Bev, John , James and I watched “Everest” last night and all of us seemed to get something different out of it. Although it was sad and 8 people lost their lives after reaching the summit of this amazing peak in The Himalayas, I was encouraged by the movie.

All the characters came from very different backgrounds. There was an expedition guide who’s wife was expecting their first baby; there was a postman; there was a doctor; there was a lady who climbed the highest mountain on each of the other 6 continents; and a few more. But they had one thing in common… they loved climbing. They knew that there were risks involved but that couldn’t stop them from following their passion all around the world. It made them feel alive. The irony is that something that made them feel alive, eventually cost them their lives. Their lives were clearly saying…

I would rather die doing something that makes me feel alive and gives me a sense of purpose, than live a safe, monotonous life, feeling as if I were dead!

Peter had a passion to follow Jesus. He loved Him and wanted to be there beside Him every step of the way. But when the time came to step up and stand up, he went back to what was safe by denying that he knew Jesus. He eventually got it and shared the Good News even if it meant jail and led to his eventual death.

David would rather take on a giant and feel alive, than sit in the crowd of the Israelite army, feeling safe but embarrassed. David knew what it meant to feel alive when he was facing a giant… and almost certain death.

What about you? Are you just going through the motions, feeling dead inside? There is a passion in all of us and until we follow that call, we will never know what it feels like to truly be alive. And may I add, that knowing God, and knowing that He is on my side, makes all the difference. It gives me the confidence to put my faith into action and to trust Him with everything. When I know that my foundation is on ‘My Rock”, no storm can scare me.

They say that we make around 35 000 decisions every day. One of the most important decisions you need to make is whether you want to live a life of purpose and faith, or whether you want to remain in the boat. It might stop you from drowning, but it will never test your faith. And in testing your faith, lies the true excitement of living.

Have an amazing day and weekend!

 

Something I’ve never regretted was learning how to talk myself into something. So often we have good intentions, but they never come to fruition because we listen to what the majority has to say. Here’s something to ponder on…

If Noah listened to the majority, he would have drowned in the flood and we would probably not be here today.

If David listened to the majority, he would never have stood up to Goliath.

If Peter listened to the majority, he would have never walked on water.

If Saul listened to the majority, he would never have become Paul.

If Jesus listened to the majority, He would never have been crucified and we would still be slaves to sin.

It’s become clear to me that when I choose to listen to what God is calling me to, and I don’t get distracted by what society is saying, God always comes through and there is always a blessing. You see, it’s about being obedient rather than looking for approval. If you want worldly approval, do what the world tells you.

To talk yourself into it takes self-discipline, sacrificing society’s approval, practice and a lot of faith. When Moses sent 12 spies into Canaan to investigate they came back with different versions of the same mission. Ten of them talked themselves out of it. To them, the giant people was all they saw, in spite of the fact that God already said that the land was theirs. But Caleb and Joshua, who saw the same giants, talked themselves into it because they chose to focus on what God told them.

I am at a point in my life now where I know that God is calling me to something specific. It doesn’t particularly make sense and it seems a bit impossible, but that’s not going to stop me from talking myself into it. I choose to pursue it because the opinion of others doesn’t matter as much as the calling of God does.

I challenge you today to do the same. Talk yourself into your calling and purpose. The world is filled with poverty and hurt and destruction because so many people are talking themselves out of their calling. Following your purpose will require sacrifice and discipline, but knowing your purpose and choosing to live it, far outweighs the loss of comfort or the critics sitting on the sidelines not willing to take the chances but very willing to criticize those who do.

Have an awesome day as you talk yourself into a fulfilling life of purpose.

 

Some people are born into privileged families – others aren’t. Some live in countries where there is stability – some don’t. But there is one fact that nobody can deny; every single person in the world gets the same number of hours in each day! And the way we choose to use each day is up to us.

What you choose to do with your life doesn’t need to depend on how much money you have or which country you live in. It doesn’t depend on whether you have a physical disability or whether you are in prison. Agreed: these things might make life more complicated but not impossible.

I have a friend who has been living with MS for more than 15 years now. While most of us in that situation would have felt sorry for ourselves, he chooses to continue to live a life of purpose. He sees his illness as a blessing in disguise because it forces him to spend time with God and that is more important to him than anything else. He has a special device that helps him to use his computer to encourage people around the world. Nick Vujicic was born without arms or legs. He wanted to end his life at the age of 10 because he never saw the point of living like that. Yet, he chose to use his 24 hours he has every day, to travel the world and inspire those around him.                                                                I have a friend in Uganda who has to live through instability and poverty in his country. His children often end up with malaria and he has barely enough for his own family. How  easy wouldn’t it be for him to be angry and to choose a life of crime. Yet, he chooses to use his 24 hours every day to educate children for free at a school that he started a few years ago. He chooses to spend his 24 hours a day to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with those who have lost hope in humanity.

Paul was locked up in prison on numerous occasions, yet he chose to make the most of it. Instead of feeling sorry for himself for being wrongly convicted. He shared God’s love with the prison guards. Their lives were turned around because one man decided to use his 24 hours wisely.

The crazy thing is that most of us who live privileged lives and “have it all” tend to be the ones who do the least. Comfort is a dangerous thing. The more we seem to have, the more we seem to chase after it.

I am sitting on the train, on my way to teach in Melbourne, writing this blog and sipping on my coffee. It’s early in the morning, it’s still dark outside and there is something that I will be doing next year that is far more in line with what I want to do. But until then, I have a choice… I can get through each day, doing the minimum, just so that I can make it to the end of that year. But I choose to make the most of my 24 hours. I have 23 young teenagers whose lives I can impact. That is a huge responsibility and I choose to accept that challenge today.

You might be in any of these positions that I mentioned in this blog and feel that life is unfair. Or you might have it all in life. The question is whether you will choose to feel sorry for yourself today and waste your 24 hours, or will you choose to rise above your circumstances and work towards changing them and changing the attitude of others. Do you choose to lap up the comfort that you have at the moment and only live today for yourself, or will you use your privileged position to bless someone else?

You have 24 hours at your disposal each day. How you choose to use them is entirely up to you.

 

Have an awesome day.

 

 

When I look around me, I see a world in crisis. A place where people don’t seem to know where they fit in. A place where people are trying to be different because it seems to be the “In Thing”.

Society today doesn’t seem to know what they want. Having been in teaching for almost 2 decades now, I can see how the discipline of children and young people has been replaced by the ultimate “rights” of children. Now don’t get me wrong; I am all for children being protected from exploitation. But children seem to get away with so much these days because we dare not reprimand them or enforce any discipline as it might offend are “scar” them for life. And while society is doing that, it also allows mothers to abort babies for the feeblest reasons. Here we are: over-protecting our children, yet giving them no say at all when it comes to life. Seems a bit like double standards to me.

We live in a world where gender isn’t recognised. In fact, at the most recent Commonwealth Games held in the Gold Coast, Australia, people had to apologise after addressing the crowd as “ladies and gentlemen”. They felt that it might be offensive to those who do not relate to being either male nor female! Society doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by referring to their gender, but women are jumping up and down, fighting about gender inequality. Which is it… gender inequality or no gender at all?

No wonder the world is confused. How is it possible not to be, when society contradicts itself all the time?

The answer is simple – The World Needs Jesus! The sad thing is that when people hear Jesus, they see Christians, and the 2 are often not synonymous.

Firstly, there are so many people out there that call themselves Christians because they might go to church, but as the old saying goes, “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian, just as standing in a garage doesn’t make you a car. Not everyone who calls themselves a Christian, is one.

Secondly, even people who are Christians, so often don’t reflect Jesus. It’s sad but true. We as Christians are supposed to reflect His love, compassion and grace to the world. But so often we reflect the opposite. The world needs to see what we do stand for instead of what we don’t. So, on behalf of Christians and the church, I would like to apologise for all the times that we didn’t act Christ-likes. All Christians will mess up at some or other time and not be a true reflection of who Jesus is. But that doesn’t change who He is.

He is The Way! We have lost our way as a society and if we want direction and purpose, we need to look at Him. My prayer is that you will have an amazing day. Please feel free to contact me at mark@whynotimpact.com if you would like to talk about anything written here or if you would like to know more about why I choose Jesus.

Everything we have in this life has been borrowed to us. It’s temporary. I don’t understand why I am privileged to live in a comfortable house, while hundreds of millions of people don’t have a place they can call home! Why do I have the option to choose what my next meal will be while millions of people don’t even know when they’ll eat again?

Amidst all these choices, I often find myself thinking about the things I don’t have. Looking at other people’s lives and feeling hard-done by. The more I allow my thoughts to regress, the more God seems to make me aware of my blessings. And the more aware I become of my amazing life, the more I am drawn to the plight of the “forgotten”. It makes me realize that I spend more money on coffee every week, than a fifth of the world’s population has at their disposal for and entire month!

And here I am… proclaiming my love for God and telling my other “well-to-do” neighbours about him. That’s the easiest thing to do when things are going well. But here’s something that might make us look at our privileged lives a little differently. God says in Isaiah 58 that if we start DOING something about the hungry and the oppressed, then our lights will shine in the darkness. The reason why the church is failing on so many levels to impact the world is because we expect people to come through the doors of our church buildings so that we can tell them about Him.

We need to be taking Jesus to the world. Jesus never told the disciples to stay in Jerusalem and the nations would come to them… He told them to go to the nations. Jesus never sat in synagogues, waiting for people to come to Him, He went to meet them where they were at. He fed them, healed them and loved them. By doing this they saw His heart and they were open to what He wanted to share. It’s time we start to take the church into the world and break through the walls that are cutting us off from reaching those who need His hope.

If we want His light to shine in a dark world, we need to take up our cross, sacrifice things that are holding us back and give hope to those who don’t know where their next meal will come from. We need to give a place to stay to the homeless and show love to outcasts. That’s what God calls “true religion.”

 

 

 

Resilience is something of a rarity in privileged societies. When all our needs are met, we start chasing after comfort. And that becomes a dangerous pursuit.

Have you ever really been hungry? I’m not talking about skipping breakfast and lunch, and looking forward to your dinner because you are “starving”? I’m talking about not having eaten for a few days. If you have, you will know that the only thing you would be focused on would be food. All you want to do is survive. And the only thing that could save you, is food.

Have you ever really been cold? I’m not talking about your spouse hogging the blankets on a winter’s night and your feet are exposed to room temperature in your suburban home. I’m talking about not having a shelter, or warm clothes, in the middle of winter. There is nowhere to go to get warm. If you know the feeling you will agree with me that the only thing that you can think about at that time is finding a blanket. All you want to do is get warm.

It’s during those difficult times that we learn to be resilient. Those are the times we either toughen up and find a solution, or we die. When we find ourselves in a situation of life or death, our survival instincts kick in and we will do whatever it takes to stay alive.

However, the opposite is just as true. When we never have to fight for survival or we never face any challenges in life, we become “soft”. We become so used to comfort and a pampered lifestyle, that we slowly start losing that survivor instinct. And modern-day philosophies are promoting the avoidance of challenges, struggles, uncomfortableness and failure.

In modern teaching practices we often talk about setting children up for success when designing assessments tasks. We are not really testing what they know because if we did, there would be a chance for failure and that is a no-no in teaching today. The idea that it would cause damage to a child if they had to fail is a ridiculous one. The notion that scores are not kept in sports matches because we don’t want any of the children to experience losing, is preposterous. The educational idea that young people shouldn’t be reprimanded because it might be embarrassing for them, or it might scar them is just as ridiculous. Of course there should be consequences when doing the wrong thing. Of course we should be reprimanded, and even punished, for inappropriate behaviour.

We are doing far more damage by shielding our youth from losing and failing, because those are the times when they learn important lessons. It’s when we lose a debate or a match, that we learn how to deal with difficulty and lose with dignity. We must realise that things won’t always go our way in life and when they don’t, we need to learn from it, build up resilience, and try harder next time. It teaches us to work for what we want. It creates a society that doesn’t expect everything to be handed to them.

It is quite easy to draw a correlation between resilience and a tough and challenging life. Those people who work hard for things and who experience many challenges and even failures, are the ones who know how to deal with life’s curve balls. They are the ones who know how to survive when facing challenges. And yet, here we are, spoilt, comfortable 1^st world citizens, trying to tell the rest of the world that our way of education, “church practices” and raising a child is superior. We are the ones raising a generation that is undisciplined, disrespectful and totally unprepared for a life of challenges and disappointments. Maybe we need to stop trying to find our answers in man-made programmes and workshops and instead, look to our creator. He created us. What better guidance can we ask for than from the One who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. What more can we ever ask for when trying to raise a generation of integrity?

Jesus wasn’t joking when He said, “In this world you will have troubles.” So often we think that the age we are living in is the most challenging for Christians ever. But it seems to me that around the time of Jesus’ first coming was pretty bad too. So, we need to prepare ourselves for tough times ahead as we move towards Jesus coming again. I can’t watch a movie without “God” or “Jesus Christ” being used in the wrong context. Even songs that are played on commercial radio include lyrics like “God is my objection” “Oh my God” and “God is a woman”. I hear Jesus Christ mentioned more often in random conversations on the train and in coffee shops, than He gets mentioned in most churches. (And that’s a bad thing in both cases)

Isn’t it bizarre that people can use any name or word in their sentences, movies and songs; yet they choose to use the name of my Saviour. I mean… it could just as well be “Oh my Moses”. Why don’t people just say, “Huckleberry Finn – what are you on about!” It’s almost as if they are acknowledging His existence by having to use His name. I get the idea that God, thousands of years ago, knew this was going to happen when He mentioned it in 1 of the 10 commandments.

Sometimes, for us Christians who live in free countries where we can worship God without persecution, we feel that we have it tough. The fact that people ridicule you because of your faith in Christ is normal, it’s not having it tough. I once taught a lesson at a “Christian School” to a Grade 2 class about The Prodigal Son. The principal and chaplain told me that I can’t tell people that they are sinners because they might tell their parents and they might be offended that their children have been labelled as sinners. The Gospel is offensive and that makes us defensive. But we have no defence for the fact that we are sinners. That is the reason we need a Saviour. It’s almost like someone needs to admit that they have an addiction problem before we will admit we need help. In the same way, if we don’t accept the fact that we are all sinners, we won’t see the need for a Saviour. “And how will they know if somebody doesn’t tell them?” You and I need to tell them – but be ready for opposition. Be ready for the walls of defence to spring up.

The more we have, the more comfortable our lives are! The more comfortable we are, the less we tend to think that we need a Saviour. That is why so many Christians in 1^st world countries fall apart when they are inconvenienced in the smallest why. We haven’t really put our faith into practice because we never really needed to. I remember the true story of a pastor of a beautiful small parish in an idyllic little hamlet in the English countryside. He felt the called to serve at a church in a war-torn country. He experienced armed men running into Bible studies and worship services, killing people because of their faith. He experienced the terrible suffering of Christians. When an opportunity arose for him to return to his peaceful, comfortable parish, he turned it down. “Why?” someone asked him. “Because this is where I need to put my faith in God! This is where I need to practice what I preach! This is where Christianity is real?”

A pastor of a very poor African church met up with a pastor of an affluent mega church at a conference. After sharing many stories and becoming good friends, the pastor of the big church said to his friend, “I will pray for you and your poverty-stricken church.” The other pastor replied, “I think you need more prayer in your prosperity church.”

Wherever we are as Christians, nothing should scare us or make us freak out because “When the going gets tough, the Christians keep going!” Why, you might ask. Well, because our hope is on The Rock that cannot be shaken!”

 

 

 

“Go and find her!” One of the most confusing and mind-blowing statements in the Bible.

God’s telling Hosea to look for and find his wife. Now Hosea is a Godly man. In fact, he’s a prophet who fears and serves God. This might seem like a perfectly fine thing for God to ask Hosea to do except for 1 thing… his wife, Gomer, is a prostitute.

Hosea is still coming to terms with the fact that his wife-to-be had one-night-stands with hundreds of men in the past. Imagine them as a young married couple, walking hand in hand down the main street of town. “Hey Gomer. Are you available tonight?” Guys… this is my wife. She’s not available to any man ever again!”

For a while, Mr and Mrs Hosea are doing well. They now have 3 beautiful children and their family is complete. One morning Hosea wakes up ready to start the day having a coffee with Gomer. Gomer! Gomer! Where are you beautiful? The children are playing in the backyard, but Gomer was nowhere. Gomer is gone. He heads to the market. Maybe we’ve run out of milk. Walking past a few people, He could feel that they knew something he didn’t. It was the type of town that, if you didn’t know what was happening in your life, you didn’t need to worry too much because everyone else knew. They knew something about Gomer that he didn’t, and it was freaking him out. The thoughts of the love of his life in another man’s arms was too much to deal with. He doesn’t deserve to be treated like that. She doesn’t deserve to be taken back. And now God is telling him to go and buy her back from a pimp when he was thinking he was going to walk back with her from the market and maybe have a coffee on the way home. Coffee helps in many situations but it’s not going to help him today.

The humiliation Hosea must be going through, walking the streets of his hometown. “Have you seen my wife?”

“I spent time with her last night but haven’t seen her since. Are you still married. I’m sorry man. If I knew…”                                                                                                                                                                 “It’s okay – I just need to find her. If you see her, please tell her I love her, and I am looking for her.” “Are you sure you want her back? She’s been cheating on you and an adulterous must be stoned to death.”

“No. I’ll pay whatever it costs to get her back” There must have been a tug-o-war going on between Hosea’s head and his heart. You’re embarrassing yourself. She has made you look like a fool. She treats you like garbage. She prefers to sleep around than to commit to you. She doesn’t deserve you! I know all of that – but I love her. It’s not about what I’m going through, it’s about her and what’s best for her. She doesn’t yet realise it, but she needs me more than she needs that sinful life. I’m going to find her, pay the price and wipe out her past. We might even renew our vows and she must wear white – her past doesn’t matter anymore.

When Jesus chose … He chose… to die on that cross, He was paying the cost it would take to get us back. You see, God created us in the first place. We belong to Him anyway. But, like Gomer, we have the freedom to have a relationship with Him, or spend our time gratifying our own needs. Jesus knows that when you love someone, you cannot force that love. Jesus chose to love us, and we chose to walk away from Him. And during the time we choose to reject Him, He gently lifts us up, buys us back and carries us home – if we let Him.