Heaven’s Opening Ceremonies

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(posted July 2012 during the London Summer Olympics)

This is really foolish and I’m going to pay for it tomorrow.

It’s 2 AM Indonesia time and I really should be sleeping before a big day tomorrow.  But I can’t help myself.  In exactly one more hour the 2012 Summer Olympics will officially begin at Olympic Stadium in London.   I’m going to stay awake and watch them, no matter the price to my weary body in the morning.  This is something that only comes around every four years, and I ain’t going to miss it.
 
The Opening Ceremonies are probably my favorite part.  They are saying that 60,000 people will be in attendance, iicluding Queen Elizabeth II who will officially open the games.  More than 80 heads of states will be there too.  The whole world will be watching.
 
I love watching the athletes stream into the stadium, carrying their flags to represent their beloved nations while the gigantic London crowd greets them.  I like to imagine the hundreds of thousands people gathered around their TV sets in the athletes’ home countries to cheer them on too.
 
I love how the out-of-this-world ceremony honors the athletes.  This year’s is going to be one-of-a-kind.  Quoting from the LA Times: “The opening ceremony itself is hotly anticipated. Directed by Britain’s Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire”), the extravaganza is titled “Isles of Wonder” and was inspired by William Shakespeare’s play, “The Tempest.” The ceremony will culminate in a performance by Paul McCartney.”
 
Wow, what a show!
 
There is nothing else like the Olympic Opening Ceremonies.  Can you think of anything else that brings our planet together like it?  I can’t either, but I can think of something in the future that will make the Olympic Oscar award winning directed multi-million extravaganza seem like a poorly-acted high school drama in a school district that was facing budget cuts and couldn’t afford any sets or costumes.
 
Heaven.
 
That’s right, heaven.
 
I know, I know, the image that immediately conjures up in our minds is a nice, fluffy place where angels have nothing better to do than strum harps.  If we were honest, it may seem a little bit boring.  John Eldredge in his brilliant book “Journey of Desire” writes about how believers sort of picture heaven as the church service that never ends: “Nearly every Christian I have spoken with has some idea that eternity is an unending worship service… We have settled on am image of the never-ending sing-along in the sky, one great hymn after another, forever and ever, amen.  And our heart sinks.  Forever and ever?  That’s it? That’s the good news?”
 
Scratch that idea of a white, boring place.  It’s going to be wild and colorful.  How do I know this?  “The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it…. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.” – Revelation 21:24-25
 
Think of it!  The Creator who imagined the Great Barrier Reef and the Himalayan Mountains and the Grand Canyon and the Amazon Rain Forest is the decorator.  Breathtaking scenery.  The kings of the earth will bring their colorful multi-national splendor into it.  Think of parades honoring Jesus. Every tribe, tongue and nation. Festive flags, traditional dances, lively symphonies and heartfelt songs, a multi-national feast of the senses.  I personally can’t wait to see the delegations from Indonesia come to the party.
 
That’s what heaven is going to be like guys!  Another picture we get is the wedding ceremony of the ages, culminating at the end of time: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth has passed away, and there was no longer any sea.  I saw the Holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband.” – Revelation 21:1-2
 
What a wedding party that is going to be!  Prince William and his new wife Catherine would be ashamed to show their wedding pictures there.
 
Why does the opening ceremony of the Olympics capture our hearts and make us dab the corners of our eyes with tissues every four years?  Because it’s our destiny:
 
“It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling.  He stamped his right fore-foot on the ground and neighed, and then cried, “I have come home at last.  This is my real country.  I belong here.  This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.  The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that sometimes it looked a little like this.” – C.S. Lewis in The Last Battle
 
Okay, gotta run.  It’s 3 AM and I’m not going to miss this…
 
Related Post: Gold Medal Motivation
 

How’s Your Love Life?

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How's Your Love Life?

Do you experience intimacy with your Creator? Can you look back over your life and see his footprints next to yours? Or do you just know about God through the stories about him? This message could very well change your life.

Click below to listen to this audio podcast, or search for “Faith Activators” in the iTunes store to subscribe.

 
 

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Stepping Over the Edge

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Can you trust God with your life?  How did God create you to thrive?  In this audio podcast, Paul Richardson gives a stirring talk challenging his listeners to overcome two core Western values. Time to send shock waves through your theology…

Click below to listen to this talk, or subscribe to this free podcast by searching for "Faith Activators" in the iTunes store.

Stepping Over the Edge

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

i am risen

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A Prayer for Easter

 

Can you see me?

I’m helpless here. A clatter of dry bones lying on this sofa. Breathing but dead. Don’t bother to knock. I ain’t getting up any time soon. Just open the door. Come on in if you like.

Put your ear right here, close to my soul. Listen. Is there life inside?

Yes, I remember now. A long time ago, you spoke to someone who felt powerless, heartbroken and afraid. You said, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Then you went to a grave, and you cried out,“Lazarus, come forth!”

I am Lazarus. You cried those words to him. You whisper them to me every morning. And you know what? I believe. Yes, I do believe. I trust you.

Trust.

HELP me! O God, bring your resurrection alive inside of me! Cause me to absorb life. I receive into myself your victory over death. Wash over me. Seep into the deepest place in my core. Jesus, may your victory over death penetrate my soul. Affect all that is me. Touch me. Write faith into my journey. Weave your love into my tapestry. Raise every part of me from the grave. Breathe into my thoughts, my attitudes, my dreams.

Awaken me. Fully.

Every morning you send forth the sun to overcome the night. All around me, your creation bursts out. All that is green grows. I want to burst up like that. I want to break through, to erupt with new life, to carry your resurrection into every circumstance, every conversation, every decision.

I am powerless. You are the resurrection and the life. I get it now. Inside out, I will overcome. I will emerge, arise, spring up and prevail. Yes, Easter is so much more than what I knew yesterday. Jesus, I’d always believed that you rose up that Sunday morning. Now there is even more. Easter is my celebration of you, and your gift to me. In you, because of you, from you, through you, I arise and overcome the world.

I will follow you. Take me anywhere. Over mighty peaks and across vast oceans. Through walls and over fences. Up, out, and beyond myself. My fears are swept away. Your courage is my light of day. Your VOICE is heard in me. Say again? I will outrun the storm. I will trample injustice. I will conquer the night. I will carry water and plant a garden in the desert. I am the light of the world.

He is Risen. I am risen.

For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith. Who is he who overcomes the world? He who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. I John 5:4-5

 

 

How Curiosity Set the Cat Free

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In this audio podcast Paul Richardson and Mike O'Quin discuss how to rediscover one of the greatest joys and passions from our childhoods.  Where did that sense of wonderment go?   Is it time for your heart to go Easter Egg hunting again?

Click below to hear this conversation or subscribe to this free podcast by searching for "Faith Activators" on the iTunes store.

How Curiosity Set the Cat Free

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A Stolen Glimpse of Heaven

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A Stolen Glimpse of Heaven

By Faith Wilson

The project was about visual literacy. My professor had given us 10 words and we had to take one photo that represented each word; diffusion, economy, exaggeration, etc. The project due date was quickly approaching. I frantically searched my apartment for something to alleviate the assignment.

“Hmmm, boldness,” I thought as I considered the last word in need of fulfillment. My eye caught my roommate’s dying flowers moping in the corner. I snapped a photo. Not bold enough. Then, for some reason, instead of giving up on the dying flowers and moving on, I looked again. It was as if the flowers had whispered to me, “Can you really see no boldness in us?”

An unexpected, fierce determination arose within me. Could I bring this perishing beauty back to life? I held my camera beneath one of the wilting blossoms and blindly hit the shutter. Click. I glanced at the instant playback. Suddenly, I was obsessed with this photo. The world around me seemed to fade away. Engrossed in finding and revealing the character, meaning and beauty in that which had been disregarded as dead, I took photo after photo until I had liberated the flowers’ boldness and brought back to life its glorious beauty. 

My understanding of reality had been altered. As if being reborn into a new world, I began seeing everything and everyone around me through different lenses. Assumptions demanded rediscovery. The ordinary begged to be unearthed. Could it be possible that I had been walking blind? Were there new ways to interpret each passing moment? Yes. I began to anticipate meaning where I had felt nothingness, hope where there had been impossibility. A new resolve erupted within me to reevaluate situations, relationships, and circumstances. The fusion of old ideas with new perspectives allowed me to reassess problems with expectation of fresh, innovative solutions. I embraced the challenge of seeing everything–creation, interactions, ideas–differently. There was new potential in the unexceptional. The unsolvable was now child’s play. The impossible had become a challenge to repossess hope. 

I had caught a peek of the world through its Creator’s eyes. All of creation was demanding, screaming, begging to be redeemed. The death and resurrection of Jesus could no longer be seen in religious terms only. Life began rising victoriously out of death in the nuances and moments of my days.  I had stolen a stunning glimpse of heaven on earth, and I was enamored.

After submitting this project to my professor I promptly changed my major and reconsidered all of the lofty plans I had before me. I am convinced that God created me to look beyond that which is seen by the naked eye. He calls me to resurrect the new from the established. All tired assumptions demand to be challenged. The end result will be wholeness and redemption. I have become convinced that rebirth into life seen through the Creator’s eyes is the key to ending the cycles of poverty, eliminating corruption, bringing hope to the heart-broken, and peace to those in despair. With ideas as our medium and the world as our canvas, let us resolve to view the world with new eyes. 

My mom has a copy of this photo framed in our house. Perhaps to another it’s just a flower, but to me, it changed everything.

“The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” –Romans 8:19-21

Going for Broke

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By Faith Wilson
Jacob’s life didn’t unfold as he had hoped.
In Genesis 32 he is about to reach the victorious culmination of his story–the moment when he reunites in forgiveness with his brother. His moment of honor, acceptance and recognition had finally come. All would be well again. Instead, he is caught by disaster. Jacob is stripped of all the wealth he has amassed for himself over the course of his life. Humiliated, he stands alone, emptied out under the wide open sky.
Then he wrestles. It’s not a five minute, short lived tussle. No, he locks horns with a determined opponent through the cold night until the sun creeps over the mountain peaks and a new day breaks over the desert. What raced through Jacob’s mind as he grappled with his mysterious adversary? Did he wonder why this was happening to him? Did he not consider the possible ramifications for completely exhausting himself in conflict with an unknown man?
Did he ever ask, “Why am I doing this?”
During this challenge God clenches onto his leg and rips his hip out of its socket. Pain sears through his body. Crippled in agony and crumpled in the dust, Jacob should have surrendered. Who would blame him for limping away, raising a clenched fist at the stars and shouting at God, “How dare you claim to be gracious and loving?” Instead Jacob does the unthinkable–he demands a blessing. With relentless determination, he clings to the hope of good in the midst of tragedy.
In our lowest and darkest moments, a Voice is heard, “Bring it on. Let’s see what you’re made out of.”
Some tiptoe away from God’s invitations to wrestle. It is natural to shrink away. So much easier to watch the fight from the bleachers rather than climb into the ring. Do you ever refuse to ask hard questions for fear you won’t like the answers? Where do you stand? Are you willing to engage in an all-out, full contact struggle in the hope that it may result in blessing?
Be assured that after you have wrestled with God, you will limp away, forever broken. Your spirit will be surrendered to the one with whom you have wrestled. Mysteriously, that is precisely where the adventure begins.
“We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.”
 –II Corinthians 4:7-11

 

The Raw Material for Beauty

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The Raw Material for Beauty
An Essay on Suffering, Creativity and Hope
By Paul Richardson
 
This article is written in response to a recent tragedy. A friend ended his own life on Sunday morning, January 22, 2012. He was an artist.
 
Throughout history, the most enduring creative expressions are most often created within or just after moments of social upheaval, war, grief, chaos or disaster. It would be difficult to overstate this phenomenon. Consider the context in which John Milton penned his epic masterpiece Paradise Lost. “His son was dead, his daughters estranged, two marriages ended, his eyesight departed, his public image disgraced, his friends judicially murdered or fled into exile.” Miguel de Cervantes was the greatest novelist of his century. He was also enslaved for five years in Algiers. His life is described as “endlessly sorrowful and painful …” Aleksandra Solzhenitsyn was tortured, suffering for eight years in Soviet labor camps.
 
Victor Hugo was already a prolific writer when, in 1843, he lost his daughter in a drowning accident. He was so deeply affected by this tragedy that his pen remained silent for almost a decade. Something miraculous took place during those silent years. Hugo would come storming back with a new wave of poetry and writings that included Les Miserables, his masterpiece about the resurgence of hope that would secure him as one of the greatest French writers of all time.
 
I am fascinated by individuals who break through humanity’s usual barriers and limitations. As I have tried to understand the substance in their lives which lifts them to such creative heights, I am in awe at the numbers of them who encounter unusual pain and suffering when they are children. As a boy, for example, Charles Dickens labored in the grime of a paste blacking factory. Isaac Newton was abandoned by his mother at the age of three. J.S. Bach’s mother died when he was nine and his father followed her eight months later. Oscar Wilde’s little sister died unexpectedly at the age of eight. One study estimates that of eminently creative individuals, 28% lose their parents as children, in comparison with eight percent of the general population.
 
At the age of six, the novelist James Matthew Barrie, who wrote The Little White Bird and the successive stage play The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, lost his brother David in an ice skating accident. It was described as a “catastrophe beyond belief” for his mother. Young James grew up in the fallout of her grief, often hearing her groan that her only happiness was found in the knowledge that her dead son would never grow up. James’ experiences would eventually rise through his pen to become Peter Pan, one of the most adored characters to ever grace the pages of children’s literature.
 
Consider the writer who swept our hearts and imaginations away into Narnia, showing us what it feels like to playfully romp with delight in the arms of Aslan? C.S. Lewis typed with creative magic. In what circumstance was that brilliance forged? When he was ten years old, his mother fell ill with cancer and slipped out of his world into eternity. Meanwhile his father sent him off to a boarding school. It wasn’t long before little Clive’s imagination rose on the wings of his grief. And in the process he would learn to awaken hope in the hearts of other children. The big-eyed delight in the eyes of every child reading of Narnia quietly originates in another child’s anguish.
 
Lewis wrote that God “whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, and shouts in our pains.” He called pain “God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Jean-Paul Sartre called suffering “the raw material for beauty.” From my perspective, there is an unmistakeable relationship between suffering and creative power. The secret of that power is not suffering itself, but the hope that is forged in the soul while suffering. Romans 5:3-4 explains this relationship. Hope is born in suffering, which produces perseverance, which gives birth to character, which blossoms into hope. By hope ἐλπίς, the Apostle Paul was not referring to the fast food flicker of optimistic euphoria that we sometimes associate with this word. Hebrews 6:19 says, “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain …” Hope is the anchor of the soul. A soul empty of hope is anchorless in the raging, unpredictable and disappointing voyage through life. Hope is the joyful anticipation of the good while in the midst of a trial. Hope, by its very nature, cannot exist apart from pain.
 
Walking amidst this great crowd of humanity are the rarest of artists. They are the masters, who create life changing, breath taking works of art. Artistic talent alone is powerless to produce such masterpieces. Their art confronts us with an audacious faith in providence. Their creative expressions lift up our eyes and plant a resolve in our hearts to rise again. Whatever their genre of creativity, they simply cannot be ignored. None of us are ever quite the same after being confronted by their art forms. These are the great artists whose creative outflow is mysteriously illuminated with an enduring and radiant hope. Almost without exception, these individuals have been lifted up through some inferno of hellish darkness. On their ascent, they’ve snatched up a handful of hope, anchored it to their souls and carried it with them through life.
 
Hope is an enduring and confident determination that the sun will rise. Gentle light will melt the darkness into a soft gray, then slowly fill up the bedroom window. Soon the brilliant sun will sweep away the night, lighting up your tear stained pillow. The Voice of God is heard in the morning. “Oh, faithful one. Your beautiful soul is formed out of a collision between your pain and my life giving, creating words. The wreckage from these collisions form the textures by which I, the greatest of all artists create My masterpieces. See how you separate the curtains, push the windows wide open and feel the rushing breeze of a new day on your face. You will rise. You will most certainly turn your face toward the cold, biting wind and live again. Just as the radiant colors of dawn are born in the turmoil of light overcoming darkness, you will emerge through the blinding confusion of your ephemeral and seemingly chaotic nothingness.
 
Hope is a creative force that explodes from within us, casting light across the canvas. Ronald Lopez was a gifted artist. He did amazing things with his natural talents, and he was a master at painting murals. He was an advocate for artists, and his work touched many lives. I was inspired by what Ronald created in Istanbul. Apparently, his life more recently took a downward turn. I feel that I can relate. I know how it feels to wake up in the night, wondering if life is worth living. I know what it means to be tortured by fear, anxiety, guilt, self doubt and depression. And yet, without exception, after each night spent in the valley of the shadow of death, God has gifted me with a glorious sunrise. I suspect that God was forming in Ronald Lopez the raw materials for an explosion of beauty. His most creative gifts to humanity and God were most certainly in front of him.
 
No matter how blinding the night, no matter how disgraceful our failures may be, there is always, always, always a reason to wait for another day.

Interview with Paul on 100 Huntley Street (part two)

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Here is part two of a powerful interview with Paul Richardson which he recently did on the Canadian TV show, "100 Huntley Street."  In it he tells the harrowing tale of his son's drowning in 1999, miraculous healing and a subsequent encounter with God.  He also talks about the vision for quality Christian eduction that transforms the nations.  Click above to watch.