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Purpose in Paper Boats

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By Nate Champneys

My five-year-old and I went down to the creek with some paper to make paper boats. In my mind I could just picture how awesome it would be to let those things go sailing down the creek. So we get down there and I fold the first one and I let it go down the creek. Kaelen was thrilled. But his excitement quickly faded into distress as the boat moved away. He waded after the boat and grabbed it.

“Kaelen, you have to let it go down the creek.” I said.

“No, I want it,” he said.

“Trust me, Kaelen. Let’s just see what happens.”

Frustrated, he slowly let it go. It went about 20 feet and got caught on a log. I waded over to it and Kaelen asked me for it. But I said, “No, dude, you have to let it go.” And I let it go and it sailed down the creek. By this point Kaelen is almost in tears and says, “But Daddy, I really want to keep the boats.”

I head back up the creek to where the stack of paper is sitting, frustrated because my beautiful plan of sailing boats down the creek with my son is not playing out the way I intended it to. But I suddenly think to myself, “Why am I so bothered by this? Who really cares if the boats go all the way down the creek or not? Isn’t the point of being here to have some quality time with my son? Instead I am driving him to tears.” Here I am, focused so hard on the end result of the boats, that I’ve forgotten that the goal of this outing was to have a date with my son. So I told Kaelen, “Okay buddy, I’m sorry. You can keep the boats.” The rest of the afternoon, I would make a boat and he would let it go ten feet or so, pick it up, and add it to his collection on the beach. (With the exception of a couple he let me send down the creek for my own enjoyment. 🙂 ) We came home with an armful of soggy paper boats, and my son was never more thrilled.

As I think about that day, I understand my mistake. I was focusing on what I viewed to be the end result: floating boats. I forgot about the process. I got focused on the “doing” and lost track of the “being,” the “doing” of sailing boats instead of the “being” of being a father to my son. This way of thinking is visible throughout my life and is something I fight daily. In another blog post I wrote about how God’s purposes are wrapped up inside the process of life. We tend to view things as “the end justifies the means” and focus on doing whatever we have to in order to accomplish a specific project. But from God’s perspective, I think that often the means ARE the end.

Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.” Sometimes we hear this verse and we think, “See, God is going to make everything I do prosper.” But that is not what this verse says, nor is it what the surrounding verses are trying to communicate. God is about His purposes. Not ours. In verse 35 Paul asks the question, “Does it mean He no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death?” This question implies that we will face these things. We may face trouble. We may face hunger or destitution. We may face persecution. How is that things working together for good? Well, according to my purposes, it isn’t. But it is good because all those bad things work together to accomplish the good thing: His purpose.

God is at work in us, with purposes all throughout the process of life, with the ultimate destination being greater than our immediate happiness, but more so, our holiness. Our job is not focus on the fact that we haven’t arrived at this destination but to be with him in the process, and trust him with it, knowing that we are deeply loved and leave the results up to Him.

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Pondering “Poopiness”

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By Nate Champneys

Poop. It seems when you are a father of three small children that your life revolves around this topic. I find our conversations range from how frequently a child has had one to the consistency of it to what needs to be done with a diaper filled with it. If you’ve ever had kids, I am sure you can relate. During the most recent “poopy” incident at our house, a valuable lesson was brought to mind, so I thought I would share. 🙂

Shortly after my five-year-old had just gone into the bathroom, my wife and I heard him calling for help. I walked into the room to find quite a scene: Kaelen was standing in front of the toilet, facing away from it, with his pants at his knees, and there was poop EVERYWHERE. It was all over the floor. It was all over the rim. It was smeared on the outside of the bowl. It was on the inside and outside of his pants. My wife asked him, “Oh, Kaelen what happened?” Sheepishly he said, “I wanted to turn the fan on.” Well the good news is, he did indeed get the fan on. He just didn’t make it back across the bathroom in time.

My wife looked at me. I looked at her. She said, “Don’t look at me, I already cleaned up throw-up this morning.” I had nothing. I realized that I was not getting out of this one. It was definitely my job at this point. I looked at the horror smeared out before me. Jokingly, I followed my wife out of the bathroom and closed the door behind me. “There,” I said. “Problem solved.” My wife and I laughed together. Then I headed in and began to clean up the mess.

Obviously, I could never really expect to close the bathroom door and expect my five-year-old to clean up after himself. And of course it’s not going to clean itself. But many times this is exactly how we view our brokenness. Each of us has dirty, nasty, stinky, rooms in the house of our hearts. Deep, dark places from our childhood, or painful times in our lives. We just try to ignore our problems and expect that they will just eventually take care of themselves. Or we think, “If I just try harder I will be able to get over my broken past.” Here’s the thing: Thinking we can just try harder is like my five-year-old trying really hard to clean up his mess. Even if he tried to clean it up, because of the fact that he is only five years old, he actually would make it worse! Instead, he called for help.

The reality is that God is the only one who can truly clean and heal our hearts and make us whole. He stands at the door and wants to help us clean up the mess of our hearts, but at the same time He doesn’t force Himself into our dirty rooms. When we intentionally give Him access to our hearts, He will begin to bring things to the surface and start to clean house. It’s very humbling and can even be painful, but who wants to live with brokenness for their entire lives? So we have a choice. We can continue to ignore the filth in our hearts, or we can choose to give God full access to begin making us new.

Have you given God full access and permission to do work through your brokenness?

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Why I’m So Messed Up!

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By Nate Champneys

I can’t remember a time in my life where I wasn’t in church. I remember being three years old and being in the toddler nursery. I remember my Sunday school teacher, “Teacher Lynn,” a sweet retired woman who taught my preschool Sunday school class. I had a really great family life. Loving Christian parents, a family that loved me, great friends, great school, great church. Pretty much cookie cutter in almost every way. I couldn’t ask for a better childhood. And yet, I am piece of work. I really am as broken and messed up as they come. I used to think, “I may not be perfect, because nobody really is, but I’ve got it mostly together.” I would look at other people who had different problems than me and think, “Wow, they need counseling.” I would never come out and say, “I am better than you,” but subconsciously that is exactly what I believed.

A few months ago I started meeting with a retired friend for mentoring, and God has really been using him in my life to show me just how broken and messed up I really am. Honestly, it’s shocking. How can I have been so blind for so long to the depths of my own depravity? And how can I have judged so many people for all their problems? I’ve got anger issues, daddy issues, pride, guilt, shame, and immaturity, just to name a few. There are times in my life when I behave a certain way and I just don’t understand why. I am just so broken.

As human beings our depravity is kind of like the Pacific Ocean. Every one of us is really messed up. This is why the Bible says, “Our righteousness’s are like filthy rags.” Anything good we bring to the table is truly laughable when compared to the ocean of our sin. Many of us will blame our childhood or our parents for our brokenness. The reality is our parents were broken, and their parents were broken, and right now I am passing on my brokenness to my children, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. Everything is broken. Don’t get me wrong, God is in the middle of all this, slowly but steadily bringing healing. But it’s kind of like using a teaspoon to empty the Pacific Ocean. It’s ludicrous to think that this side of eternity we will ever come close to emptying the ocean of our depravity. But that has never been the point. I used to think that when I reached my 80s that I would be almost perfect. But the more I look around, the more I realize I have never found a human being who is almost perfect. This is a fantasy. Everyone, no matter the age, is still broken. Again, perfection is really not the point. It’s never been the point.

So what is the point then? The Scriptures say that, “While we were YET sinners, Christ died for us.” God did everything He did for you (including dying for you), not to make you a better person, but so that He could be with you. Granted, by being with Him, we can’t help but start to become more like He is. His love is so deep for you that He says, “I will love you in the midst of your ocean of sin. As you spend time with Me, I will heal you teaspoon by teaspoon, and some day, when this life is over, I will make you completely new.”

So when I condemn other people for their brokenness, I am basically saying, “I am better than you because God has removed 2,457 teaspoons out of my ocean of depravity and He has only taken 2,456 out of yours.” Ridiculous, right? God is calling us to a different way of thinking. He is calling us to be broken and messed up together. To be okay with being works in progress. Not to condemn each other, but to “spur each other on to love and good deeds.”

Hebrews 10:21-24

“And since we have a great High Priest who rules over God’s house, let us go right into the presence of God with sincere hearts fully trusting Him. For our guilty consciences have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water. Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep His promise. Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works.”

 

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God Still Speaks … Through Laminate Flooring

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By Nate Champneys

“Dad, I want to bring in the flooring,” my 5-year-old son Kaelen asked me for the tenth time today. My wife and I are living in a fixer-upper duplex we bought a few months ago. I bought some flooring a couple days ago for my kitchen, and it’s still sitting in my minivan. I have not had the time or the drive to move it inside. My son, it seems, has both of these. This time I finally give in and we head outside and begin unloading the 20+ boxes in the van. I open the door and grab three boxes. The boxes are about four feet long and weigh about fifteen pounds each. My son walks up and grabs a single box and muscles it out of the van with all his might. He nearly falls over as he struggles to carry the awkward package by himself. I walk my three boxes into the house and return to see that my son has only made it a few feet farther and is now dragging his box.

I am so tempted to let him continue to struggle while I finish quickly unloading the van, but I pause. My son has been so excited to unload this flooring; I can’t possibly rob him of that. So, almost annoyed, I ask him, “Kaelen, do you want to get one side while Daddy gets the other side?” He grins from ear to ear and says one word: “Yeah.” So, box by box, we carry the flooring inside the house, him on one end and me on the other. He is so happy to be doing this with me, but I can’t help but think of how I could complete this whole task myself in one-tenth the time it is taking us to complete it together.

All of a sudden, a huge “ah-ha” moment hits me like a ton of bricks (or laminate!). A few weeks earlier I had been thinking about how strange it is that God uses people like me to accomplish His purposes. It really isn’t very efficient. Really, when you look at the Church in general, we are not very efficient. The disciples were given one command when Jesus left them: Go, and make disciples. It has occurred to me that the church really is not efficient at this task. While I had been thinking about this I had a conversation with God. “God, why do you do it this way? It sure seems like you could do a much better job without using broken humanity.”

So, as I am moving this flooring with my son, God turns on the lights of understanding. I get the answer to my question: Because He is not only about the end result. Don’t get me wrong, He ALWAYS accomplishes His end goal, but, at the same time, he has purposes wrapped up inside the process itself. Yes, I could finish the task of unloading the flooring ten times faster if I just excluded my son. But, at the same time, I would not be allowing my son the joy of helping. I really don’t need my son’s help; but that’s not the point. God does not need us to accomplish his purposes. He simply doesn’t. He could accomplish the task one bazillion times faster and better all by Himself. He is God, and we are not. But that is not the point. It really is His joy to include us in HIS work and, in the process, our sanctification is also part of that work accomplished.

“For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” (Ephesians 2:10, ESV)

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Contrasted Joy

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By Nate Champneys

As I reflect back on the Advent season, some thoughts come to mind. Advent is all about reliving the anticipation for the coming Messiah, right? But when you look at the language of the Old Testament, it wasn’t this excited, happy, “Santa Claus is coming to town,” “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,” kind of anticipation. It was a desperate longing. A crying out to God in the midst of pain, confusion, and almost even anger. It is interesting how Advent strikingly resembles a lament. If we go through Advent without reliving the lamenting of the people of Israel, I think we miss out on something.

Contrast is a huge part of our lives and really important. In an autumn landscape, if all the trees were exactly the same color, it just would not be nearly as beautiful as the contrast of all the colors. Think of some of your most favorite foods. In food, one flavor, take salty for example, is okay, but it’s multiple flavors together that make food tasty. Salt is fine, but when you put buttery, sweet, and salty together, it makes something amazing—salted caramel chocolates. Mmmmm. Without the salt, though, it’s just an ordinary caramel. In the same way, when we go through Advent, if we miss the lamenting, longing part, the joyful part is just not as good.

Contrast. It gives everything context. How do we really understand joy without the contrast of suffering? The apostle Paul said, “I am overflowing with joy in all our affliction” (2 Corinthians 7:4). Kay Warren defines joy as “the settled assurance that God is in control of all the details of my life, the quiet confidence that ultimately everything is going to be alright, and the determined choice to praise God in every situation.” It’s not that suffering is necessary for us to have joy, but how much more can we take joy in something when we contrast it with suffering. Psalm 43:4 says, “There I will go to the altar of God, to God—the source of all my joy. I will praise you with my harp, O God, my God!” Psalm 86:8 says “Among the gods there is none like You, O Lord; Nor are there any works like Your works.” There is contrast again. There is no one like our God. That fact contrasted with everything else makes our God the source of true joy. Joy is really the natural response to the understanding that, in all things, God is god.

So as we finish the Advent season, our final resting place is joy. We have joy because our God is like no other God. Our God, since the dawn of sin, promised to make things right again. Our God kept His promise. And our God will also keep his promise to come again. Because of all these things, we can have joy.

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Molar or Pinkie Toe?

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By Nate Champneys

I was driving down the street the other day following another car, and I watched the driver roll down their window and throw a bag of fast food trash out in the street. It really bothered me. But I had to ask the question, “Why does this bother me the way it does?” The reality is that this person’s littering doesn’t really affect me when it comes to my day-to-day life. Technically, it’s probably none of my business. But the thought that ran through my head was, “Why would you want to deface your own street?” To me, the problem goes much deeper than some litter on the ground. When I see graffiti along the side of the road, I view it as a much deeper problem than an ugly (or sometimes beautiful) mark on a fence or building. Somewhere along the way, many of us stopped thinking of America as our country and started thinking of it as “someone else’s” country, and it has created many problems. Where there is no ownership in something, there is no reason for a person to take pride in that thing, and therefore there is no reason to care for that thing. It is a sad reality.

The problem is that this very same attitude has also crept into the church. As a pastor, I have a front-row seat to observe this phenomenon. I see it when something is broken or run-down and someone asks, “When is somebody going to fix that ______?” Or somebody says, “We need to buy a new ______. This one is really run-down.” Or, “The chairs in the sanctuary are so dirty, someone really ought to clean them.” But many times we get sucked into this way of thinking. If your bedroom is a mess, you never make the comment, “Somebody needs to clean this up.” You understand that it’s your bedroom and so it’s your problem. Now don’t get me wrong, there are so many people who step up without being asked and take ownership. But somewhere along the way, many people have started to view the church as, “The church I attend,” instead of viewing it as, “My church home.”

The reality is that no one person owns our building. No one person is in charge. We are a “congregation-run church.” If you are a member, you are a part owner. The grounds outside: it’s your lawn. The kitchen sink inside: it’s your sink. But it goes further. The Wednesday night Awana program: it’s your program. The women’s Bible study: it’s your study. The community group you attend: it’s not the community group you attend, it’s your community group. Elim is your church. If it’s not yours, whose is it? Is it Pastor Martin’s? Mine? Brian’s? Ultimately, it is Jesus’ church, but He has created us in Him to “be the church.” We all may have different roles in the body, but we are still created to function within the body.

Really, our job as pastors is to empower people to serve Christ and His body, however God designed them to do it. A few weeks back, Bryan Anderson came to me and said, “Nate, would you mind if I took a look at the drinking fountain?” It had been broken all summer because of a leak. I said, “Would I mind?! Are you kidding me!? Absolutely!” It brings me so much joy to see people take ownership of this family that we call Elim and serve her. Obviously not everyone can fix a drinking fountain, but Bryan was offering himself to Christ in the way Jesus designed him to function.

My question to you is, what is your function? Every body part has a reason for existing, a purpose that only it can fulfill. Trust me, Jesus did not make any of us to be useless. I may be a left molar, and you may be a right pinkie. But in any case, we all have a function and exist as part of a whole. Paul tells us in Romans 12, “so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.” What a beautiful picture.

My hope in writing this is for it to be not a guilt trip for you, but permission to function as Jesus created you to be. For you to unashamedly, passionately serve Elim (and the global Church beyond) in the way Jesus created you to serve. To be the best lung, or kidney, or pinkie toe (or whatever role he created you for) in the body of Christ that you can be!

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship … For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. Romans 12:1, 4-6

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