marriage fails move on to someone else until we find something that works? In my own view, no way! As I did with reading Resolution for Men, I plan to break some chains when it comes to the wrong view on marriage. Catherine and I may not have gotten in right with our initial marriages to other people and we cannot change what happened. We can seek forgiveness of God and seek to make this marriage show how much we intend to honor God. If we can achieve half of that goal, we will set a better example for our children.

Ephesians 5: 25 – 27 says “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.”

If I can follow half Jesus Christ’s example of loving my wife as much as He love the church, I might succeed. My goal is to love my wife as much as I can and set the best example I can for our children when if come to marriage. Hopefully they can learn from our mistakes and build a relationship with God first.

Romans 8:28 says “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” 

It took my meeting Catherine to realize that He has a plan for me and I need trust and let Him guide me through this marriage with the end goal to glorify Him.