Verwandte Artikel zu Life with a Capital L: Embracing Your God-Given Humanity

Life with a Capital L: Embracing Your God-Given Humanity - Softcover

Heard, Matt

 
9781601424464: Life with a Capital L: Embracing Your God-Given Humanity
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1601424469 ISBN 13: 9781601424464
Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

“Matt Heard writes winsomely and compellingly, answering that quiet aching so many people – yes, even Christians – have that there must be more to life…. I highly recommend Life With a Capital L!” - Joni Eareckson Tada, Joni and Friends International Disability Center
 
What is it that you long for? Dream about?  Hunger after?
 
We all desire more than just the endurance of our daily routines. But often we feel limited and stuck — like we’re merely existing instead of living.
 
That’s not the way it was meant to be. God intends the humanity in each of us to be deeply experienced, lavishly enjoyed, and exuberantly celebrated. In fact this is what the gospel is all about.
 
Yes, the gospel. Contrary to conventional thinking — inside and outside the church — following Jesus is not about denying our humanness but embracing it. Rather than acting more spiritual or being more religious, we’re called and enabled to become more fully human…  and alive.
 
Matt Heard escorts us on a journey of discovery: that Jesus didn’t come to save us from our humanity — Christ instead yearns to restore it to what God originally intended. Matt then explores ten key areas where everyday life can become extraordinary Life.  
 
Christ promised we could “live life to the full.” He didn’t just mean eventually.
 
Life with a Capital L is the Life you are longing for. Now.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Matt Heard and his wife, Arlene, live in Colorado Springs and are the privileged parents of three adult sons. A speaker and writer, he was the senior pastor at Woodmen Valley Chapel for twelve years.  Whether standing in front of people with a microphone or in a trout stream with a fly rod, whether sitting around a dinner table with friends or serving a need in his city, he loves exploring and experiencing Life with a capital L.

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introduction
There Is Life Everywhere

It is not that they chose to die, but rather that they could no longer figure out how to live.
—Robert Kurson

It was a moment that changed me, and I almost missed it. Touring the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, I was rushing through a small room to catch up with some friends when the painting caught my eye. Russian artist Nikolai Yaroshenko had purposefully layered his oils on this canvas back in 1888. Five diverse prisoners—a soldier, a worker, a peasant, a mother, and a child—are huddled together, peering through the barred window of a halted prison railcar. The child reaches through the steel bars, feeding pigeons on the railway platform.

Even in the midst of an awful predicament, the five prisoners were making a choice to engage with something. With what?

Yaroshenko’s title gave me the clue: There Is Life Everywhere.

Regardless of the day or the dilemma, we each have an opportunity to embrace something, not only the fact that our hearts are beating, but why they’re beating. Yaroshenko beckons us to look beyond our immediate circumstances and seize the privilege of being human.

There Is Life Everywhere. With his title, Yaroshenko is making a statement. But with the deliberate, thoughtful strokes of his brush, he is also asking a question. A question posed to those who will turn down the volume of their circumstances and listen. A question addressed not only to our ears but our hearts: will we embrace the Life that’s everywhere?

Like a well-aimed arrow, his question pierced the silent space of the gallery and penetrated my heart.

I sat down on the only bench in the room. Not only had I been rushing through my tour of the museum, I was just completing a season in which I’d been rushing through my life. Standing there, I realized I had been imprisoned by my busyness, difficulties, and burnout. Yes, hectic and challenging seasons in our lives are unavoidable, and they can even be invigorating. But they can also turn deadly if we let the sound of the chaos drown out the question Yaroshenko is asking.

~ ~ ~

Life. People define it in many ways. Is it merely when our cells are reproducing and our hearts are beating? We know there’s more to being fully human than that. And we all have our ideas about what that element of “more” should include:

Some fulfilling relationships.
   An enjoyable family.
      The attainment of a particular bank account balance.
         A gratifying career.
            The accumulation of enough stuff.
            A particular level of health and fitness.
         The absence of disease and difficulty.
      Plenty of exciting vacations.
   Enough fun along the way to keep at bay the ache that’s deep within our souls.

I sit back and look at that list. Is that it? Is that life? A cycle of well-crafted circumstances? Really?

Deep down, my objection comes in the form of a persistent suspicion, even a deafening hunch, that there’s more to the dance and drama of my life on this planet than air in my lungs and even circumstances to my liking.

Take the characters in Yaroshenko’s painting. Most of us think that a prison trip to Siberia would be a surefire snuffer of any kind of life worth experiencing. We’d think that humanity could never thrive in the context of conditions so inhumane. But Yaroshenko didn’t think so. Even in less-than-ideal circumstances, he envisioned
a type of life that’s within reach. 

~~~

Yaroshenko’s painting was actually inspired by a short story written by Leo Tolstoy three years earlier. In “What Men Live By,” Tolstoy, a follower of Christ, begins by quoting 1 John 3:14: “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death.” Those words reference a central theme of Jesus’s teaching, one that goes to the core of why he came: to usher us into a new way of being human.

Before each of us is the choice to remain in a realm Jesus calls death or to allow him to transition us into the realm of life. “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life” (John 5:24). So many people miss this—that Jesus is referring to something that happens right here and now.

Yaroshenko’s “life” that can be found “everywhere” is this life into which Jesus invites us. Today.

It’s a way of doing life that can be present in every nook and cranny of our days—from heartbreaks to hobbies, client meetings to birthday celebrations, dinner parties to soup kitchens, funerals to vacations. From enduring an illness to enjoying concert tickets in the front row.

And, yes, even in prison railcars.

I’ve started calling it Life with a capital L.

Everyone experiences heart-beating, lung-breathing life. Some are able to add to that existence some enjoyable relationships, a satisfying career, and maybe a level of financial success. Some will even add a bit of religiosity or maybe even spirituality to their repertoire. But not everyone experiences Life with a capital L.

For some, it will be a surprise to learn that Life with a capital L doesn’t start by trying to be more spiritual. It starts with becoming more fully human under God’s direction.

It doesn’t come with a permanent, plastered-on smile, a get-out-of-jail-free card, or an exemption from pain. But it does come with Jesus Christ’s assurance that he will put our feet on the path and get us Home.

In the midst of Monday morning realities that can range from busy to broken to beautiful, Jesus can breathe Life into our life. He can overcome the problem of a life consumed by merely existing. He can satisfy our yearning to actually Live.

~~~

Go back with me to that museum in Moscow. It was only after staring at the painting for a few minutes that I saw him. He, too, was inside the railcar.

A sixth prisoner.

In the shadowed background, he is silhouetted against the light of the barred window on the opposite side of the carriage. With an empty stare, he looks the other way, into a stark, gray sky. Missing out on the Life-filled moment unfolding behind him, he is lost in a sea of his own hopelessness.

It struck me. Yaroshenko wanted me to see him—this other guy on the opposite side of the railcar who was missing the Life. Because too often I’m that guy.

How many times in my journey have I moved to the other side of that railcar and stared out through prison bars of pain, disappointment, or just plain busyness? How often do I look in the opposite direction and miss out on Life? Those are questions I’m still asking, and they are changing me. Deeply and positively.

The ultimate question is not whether Life—with a capital L—is everywhere.

The question is whether I’ll experience it.

PART 1
reclaiming our humanity

Chapter 1—Fully Human: Realizing Life While We Live It

If the church is not a place where we not only learn something about what it means to be human but also a place where seeds of a fuller humanity are planted in us and watered, to grow, then all our hymns and prayers and preachments are...

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Verlag
PRH Christian Publishing
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1601424469
ISBN 13 
9781601424464
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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