Links:

Link to Day 1, Link to day 8 thru 11

For those who followed my previous crazy journey’s, here’s the post the Friday before I started this one, which puts it in the context of this blog as a whole: Christian Influence Peddling.

Welcome Back

It’s Saturday. Skip down to the Recap of this Blog Series if you’re lost on where we are–I want to dive right in. It’s no coincidence that I announce week 2 theme is the Spiritual core behind the things I’m doing in this season and then get so busy I can’t post for 3 days at a time. Anything “deep Kingdom” will be opposed. It doesn’t matter though, because God wins in the end.

Update

So day 12! I was up late last night trying to unwind from the week. I didn’t actually finish my writing project until 7pm, then I finally got to join my family for pizza movie night. Woke up at 5:38 AM anyway, but lay in bed drifiting in and out till about 7am. Sorry if this is the boring part, but weighted 299lbs yesterday, and 298.2 lbs today.

We finally hit some snags that will cost delays at the house remodel. Having trouble nailing down an electrician, they’re just all busy. I got someone to pitch-in a bit to get us unstuck but they don’t have time to do the next phase in the ADU, which is okay, it will buy me some time. My wife is coming to grips with the fact that we won’t be done and moved in before April 1 so we’re paying for two places for at least the month of April. I have figured this all along because if ANYTHING went wrong we were going to blow through the early deadline.

We may also blow through deadline #2, April 17th (my little girls birthday). Which means we’re going to have to get creative in where we put relatives who are coming to visit. But in the grand scheme of things we’re taking on in this crazy (63 day) season it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay…

The Spiritual Journey

Ever here people say, “trust the process?”

I’ve always hated that. I don’t trust your process. LOL! A better way to say it might be, “trust that you are in a process.”

Now that, I can get behind. Trusting a process is religion, but the truth is we are on a journey (a process). The destination will be glorious, but so is the journey. Imagine for a second that God has a vision for your life, and He’ll tell it to you if you ask, but he doesn’t reveal the process because you might not go for it if you knew what you were biting off.

Say God tells you something you’ll have. A big something. Or maybe He reveals a giant calling on your life–like saving a nation. Ask yourself who you might have to become in order to inherit that giant calling. The chances are that God will take you through a process of becoming so that He can hand you what you and He want you to have.

The process, or journey, is one that you can stumble blindly through or one that you intentionally seek out. Usually, if you try really hard, your going to get a bit of both, and that’s okay. We live in a fallen world and we have an enemy to constantly throw in our faces just how far we’ve fallen. The truth is that God is bigger. Nothing we do takes us out of his process, so long as we’re not actively shutting God out of our lives.

So in every life circumstance God has two goals: draw us into closer intimacy with Him or to grow our character so that we can handle more journey and more inheritance. That’s been a huge comfort to me over the last couple years.

This might be easier to understand if I describe the process I see most often. (The process is unique for everyone, but there is a pattern.)

The Wilderness of the Soul

The process compares to the journey the Children of Israel took out of Egypt to the Promised Land. Step one is leaving slavery. God accomplishes that through a bit of a journey in it’s own right, but when it’s all said and done you end up crossing the Red Sea.

It actually doesn’t take a ton of faith to leave slavery. I mean you just have to hit rock bottom and realize that a loving God wants to be your father. It’s a lot but compared to what’s coming it’ll feel like child’s play. The Red Sea represents the baptism of water in the individuals journey. It’s a decision to die to sin, come alive in Christ and pursue New Life as a Spirit Filled individual. It’s typically an evangelist who leads you out of Egypt, and then they sort of turn you over to a local church in the hopes that you’ll continue to grow up in the Lord.

In reality…well I’m just going to say it. The spirit of religion is all over the local church. They love the new tithe-paying members and they’re happy to propagate the myth that God ceded the sanctification process to them. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be meeting with other Christians, or that it’s not super helpful in learning the ropes, it’s just that the church as an institution finds it handy to be officially in the path of your next steps as a Christian. Whether they know it or not they often stand between new Christians and the process God is trying to take them through.

The same God who sent your Jesus to save you, because you couldn’t do it yourself, sent you the Holy Spirit because you can’t sanctify yourself either. Let’s return to the Children of Israel. They walk across the wilderness in probably about 4 weeks and then utterly fail to lay hold of the Promised Land because they didn’t trust God of ten plagues to help them defeat the giants that lived in their Promised Land. The hadn’t put on the robs of sonship (daughtership), and who could really blame them.

It’s hard for a former slave to give up that mentality. We’re so used to the way the world thinks we have a hard time leaving it. It’s process Paul calls mortification. We have to die to the way we think. That’s what the Israel did. They wandered the wilderness until that generation died off.

See the typical Christian is saved from slavery to sin by an evangelist only to be stranded in the wilderness until they die. The church will tell you that your job is to try really hard not to sin too much until you go to heaven–your ultimate home. The Truth is you home is not in heaven. You’ll go to heaven when you die, but it’s a pit stop, then you return with Christ to a remade Earth. There is so much scripture behind this I don’t have time to play proof text poker, if you can’t buy that we come back to Earth after the enemy is driven from it just study. Probably when I say it it will sound right. God formed Adam from Earth and gave him dominion over it (I say Adam but I mean to include Eve).

I’m not trying to be anti-organized religion but we really have to be wary of some pits we can fall into or we’ll end up like the children of Israel, wandering the wilderness until we die.

So back to our journey…The key to getting out of the wilderness of the soul is beating four spirits/mentalities–Orphan, Religion, Poverty, and Political. These are battles we must fight but we win not in our own strength. It’s something that we win when our the Holy Spirit builds faith in us so that our Identity changes.

Baptism

When you leave the waters of the Red Sea you are spiritually reborn. There is an infant in your heart being nurtured by the Holy Spirit. While on Earth, the inner child will always be a part of you, but as you heal from slavery scars your spirit will grow and mature. This is according to God’s plan. As you grow up you get adopted into a royal family, aka the Kingdom, and the way God interacts with you will also mature.

I have so much more to share on this topic but I’m out of time. Love you all. More soon.

Quick Recap of this Blog Series

I’m a writer (fiction/non-fiction/copy) who’s turning 50 in June. When I have a season of big changes to adapt to and big projects to take on, I like to combine it all into a plan I call a journey. I’m calling this journey Spring 2021: Cleric Journey – (It includes such things as turning 50, remodeling a house, expanding my writing business to include entrepreneur & life purpose coaching). I typically journal me progress, big wins/big flops, but this time I’m blogging it so I can…

• Inspire or help some folks facing similar life situations.
• Share tips I’ve learned or that people suggest to me that I decided to try out.
• Stay committed to progress by stating to all my readers what I’m doing and if it’s working or not.
• Eventually turn it into a written resource for the Creative Christian Entrepreneurs I coach.

Note: The thinking behind journeys is this. When facing busy seasons in life, we need to impose some routine on life, and be flexible other places. We need to decide what our life is about, that authentic to us, and not lose site of that while taking on those big projects of crazy seasons that happen to all of us in life.

Goal Recap

My goals/priorities this season–addressed in one project (One Big Thing), include
– Losing weight & getting younger, (soon auditioning new diet/exercise plans).
– Bed by 9:30 PM & getting up at 5 AM every weekday and spending time with God (which includes writing this blog).
– Launching the coaching arm of my writing/coaching business, and faithfully stewarding opportunities with my church.
– Remodeling a new home so that we can start living multi-generational with my mom.