jeff mikels

This post is simply to win a contest, but on Seth Godin’s blog, he records an account of him going to a hotel and finding an ethernet port in a table leg!

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My salvation and my honor depend on God; he is my mighty rock, my refuge.—Psalm 62:7

I was reading Psalm 62 this morning for my quiet time, and this verse popped out to me. Reading it sparked a little “wow” moment somewhere inside me.

Everything about this verse is almost cliche to me. Sure, my salvation depends on God. Sure, he is my mighty rock. Sure, he is my refuge. All those things are “old hat” to someone who has been in the church since he was born.

However, there is that extra little word thrown in there—honor. My honor depends on God.

It just got me thinking. How much time do I waste during my day trying to preserve or earn “honor” for myself? I imagine that 90% of my day is about gaining honor in some way.

When I do my todo list, my motivation is usually to impress someone. I want to impress my wife who really values getting things done in a timely way. I want to impress the people I know in Lafayette, so they will trust me more as their pastor. I want to impress unbelievers so they will listen to my message. Whenever I do anything, on some level, I’m trying to earn honor from others.

But my honor depends on God.

That’s a new thought for me. I have always thought that my honor depends on me and my performance. Sure, people tell me all the time that “It doesn’t matter what you do as much as it matters what kind of person you are,” but when it comes to honor or reputation it really seems to depend on what I do, doesn’t it?

Well, according to King David. Our honor doesn’t depend on what we do before people. Our honor depends on God. My honor—how I am evaluated by others—doesn’t depend on me or on the fickle nature of other people. My honor depends on God.

Now that is a refreshing thought!

Suddenly, I feel more empowered to focus my energies on pleasing God rather than people. If it is true that my honor really depends on God, then he should be my only concern. I should invest myself in pleasing him, and if he so desires to honor me in the eyes of others, that is his prerogative. If my honor really depends on God, then my attempts to please others will always yield lackluster results.

Lord, I just want to thank you for teaching me this lesson today. I want you to please you. I want to concern myself more with how I stand before you than with anything else. And I want to know what means to stand before you robed in Christ. I want to know your grace.

Thank you for showing your grace to me this morning by teaching me something new. Help me to always remember that my honor isn’t about how well I can impress people. My honor depends on you.

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Considering that it is time for me to leave NWBC, I thought that I would reflect for a few moments on the past five years and all that has happened. Consider this post to be my memoirs for the past five years, and it is therefore HUGE!

» Click here to read the rest. «

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MyJournal — 08/01/2005

For the past few days, I haven’t been spending the time to do my 30 minutes a day. Oh, sure, I have an excuse or two, but they aren’t really good.

Last Thursday, I was leading the wedding reception for Jonathan Kaushal, and that went from about 6:30 pm until about 11:00 pm! When I got home, it just wasn’t on my mind at all, and I went to bed.

On Friday, I had a rather late night because Jen and I were meeting with Marilyn Moravec that evening. That was rather interesting and there were two things that Marilyn said that really stuck with me.

The first thing that stuck out to me was her claim that one person is never responsible for the feelings of another person. That’s something that I haven’t yet decided upon. I don’t know if I really believe that or not. I mean, if I do something that “causes” another person to feel bad, then am I not responsible for that person’s feelings?

This is something that I really need to deal with to decide about because I have been burdened by this for the past four years here at the church. I really believe that I have made people feel a certain way (mostly because they have told me so) and therefore am somewhat responsible for their emotions, no matter how out of whack they were.

Of course, I can think about it all objectively to see that the different people who have been highly emotional in my ministry have actually been acting out feelings that existed long before I ever came onto the scene, but too many people have blamed me for “not caring enough” about others and causing them pain because I was either naive or something. The bottom line is that people have been telling me for four years that I am responsible for the feelings of others.

That has made me a people-pleaser more than anything else. I’m not really interested in pleasing people except that I have begun to believe that I am responsible for how others feel.

Marilyn says that is never true. She says that I am only ever responsible for my behavior and whether that behavior is right or wrong or good or bad, but not for how that behavior makes other people feel.

Interesting.

The other thing that she said was that I really need to have some healthy people around me to help me keep my objectivity when going through tough situations like I’ve gone through here. I thought that was really interesting, so I asked here what to do if I’m in a situation where all the people surrounding me are “unhealthy” and are not helping me remain objective, and with little or no hesitation, she said, “Leave.”

Simply put, if there aren’t any people healthy enough to keep me objective, then I shouldn’t be there at all. (Of course, I don’t know who would be there in that situation, but she said to leave.)

That’s been really great for me because it has given me a sense of release from this ministry that is greater than any other sense I have had so far. Basically, it means that God needs to bring in some kind of specialist to deal with situations like that. I’m not a relationship or emotion specialist, so there you go!

By and large, it was a good conversation with Marilyn which made for my first really positive experience with professional counseling. I still don’t like the whole “neediness” factor of it, but there you go too.

Yesterday was an interesting day at church. I basically shared with the people that we need to confess some sins before God, and I gave a few minutes for people to share publicly at an open microphone in the middle of the room. However, no one said anything.

None of the leaders were there except for Mary Martin.

MANY of the former Vision Team members were not there either.

Attendance was absolutely terrible.

AND, we still had some visitors.

I have been truly amazed at the lack of seriousness that the people in our congregation have when it comes to church. I don’t know if I should criticize them or what, but I’m almost mad about it.

Today was our VBS. God really took care of our needs by bringing a couple kids. It was Charlie, Katie, Jaden and Frankie. Even though there were only four kids, it went really well, the kids had fun, and the rumor is that they will be inviting some other kids to join them tomorrow.

I think the whole thing went really well as a matter of fact, even though I of course have been feeling rather critical about how it is being administered.

Nevertheless, I believe that God will be doing some good things through this program for the kids who come, and that is what makes it all worth it.

Lord, you know all the things that I have been talking about. You know my feelings and frustrations. You know what is right and true and good especially with regard to the advice that Marilyn gave to us. Please help me to be able to clear up in my mind what is the right thing. Help me to know what the line is between my actions and my responsibility and the feelings of others.

I know that my actions do result in your pain and your anger, and I feel that I am therefore responsible for your feelings. Help me to know the difference between what “feelings” people feel and what “feelings” you feel. I do believe that you are completely different from people and that whatever feelings you have are of a completely different kind than the feelings we people have, but I’d still like to have more understanding about all that.

Now, Lord, you know that I would love to get an early start on my message for Sunday. Please help me to identify what should be done this week so that I can keep my priorities straight.

Thank you. I love you,

J

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MyJournal — 7/22/05 8:14 pm

Things have gone pretty well for me today. Since it was a day off, I didn’t do that much, but I actually felt like today was just the same as any other day. In fact, I have begun to worry that I don’t have enough separation between my hobby life and family life and work life. They are all seeming to merge together.

Mostly, it’s because I have a big list of things that I want to do, and most of them have hobby potential built right in to them because many of them are related to computer stuff.

This morning, I wanted to sit down and work on our family finances spreadsheet so that we could get all that stuff taken care of, but I couldn’t really do it, because when I sat down with the computer, I realized that I hadn’t put anything on my blog site in like forever, so I copied my journal notes to the computer thinking I might turn them into some blog posts. However, I decided against that in favor of posting the text that I had been working on for last week’s sermon. Since I had written the text up in a kind of manuscript format, I thought I would just post that.

Well, as I posted it, I realized that it wasn’t really complete and if I left it until later, I would likely never come back to it again. So, I just completed it. That took me about an hour to write all the stuff that I wanted to say (and did say in my last sermon), then formatting it took a little bit of time, and then I realized a couple weaknesses in the theme for my site, so that I had to spend some time fixing that.

All in all, it took me most of the morning, and the twenty minutes not given to that were spent on the Lego Star Wars video game with Charlie and some lightsaber duels with both the kids.

And, I don’t know if anyone ever reads it! That’s the thing that makes me wonder if it is really worth it. I know I enjoy it, but I don’t know if anyone actually reads it and that’s something that kinda bothers me. It’s great to have an archive of personal notes and all that, but I’m really doing it to benefit others.

Which reminds me of the book I’d like to write and haven’t even started… It’s the book on “one step closer” which would be a motivational and fund-raising effort for the new church plant. Basically, it’s a book sharing my vision for the way the Christian life should be lived. Of course, I don’t know if I’m living that life or not, so maybe the book wouldn’t be that good of an idea anyway.

So, here I am thinking that perhaps the blog is really just something for myself. Someday, it might become something more, but until then, I don’t know. Perhaps it really is a good exercise to be writing on a regular basis. Perhaps, God will use it. Perhaps if I don’t let it all waste my time, it will be good.

I think I need to get into the GTD system, but I don’t want to have a system that I’m tinkering with to distract me from what I should be doing. However, I’ve never been focused on what I should be doing, so maybe tinkering with a system like that would be a good thing.

I don’t know about that either.

I guess the bottom line is that I want to be more effective with my life. It’s not that I want to be more famous or anything specific. I just want to be more effective. If my effectiveness is with online ministry, then I want to have the guts to emphasize that and capitalize on my gifts in that area. If my effectiveness is with preaching, then I want to have the persistence to stick to that and really get better at it.

Lord, ultimately, you are the only one who can make my life effective or not. you are the only source of true effectiveness. I don’t even know why I spend so much time trying to be effective without you.

It’s silly isn’t it? I mean, it’s silly to spend so much time trying to accomplish something or to feel important or to be effective when the reality is that you are the only one who can really make it happen. You are the only one who can give me perspective on what is really the most important thing and what I should be spending my time on. You are the one who will give me clarity and focus when I need it. I believe that, but I don’t live like that, because I really enjoy living out of focus. I really enjoy living with a nearsighted perspective on life that says I will deal with whatever I want to whenever it comes my way. That just isn’t a very wise way to live, though.

Wisdom. Perhaps it’s time for me to get back to the book of Proverbs. There really is so much in there that we should live out. Perhaps that is the book I should publish. Perhaps it isn’t something of my own creation, but something commenting on God’s word that should be the first thing I focus my energies on.

That might really be the answer. God if that is true, then I pray you would bring a confirmation of that to me over the next couple of days. Have someone else mention the book of proverbs to me in any context over the next week, and I will take that as confirmation of this focus. Otherwise, give me a different idea of what to focus on.

Of course, I would also like wisdom to know how I should write it and whether using a blog tool or a wiki or something would be better for me. I don’t like having so much in so many different places, but it is just sometimes too inconvenient to force myself to accept one mold when another seems so available. That really is a problem for me!

Well, Lord, I ask you one more thing for tonight. Would you give me clarity on which angle I should take on my message for Sunday? I’m really wondering if I should hit Nehemiah, Ecclesiastes or move on into something else. Most of all, I really want us to focus on you and get a word from you.

J

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MyJournal – 7/21/05 8:21 pm

Yesterday, God met me during my evening prayer time. I was over at the church at 7:30 like I had said for prayer, and a couple of other people showed up—Paul and Leah Witte came, and Eric Wilson (a new fellow) also was there.

It was a really good time for me. I had been really skeptical about who would come, and I don’t even know if I should be disappointed or not, but none of my Leadership Team members were there. Now, I know that Jason was meeting with his small group, and I imagine that Betty and Doug were at their small group, but Mary Martin wasn’t there for any reason at all. She told me today that she didn’t have an excuse.

I’m not going to let that bother me, though, because I was there for myself and not for anyone else or for any kind of church program. Oh, I hope that we can become a Spirit-led church that really is empowered by prayer, but that’s not what last night’s meeting was about. I wanted to pray.

The first half of the meeting went pretty well as I just had everyone go off privately for some alone time with God. We prayed privately for about 30 minutes before getting back together to pray with each other.

It was pretty good for me because I sat down with the passages of Scripture that Mary had given me for Sunday’s worship service, and I just read through them. However, I also read a little from Isaiah 55, and it’s in that chapter where God says…

“My ways are not your ways, neither are my thoughts your thoughts, for my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

That verse resonated with me because it was one of the verses from last Sunday morning’s worship service.

However, the verse right after it was a great encouragement to me. The verse right after it was “My word will not return to me empty. It will accomplish the purpose for which I sent it.”

That was a GREAT encouragement to me. Even though I of course knew that passage by heart, it was a refreshing thing to read it again because I could once again just hand everything over to God to trust him with it all. His word is still His word and it isn’t mine. He is the one who sends it. He has a purpose for it, and he will make sure his purpose comes to fruition.

I don’t have to worry that perhaps I’ve failed in this place. I just have to reevaluate myself to see if I have stayed faithful to God’s call on my life to preach the Word. If I have done that, then I can trust God to accomplish what he wants with it. It’s his word after all, and he promises to do with it what he wants to. That is a great encouragement to me.

I wrote down some other ideas too, but that was the major thing that impacted me. I know it was God speaking to me. I claim that.

Lord, if it really is true that you will always accomplish your word, then would you please reveal it more to us here at NWBC? Would you please help us to see you more clearly? Would you please help us to be more aware of your word?

In the next couple of days, I just pray you would shape into my heart some big truths from your word that I should share with the people on Sunday.

My big problem right now is that I’m once again stuck in the Linux Research mode at home and the Leadership Team Infrastructure development mode at my office.

I feel really good about the system that you’ve helped me to put in place, and I think it will be something that will be really useful in the future not just at NWBC but also at whatever church I’m leading down the road. I’m also glad that I don’t feel I have to do so much tweaking at it anymore.

Today, I spent a good amount of time working on the dokuwiki site so that I could add some functionality that I thought would be beneficial, and it felt so good to be able to do it. It gives me such a sense of accomplishment when I do something like that. I have so many computer projects that I would like to do…

Make the NWBC giving program cross-platform by removing the ActiveX code like the GTD TiddlyWikki and removing the AutoIt helper scripts in favor of python. I’d love to be able to make it work from within a web server too, but I don’t know if that would work.

Set up the conference computer to run Linux and have our development website hosted on that machine.

oh, and I keep thinking of more things to do with all that.

The problem is that all my thought energy is being devoted to ways I can improve the church computing infrastructure and not to ways I can be more effective in preaching or in ministry. I have to start filling my mind with some other stuff so that I regain that focus! But of course, it is so hard to stop doing what I’m doing now.

I need to find some closure.

So Lord, I don’t have any real motivation for closure. I see so much potential and opportunity in the computer stuff, but I don’t see any potential in anything else. Would you please open my eyes to see the greater potential in the people in our church and neighborhood?

I love you.

J

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This last week has just been madness for me. I tried last week to encapsulate the events of Tuesday in my journal, but I ran out of time to do it, and I assume that I will run out of time today to complete it, so I will try to be summarizing and somewhat brief.

Last Tuesday, I was watching the news as the events unfolded and as reporters were still confused about all that was happening. I was shaken by the immense act these terrorists had done, and some of the initial harrowing predictions of casualties numbered upwards of 10,000 (even today, nearly 5,000 are missing and presumed dead). I decided that I needed to go to work for a bit, so I came over to my office. On my way over, though, I thought it might be a good idea to open up the sanctuary to people who wanted to pray. I came into my office, and almost immediately there was a knock on our office door. I opened it, and there was a man standing there who looked a little dazed and confused, so I thought he was shaken up by the events of the morning. I invited him in to talk with me and to pray if he wanted to and he said he would appreciate that.

Right after he came in, Virginia Baumann came out of the bathroom and told me she really needed to see me, so I asked this fellow to wait just a few minutes in the hallway in front of my office so that Virginia could tell me what was going on with her. She came into my office and told me that she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and was going to have surgery soon! We prayed about it, and then she left.

Now, remember, Mildred Takecare had died the previous Friday, and we were all in the throes of putting together a funeral service. (I was trying to put together my first funeral service ever, and I was rather nervous about the whole thing.) Also, remember that the previous Sunday was my “altercation” with P.C. Straw and the sound guys about improving the quality of our sound (P.C. walked out and then came back, and we talked, and he said it was all cool…) Finally, remember that Monday had been my extended conversation with Lorraine about all the monkey business between the sound guys and the worship team. Argh!

Anyway, this fellow, named Miguel, told me after quite a bit of coercion that he had been confused for the last two weeks about his whole life. To make a LONG story somewhat shorter, I eventually pieced together that he had been in some kind of organized crime group and two weeks previously, he decided he hated his life and wanted to change. He started going to church and eventually got a meeting with the pastor there who witnessed to him and counseled him to leave his life of crime behind. He told his boss that he was out. His boss told his uncle. His uncle put a gun in Miguel’s mouth. Miguel panicked. The boss stood up for him. He went back to work, and Tuesday morning he was on his way to make a delivery of some kind when he decided to just run away. He dropped the car somewhere, took a bus, and ended up at our church talking to me.

Well, after about two hours of talking with this guy, I was pretty convinced that for some reason, God had brought him through the last two weeks, and for some reason God had brought him to our church. He was VERY willing to be obedient to anything God told him, and anything I told him because as a pastor, I was a representative of God. We talked, and eventually decided that I would give him a ride to the nearest train station and loan him some money to get a ticket. I gave him a Bible and the street address of our church so that he could return the money if he ever got the chance to.

We had a prayer service on Wednesday evening that was just wonderful (I thought).

We planned the funeral for Thursday evening, but that day, I got a phone call from Gary Bledsoe saying that Perry for some reason was opposing my ordination, and he wanted to know why that might be so. I read my email, and Perry had sent an email telling all the stewards that he would oppose my ordination if it came before the congregation that Sunday. He sent me an email listing some other grief he had with me, and he carbon copied that email to both Bob Carlson and Lorraine. I sent an email back to the stewards explaining that I wasn’t being pushy with the whole ordination thing and that I was willing to do it whenever the church wanted to make it happen because I had already done my part of the whole thing.

Anyway, Perry and I spent about an hour and a half on Thursday afternoon talking about his “observations” about me, and me trying to explain to him that his methods had been inappropriate, and him saying that I had asked him to do that for me…

I don’t want to continue in that vein, but you can clearly see that the week was absolutely harrowing from a spiritual/stressful/practical point of view. Sunday was our annual budget meeting and the church put together a task force to plan my ordination, and Perry didn’t say anything.

Lord, I’m confused about how to deal with Perry and his family. Mostly, I’m confused about how to understand him. I have the sense that Lorraine and I can talk and understand each other, but I feel like everything I say to Perry just gets all jumbled up once it hits his ears. I asked him to make a small list of my offenses and what he wants to see accomplished in the meeting he wants to have, and today, he sent me an email with a two-page document outlining all manner of things without any comments on what he wants to see accomplished in our meeting. I have told him many times that I never asked for him and Bob to be my accountability partners, but that I wanted him to call me on individual issues on an individual basis, but he still thinks it is necessary to have all three of us meet together. I don’t really know what to do, because I can’t think of any potential good that can come out of this meeting, unless he hears me totally capitulate to everything he accuses me of and requests of me. I think he wants to have Bob in the room so that there is a little more firepower on his side. I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to have a meeting with Perry at all, but I really don’t want to have a meeting with him and Bob. All I can think is that I have to tell him that I mistakenly told him something that shouldn’t happen in the context of this church. Perhaps I need to tell him that if he has a personal problem with me being the pastor, he should speak with someone on my pastoral cabinet or speak to the steward of Human Resources. I think I would prefer for him to handle things that way. But I need your wisdom about this.

Lord, I pray that you would watch over Miguel and help him to get to where he wants to be both in terms of physical location and in terms of spiritual maturity. He is in your hands now, and I ask that you would hold him tightly so that he could realize your power in his life. Help him to grow closer to you, and help him to see you more clearly even in his travels.

Lord, be with Charles Takecare since he just lost his wife. Be with our church. Help us all to hear you above ourselves and help us to see Your passion for the lost people in this neighborhood. I love you Lord. Help me to love you more.

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