That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

‭‭2 Corinthians‬ ‭12‬:‭10‬ ‭NIV‬‬

When others engage against you, when they find your words or actions worthy of arguments or put downs, or when they’re willing to spend their own precious time to subdue you by silencing you, it often means you’ve hit a nerve.

Likewise, if you’ve ever had your conscience suddenly pricked, challenged by the Holy Spirit within you, it’s much the same thing. Our flesh tries to silence the conviction because it’s hit a nerve.

Though through different circumstances, the stricken nerve is determined by whose interests you serve.

The spirit of God alerts us to our weaknesses and vulnerabilities and challenges us to make a defining change or to recalibrate the trajectory we are on.

In either case, striking a nerve is painful.

What you do with that pain is what matters.

Attend to it. Introspect. Accept the challenge it presents and be willing to make a change for the better when your sin or weakness is made plain, evident, and inarguable.

When we are weakest, He is strongest.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”

‭‭2 Corinthians‬ ‭4‬:‭16‬ ‭NIV‬‬

While aging may arrive at our table with sides of illness, fragility, and lots and lots of wrinkles, being up in years serves up vast portions of maturity and wisdom.

Inward growth becomes our senior superpower.

As an elder, I now have greater confidence and clarity of the variety I had always sought when I was a younger man.

Renewal of mind, position and purpose is the commodity we now trade for beauty, agility, and all the passing attributes of youth we once cherished.

When I’m gone, I’ll both leave as a renewed man, and leave my renewal attributes for the world to remember me by.

Not a bad trade for an end game if you ask me.

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

‭‭2 Corinthians‬ ‭4‬:‭18‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere.

‭‭2 Corinthians‬ ‭2‬:‭14‬ ‭NIV‬‬

When I worked retail, someone in my vicinity was wearing the most attractive fragrance I’d never smelled before.

I sniffed him out only so I could ask the brand name. I was entranced by the aroma and as it turns out, I wasn’t alone.

He’d already exited into the mall when I stopped him unabashedly to ask. He named the fragrance for me and laughed that I’d been the third person who’d asked him just that day.

For the life of me I don’t recall the brand some 40 years later but it was unique enough to follow and embolden my inquiry of a complete stranger.

I’d have bought the scent from his coat pocket at any price if he’d had a bottle on him at that moment.

Today, that encounter still serves as a metaphor of how I hope my life as a follower of Christ might attract those who are seeking what I have already found.

[If there’s one thing addicts do well, it’s telling stories. But after 13 years clean, they’re usually not lies since the onset of sobriety.]

Someone asked me recently how I did it. How I got off drugs, meth of all things. Undoubtedly tonight at my meeting I’ll be asked once again as is the tradition for anyone getting another annual chip. My baker’s dozen.

I’ve given a lot of thought to the question. Less to the mechanics of my leap into sobriety, but more about which of my words might just trigger another addict in attendance to turn on that light upstairs, illuminating them to the possibility that they, too, despite their past, deserve a future.

You see, it’s not so much the quitting of drugs that’s important. Equally necessary is the installation of hope and belief that you are worth far more in this world than the lonely company of any chemical or its cohorts. It’s about having been utterly blinded by the stupor of a drug and its false promise of contentment that blocks out hope or vision that there’s really anything more to life.

To that end, we are all addicts. We all have something we’ve allowed to remain which blocks our hope and blurs our vision. Something to which we reluctantly remain bound.

“Clean and sober.” It’s almost cliché these days.

The distinction between the two, however, is perhaps the most important thing I learned in my years of recovery so far. I got clean once, but I get more sober with each passing day.

The truly recovered are not recovered at all. They are recovering. And the truly recovering ones can instinctively tell the difference.

A recovering person hasn’t simply stopped using, they have started living. It’s evident that a clarity of mind, purpose and a place for God was birthed at some moment, and rarely is that moment a single epiphany, but the convergence of many lifelong epiphanies which, strung together, create the continuity of recovering.

It’s the high I get from the ongoing little epiphanies of life these days. They continue to escort me down a much more beautiful path. And when you find yourself in a much better place, hope is much easier to find. In fact, it seems to find you.

And isn’t that really the definition of God?

So for the addicts in all of us, I say to you, we are here in this world for one reason only: Be that hope for someone today. Be clean. Be sober. And most of all, live like you deserve to.

That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

cLifeMeansSoMuch.com

We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭15‬:‭51‬-‭52‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Sadly, for many it will be too late.

But we’re hearing more and more from high profile athletes, celebrities and others about their conversion to a faith in Christ lately.

Their decisions compel them to make public what began as a private search for something true and of eternal consequence.

When you make such discovery, it’s hard not to tell the world about it.

Famous people are finding their fame unfulfilling and replacing their own achievements with the lasting achievement of Christ’s death and resurrection and a promise of the same for those who will believe.

The trumpets will sound for all of us.

Be one of the truly famous who can and will answer that call.

Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭15‬:‭58‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.

‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭9‬:‭25‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Recently in Paris, we saw podiums and their medalists and heard some of their backstories that brought them to that moment in time.

Years of grueling training and many wins and losses on the way were part of the journey that earned them medallions of metal alloys now containing just 2% of what their names promised.

Still, the wins are symbolic of achievements that will all too soon be either forgotten or surpassed by someone else.

The reward for all their efforts is a fleeting moment of triumph. It doesn’t last forever.

The only win that endures forever is the one resulting from daily commitment to following Christ and our reward is an afterlife not of bronze or silver but an eternity on entire streets of 100% pure gold.

Train for the race that wins the prize which holds its value and lasts forever.

You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons.

‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭10‬:‭21‬ ‭NIV‬‬

I’m always bothered when, for instance, someone from church cites their horoscope for the day to explain themselves or their circumstances.

A plea of ignorance won’t be an acceptable excuse on judgement day.

But divided allegiances are on display everywhere, and sometimes even in my own life.

The difference lies in having received the Holy Spirit that keeps such things in check within our consciences to foster learning and spiritual growth along our pathway to salvation.

That’s His job.

Earnestly pray for wisdom and discernment, especially in these times when deception is the cultural name of the game to lead us down paths toward destruction.