Chip Ingram - Living on the Edge

Over the last several months or so, I have really embraced the concept of podcasts. I love downloading great spoken word MP3's onto my iPod and listening to them during otherwise wasted time commuting to work, mowing the grass, and sometimes even while washing the car. It's like an audio book but a shorter, more focused version which can be digested in the time we have available.

I want to recommend several of the best Christian podcasts that I've found in hopes that you too will find these as a way to "renew your mind" (see Romans 12:2 ).

My first podcast recommendation is the "Living on the Edge" podcast by Chip Ingram. I just find that the way Chip Ingram talks about practical application of the Bible in our everyday lives very compelling. His podcast has really helped me grow spiritually. It comes out pretty much every day and each episode lasts about 25 minutes, perfect for commuting.

I was listening this morning as he was going thru a series on the Ten Commandments. His discussion about the commandment about having "no other gods before me" really challenged me about the things in my own life that have the potential to become idols. I have what I hope is a healthy ambition at work. But am I putting too high of a priority on recognition at work? Would my life fall apart if certain people were taken away from me? Would I be willing to give up the nice house, proximity to relatives, or my 401K balance for God if it were really required of me to serve God's purposes? In other words, is God really first in my life?

Listen to Chip now with iTunes or listen online.

Make a Loan and Change a Life - Part 2

If you are a regular reader, you may remember a couple of previous posts Make a Loan and Change a Life and My Career as a Financier to the Developing World in which I talked about making "micro credit" loans as way of helping people in the developing world help themselves. I am happy to report that I just received an email from Kiva.org telling me that Ariola Sánchez in Ecuador has paid her loan in full. Ten of us who signed up at Kiva.org loaned $250 ($25 each) to Ariola to "buy Bibles, clothing and other miscellaneous products to sell" in her neigborhood.

Real Men Friends

I had lunch today with three other Christian brothers. I found it a great source of encouragement to be with other men I know share my faith and also want to find God's will for their lives. It was uplifting to know that I was not alone.

I encourage each of you to find a few same-sex friends with whom you can be real about your struggles and successes.

See also these posts on accountability.

Confessions of an Amateur Believer

Have you ever wondered if being a Christian meant you had to stop using your God-given brain and blindly follow something you didn’t understand without questioning? Have you come to consider thoughtful self examination of your beliefs something to be avoided? Think it is something you shouldn’t want to do? Is it somehow a sin to have doubts about matters of faith? Have I got a book recommendation for you! Check out Confessions of an Amateur Believer by Patty Kirk and see that you're not alone.

Patty Kirk gives us some revealing insight into her life from which we can all benefit. She grew up in the faith and had that beautiful child-like complete trust that there is indeed a God and that God is good. Then because of family problems and some traumatic experiences she came to leave the faith and doubt the existence of God. After years of persuing more and more education and life overseas, she came home and found her faith again. Even those of us who never left the faith of our childhood can still glean insight into the bumps in the road which may have driven our friends, family, or co-workers away from belief in God.

The book is basically a collection of essays about her doubts and how that God dealt with her doubts through the people around her and her experiences in life. Most of the time, a Bible verse (maybe even one she’d read many times before) struck a nerve. The Holy Spirit spoke to her and and put a bright spotlight on a particular passage and related it to some event or worry or hurt.

In one chapter entitled “On Barns” she tells of how the she and her husband have six barns on their farm in Oklahoma but they don’t really farm much any more. When beef prices fell in the 90’s he became a CPA and she became an English teacher. They were “barn rich and money poor.” While reading the parable in Luke 12 about the prosperous farmer who contemplates tearing down his barns to build bigger ones so he can store up enough to stop working and life the easy life, she took hard the fact that God chose that time to say “You fool! This very night you will die!” He hadn’t actually torn a barn down yet. He was making plans for his own future to be self sufficient without needing God anymore.

“I got to thinking about the fact that this rich guy hadn’t even carried out his plans yet when God told him he was about to die that very night. He was just thinking about it. And it occurred to me, suddenly, that this parable was not about storing wealth but about making plans and to-do lists, about living in the future tense instead of now.....

My barns, I got to thinking, are unpublished books, further academic degrees, things to write in future resumes or please for salary increases, courses yet to come, a clean house, a pretty yard, a place to rest. And my sin is not these things, many of which I already enjoy, but thinking about them, my secret yearning

for more job security and professional acclaim and some sort of future leisure in which to garden, read novels, and throw big dinner parties.

I have thought the rich guy’s thoughts....I work long hours, pour my energy and enthusiasm into my students and writing, and then snap at my husband and children when I get home and dream about a future in which this isn’t so.

Today I wish to consider the barns I am tearing down; my marriage, my two children, my faith in God to take care of my wants and desires. Jesus began his parable with a strange statement. He says: “The ground of certain rich man produced a good crop.” The story is about the certain rich man, his schemes and impending death, but the subject of the opening sentence is not the man but the ground – the land, the earth, the very dirt of which the man himself was made.....

Planning to build bigger barns is cherishing the future of our own creation rather than the good barns full of what we’ve already been given.”

She has this to say about the story in which Jesus is asleep in the back of the boat when a horrible storm comes up and the Disciples are terrified. They wake Jesus up as if to say “Why are you doing nothing to help us? We’re all going to drown!”

“Where is your faith?” He asked them, and suddenly I realized that shrieking to Jesus to help me and having faith that He would help take care of me were not the same thing. Faith, that elusive gift that I could not earn, did nevertheless require doing something, something very specific. I had to calm myself with the certainty that I was loved and would be taken care of. ‘Like a weaned child with its mother,’ I had to calm myself enough to let my Master sleep.

“Calm down,” I used to tell my little daughters when they were unreasonably upset or over tired. I reminded them that I was in charge but that I knew they had the power to calm themselves. I made them sit in my lap and take deep breaths. I stroked their hair. After a while, their tight little rebellious bodies would soften and lean into me.

Think of it! Jesus slept in that little boat while the dangerous storm raged. Giving my problems to Jesus is to let him sleep – and to sleep myself.

The Psalmist knew this: it is in vain that we ‘rise early and stay up late,’ he tells us in Psalms 127, “toiling for food to eat” – for the Lord “grants sleep to those he loves.”

There is a similarly wonderful chapter on that perpetual brunt of all kinds of jokes – the mother-in-law. Only this hits hard deep inside because it is based on scripture. Patty Kirk describes how she felt a sense of resentment against her mother-in-law despite all the free baby sitting, meals, and cars she let them buy from her at below market prices. She resented her because she wanted a more independent life for her and her husband and her mother-in-law’s constant “help” was a constant reminder of how interconnected they were.

“Eating a Mamaw’s meant surrendering one of my most precious retreats from the difficulties of life, my escape and solitude, my self-made and hard won identity as the provider of food for my family.”

Then she read the story of Naomi and Ruth with fresh eyes. Ruth’s words to Naomi:

Wherever you go, I shall go.
Wherever you live, I shall live.
Your people will be my people,
and your God will be my God, too.

Today regarding her mother-in-law:

“Hers is the fiber from which whole cloth is made, an inspiration for any would-be Ruth or striving Christian, a model of selfless love of herself, others, and life itself. As I get older and more sure of the choices Ihave made, for better or worse, I begin to see how one might come to cling to such a pillar in time of need. I already cling to her, in fact. More and more, when time is short and stressful, I seek her ease, her meals, her love for my children and attention to their demands.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I received a free review copy of this book in the hopes that I would say something nice about the book. My first reaction was selfish I admit. I was glad that a real book marketing professional thought my humble blog would make good publicity for the book and that some of you might take my recommendation and pick up your own copy.

In hindsight, I must say that I was the one blessed in this process and I’m sure glad that I was given this opportunity because I’m not one to go to bookstores and pickup books from authors I’d never heard of before. But I have my own aspirations of writing a Christian book some day and I hope I can write something that will touch your soul down deep inside like this one touched me – and I exercised my God-given brain, too! I encourage you to go pick up your own copy of Confessions of an Amateur Believer by Patty Kirk.

Words of Encouragement

God placed a new person in my path recently to encourage me and bless me. A good Sunday School friend of mine invited a young pastor named Brian (the pastor of another church nearby) I had never met to say a few words at my Sunday School class party. From my Sunday School friend I learned that this young man once had a promising career in business but walked away from it all when he felt God's call into the ministry.

When Brian got up to speak, he read some of his own inspirational Christian writing. My antenna started twitching because I realized "here is another person right here in my neighbor hood who takes his Christian writing seriously!" After Brian spoke, I was able to find out that he was once a management consultant in the healthcare industry. Now I am a consultant myself as well (I help corporations design their business software and websites) so we even had that in common.

I also learned that Brian had been writing the really wonderful Christian poetry and weekly email newsletters to his congregation and friends and had been doing this for a while. He told me he probably had 140 or more Microsoft Word documents of his own inspirational writing that he had been distributing by email. I told him he should start posting some of his writing in a blog for the whole world to see (and find via Google and other search engines)!

I encourage all my readers to visit Brian Johnson's new Blog Words of Encouragement. I just read his most recent post "$2 worth of gas" in which he tells a story of rushing off to do ministry at a prison without any cash or his debit card and desperately running out of gas. He stopped at the first gas station he came to after his visit to the prison and found they did not take checks. When he tried to buy $1.14 worth of gas he scrounged out of his ashtray, the lady behind the cash register offerred to let him have $5 if he'd pay her back. His pride kept him from accepting her generosity (she had no way to know if she'd ever see him again) but later he began to wonder if he should have accepted her offer. Had he selfishly stolen her opportunity to do a good deed? Was refusing her gift like refusing God's grace in some way. Its a great story. You won't be disappointed.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

My Career as a Financier to the Developing World

If you happened to read my previous post Make a Loan and Change a Life you learned that I made a small loan to an entrepreneur in Ecuador that sold Bibles and other retail items. I am happy to report that Ariola has made her first payment of $42 out of $250 or 16.8%. Since I was one of ten different lenders lending $25, my portion of her repayment was $4.20. Here's more about Ariola and her business.

Location: Guayaquil, Ecuador

Activity: Retail

Loan Amount: $250.00

Loan Use: Buy bibles, clothing and other miscellaneous products to sell

Loan Repayment Term Range: 6-10 months

Start Date: Nov 25, 2006

Amount Repaid: $42

Partner Rep: Luis Crespo, Esther Vasquez

Partner: MIFEX

Ariola is a saleswoman in her neighborhood. Primarily she sells bibles to the people from her church and her community. She started off with $50 of investment capital and has slowly expanded her businesses. She also sells clothing and other products targeted towards women. In order to make her products affordable to her clients she takes half of the payment at the time of purchase and charges the rest on a weekly or bi-weekly rate. She is eager to receive a loan in order to buy more products for her clients like more bibles, CDs and clothing. She hopes that she can receive the loan before the busy Christmas season begins. This business is a complementary source of income in her household of 6 children. Her husband works as a bricklayer but he does not make enough money to provide for his family on his own.

Go visit Kiva.org if you want to help a developing world entrepreneur.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

Facing Our Fears

If you have not yet ventured out to the movie theater to see the movie "Facing the Giants" then let me give the movie my personal recommendation. (Click here for a 2 minute video clip.) There are many stories woven together in a powerful way.

• The story of a football coach who feels like a failure in his career which could apply to anyone struggling with how they make a living.
• The parents of the football players who plot to have the coach fired even thought he is a "fine man" because they value winning more.
  
• The young wife who desperately wants to have children but hasn't after four years of trying
• The faithful Christian who has been "prayer walking" along the halls of a high school for years asking God to send revival to the students of the school.
• The teenage boy who routinely disrepects his father.
• The teenage boy who has always been physically too small and too weak.
  
• The father in a wheelchair trying to raise a teenage son into a man by himself
  

I'd like to point out to other things which struck me.

• This film was basically produced on faith by a single church that wanted to impact the world at large, Sherwood Baptist in the small town of Albany, Georgia. This is an amazing example of how God can use regular people who want to let God use them in a mighty way for His purposes.
  
• My favorite scene is when the current coach of the University of Georgia, Mark Richt, visits the main character in the football team locker room and tells him how many times the Bible says to "have no fear" right before the state championship game. I know I've often been too timid, too hesitant, and in general fallen victim to fear. I wonder how many blessings I've missed out on in life because I've not taken step one on faith when God prompted me to. By the way, click here to read Mark Richt's testimony
  

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

Make a Loan and Change a Life

A few weeks ago I was reading my local newspaper, The Tennessean, and saw an article about the most recent Nobel Prize in Economics. I learned that Muhammad Yunus, who got his Ph.D . from Vanderbilt University here in Nashville in 1971 received the Nobel Prize for his work combating poverty through the use of "microcredit" or "microloans".

Yunus’ concept of microcredit – small loans to poor villagers in Bangladesh to help them buy livestock or fund an enterprise, has grown from $27 he loaned out of his own pocket into the Grameen Bank, which has loaned more than $5.7 billion to 6.61 million borrowers. Despite lack of collateral or signed loan documents, 99 percent of the loans have been paid back. The Grameen Bank provides services in more than 71,000 villages in Bangladesh through 2,226 branches.

Just a few days ago I was channel surfing and stumbled upon a Frontline story Uganda: A Little Goes a Long Way which showed how an organization called Kiva was using the internet to connect people like me with deserving entrepreneurs in far away places. The response to this TV show was overwhelming as their website was swamped and inaccessible for several days. The website finally came back up and I was able to make my first "microloan" Saturday night. I used my credit card to loan $25 to Ariola Sánchez, a retailer in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Kiva pooled my $25 along with loans from 9 others to fully funded her request for a $250 business loan to purchase an inventory for resale.

Kiva is not a religious organization but I could tell that many of the entrepreneurs who benefit from the loans are Christian. One of the items Ariola sells, for examples, is Bibles. I encourage my readers to visit the Kiva website with their credit card handy.

What Do You Do that Makes God Smile ?

In the film Chariots of Fire, Olympic runner Eric Liddel says, "I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast, and when I run, I feel God's pleasure." Later he says, "To give up running would be to hold Him in contempt."

Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth am I Here For?

I believe Eric had been studying to be a missionary and a family member had been trying to get him to give up his Olympic aspirations.

This made me think "What do I do that makes God smile? What is my purpose at this time in my life... that if I was doing exactly that... would make God smile?

Is it putting tid bits like this on my blog when my wife thinks I should be crossing items off the long "to do" list she has for me? Certainly, God expects more from me over my lifetime than a few paragraphs on my little blog. But, for this very moment, I think it makes God smile. I hope so anyway.

Another quote from The Purpose Driven Life: "Every human activity, except sin, can be done for God's pleasure if you do it with an attitude of praise. You can wash dishes, repair a machine, sell a product, write a computer program, grow a crop, and raise a family for the glory of God."

God, I pray that You will reveal to me exactly where I need to be to be in the center of Your will for me right now. Show me what to do to make You smile. In Jesus' name... Amen