As The Deer...

Ps 42

I read this this morning and was blessed and encouraged to place all my hope in God. Trying times are always ahead and when I meet them there are so many paths that would lead me away from my trust in Christ just as there were for the psalmist who wrote this so many centuries ago. Then it hit me, God knew that there would be a day when His children would need this Word so He inspired men to place it in a group of writings or "books" and call it the Holy Bible. But what really hit me was that this is someones memoir. The writer went through this and recorded it as God gave him the inspiration to do so. Of course I have always known this but this morning I was feeling like I was the only one who ever went through it. I was feeling sorry for myself. Yes, I was encouraged, yes, I was strengthened and just as it was for David it was up to me to get myself out of this funk, nobody was going to do it for me. So I sought out God. Isn't it nice to know that Holy Spirit is there to comfort and strengthen us and isn't it even more awesome that our Heavenly Father is there to chastise us when we begin to act like spoiled children and throw our little pity parties? My day is too full to allow me to get in the way of God being glorified. He truly is The Lifter Of My Head.

God Bless and lets look up today, you cant see your future if your looking at the ground.

Part 5 of A Winning Hand

When I was 15 I sat next to my brother in a church pew at Sunnyslope Christian Center in Hollister, CA as the preacher asked if there was anyone in the audience who wanted to give their life to Christ. My brother who had just graduated from SF Teen Challenge and had been trying to get me in church since he got out leaned over to me and said “Come on Cy, God wants to forgive you of your sins and have a relationship with you.” My response to him was, “I don’t need God or forgiveness, I never hurt anyone and I have everything I need already.” Of course I doubted everything I just told him. I just wasn’t sure of anything except this, I knew everything would change and I didn’t want it to.

On that day God offered me the winning hand and I refused to place my bet. I knew that if I was to take God up on His promise that I would lose all that I had, even though I believed that what I had was not enough to give me the things I wanted in life. But I always had so little that I was unwilling to part with the little I did have. What I didn’t know was that soon the little I had would lead me down a path that would eventually leave me with nothing at all.

I found myself living and sleeping on a pile of discarded cushions behind a dumpster, eating what stores throw away, pushing around a shopping cart as I went about my days digging in the trash for recyclables and begging for drug money on street or in front of the local video store. I had not only lost everything material in life but I lost my family and most importantly my opportunity to raise my only son. It was the loss of him that kept me stuck in depression and misery for over 7 years.

What I didn’t know is that God is the Master of taking little things and filling them with His power to do big things.

Part 4 of A Winning Hand

Christ's example of what our aim is and how we can use service to rise above "placement in life":

Philippians 2:5-8 NKJV

⁵ In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: ⁶ Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; ⁷ rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. ⁸ And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!

I was converted to Christianity when I was 25 but was not fully committed until I was 39. I had spent my youth chasing the American Dream and using my placement in life as an excuse for failure and a reason to fail. Consequently I ended up never really achieving any real success. There were times when I felt like true success was just right around the corner but I always believed that it was reserved for someone else and not “a guy like me”. That was my failing, I believed in the lie planted in me long before when I was a young boy, I had to be just like everyone else around me. Trouble is all my friends and family were drug users, drinkers and criminals. This was my lot in life. Or so I believed.

When God called me into the ministry I was just about to be 40 and I was in a drug rehab facility. San Francisco Teen Challenge was a place where I could learn to connect with God and discover that there is so much more to life than obtaining the American Dream. In fact that dream is not and never was what God had called me to. His calling is so much more than what a nation can offer, it takes you beyond your own means, further than yourself and higher than any of your own expectations. I see now that there is nothing I cannot accomplish as long as I continue to trust in Him and allow Him to lead.