Holistic Hippies Pt.2

Jesus lived a FULL life. He lived a PERFECT life. He lived a WHOLE life. From the moment he arrived in a manger to the moment he ascended into those clouds, he was combatting and rectifying this broken and separated reality that human beings and all of creation seem to be completely subjected to. Jesus' ministry can often be hard to pin down on what was his primary objective. We often want to pick one expression of his time on planet earth as the most significant.

Often we find that this primary act of Jesus was expressed through his death on the cross, and rightly so, this was significant. This issue of sin and the suffering it produces is settled in this wonderful and beautiful act.

Some people look more at his teachings and his acts of compassion as a man as the primary expression. His wisdom and mercy become the guiding principles in how we should follow him.

Some people find that his death was only the beginning of something great and that really his resurrection was the primary purpose of his life on earth. Everything else was just a lead up to the moment where he defeated death itself and overcame the devil once and for all.

If your anything like me, reading through the Gospels in particular and trying to clarify with absolute certainty what the main thing is... well, it can be really exhausting. The moment I find myself settled and secured that I finally "got it", that I have complete revelation on this stuff, I find myself being painfully and excruciatingly humbled by another aspect of who Jesus really was and what he really came to do. I start to wonder in these moments if I'm missing the point. What if Jesus came not just to be glorified on how he put some things back into place by a few scattered events throughout his life, but what if everything he did was a massive, all encompassing expression of God's love that we will never, EVER be able to get our minds fully around?

Jesus' ministry to the world was HOLISTIC. Body,soul,mind,heart... he literally made it possible for us to be whole in every single area. How did he do this, you might ask?

Through his...

LIFE

DEATH

RESURRECTION

My proposition then is how do we learn to appreciate the breadth of his ministry in all that he did? How do we encourage a broad and HOLISTIC approach to following Jesus where we don't allow ourselves to get too pigeonholed into only focusing on one of the areas mentioned above?

You can see this quite a bit in Christian ministries. We get really focused on one of the amazing expression of Gods love and grace to the world through Jesus.

We get a revelation of Jesus' compassion on the sick, poor, orphaned and widows. We allow ourselves to be consumed with his heart and mercy for anyone who is in any kind of need. We see how he provided for the masses with fishes and loaves. We see how he ate and fellowshipped with the rejected and despised. We read about these things and we are inspired to go and do things like set up hospitals, aids clinics, shelters, counseling centers, orphanages etc. We see how Jesus responded to the physical needs of this world and we are compelled to follow.

Then we get a revelation of Jesus' radical and miraculous authority over spiritual and dark afflictions of the soul. We read about how he commanded a legion of demons out of a man and sent them into a pack of pigs. We read about how he spit in dirt and touched people's eyes with his holy mud. How he got words of knowledges about people he had only just met. As we read these things, of course we begin to be inspired on how God might want to use us in similar ways. So we set up whole schools and programs to train us in the supernatural. We desire to have access to this supernatural authority Jesus walked in, in both his life and through his miraculous resurrection.

Then we get a revelation of Jesus on the cross. How much pain and affliction he went through... all for us. How be hung and bled and eventually died to free us from our own self inflicted misery. We see the destructive power of sin and the bondage it holds us in, in both this life and the next. As we truly understand the mercy of God through this act of Jesus we are overwhelmed with a sense of total gratitude and appreciation. So we go about trying to convince the world through whatever means necessary the urgent and compelling truth of the cross. We set up schools, ministries, programs, outreaches etc. with the sole intent of learning how to preach this beautiful Gospel.

Now, obviously all of the above mentioned revelations are God breathed, scriptural and profound. I asked myself recently if I were to sit down with Jesus now, interview style, and try to get him to nail down once and for all his crowning achievement, that his response might leave me somewhat hanging. I wonder if he would be almost confused by the question. I wonder if his answer would come across more like this...

"I did nothing apart from what the Father was saying to me. In those acts of obedience and dependence on him I was near to him and whole. From the brightest to darkest moments of my life on earth I experienced a WHOLE and FULL life in him. That is my crowning achievement."

As I grow in my life and calling I want to be blown away by the FULL measure of Jesus manifest in and through my life. Sure, there will be seasons where I focus more on certain aspects of what that fullness really looks like being expressed in and through me. Times where I dig deep into word and work on my hermeneutics (if you don't know what that word means,honestly, don't worry about it). Times where I focus on radical evangelism and proclamation as a means to make it more of my lifestyle than and event. Seasons where I busy myself with setting up schools, programs and ministries to equip others to know God more. Moments where I draw aside and sit in absolute silence and stillness and allow my life to be completely uncluttered and absolutely solely focused on intimacy with the Father. But the challenge remains to always allow myself to experience the HOLISTIC love of the trinity in every aspect of my life and the lives of those around me.

To never arrive, to never settle, to never feel like i've achieved.

But to rest in the fact that Jesus' Life, Death and Resurrection reach deep into my WHOLE being, continually conforming me to himself.

When you see someone who is incredibly confident and secure in who they are or what they're good at there's a good chance that they had a loving father early on speaking the truth consistently into their lives. A father who was generous in his approval of that child and a child who constantly, above every other person around them, was starving for their father to affirm them in whatever it was they were doing. I know that this is isn't an absolute rule and that not every single confident and whole person fits into this category. I do think you'd be shocked though at how high the percentage of people who are, how many did have this amazing and simple foundation in their lives.

I unfortunately didn't have this. So that leaves me with a interesting conundrum; how do I go about being secure,confident and whole in my life?

It's quite simple actually.

I follow Jesus' example of asking the Father non stop what he thinks about me, what he feels about me. I ask him for his heart for the people around me, I ask him if I'm doing a good job in loving those people. I ask him and only him to validate me and bring truth and definition into who I really am.

A CONFIDENT, WHOLE, LOVED son of the most high God.

Holistic Hippies Pt.1

My life is full of extremes. Sometimes I wish it wasn't always this way, but mostly I think I would go crazy if my life was nominal, marginal or highly measured. I always have a sense of something HUGE around the corner, constantly anticipating the next big impossible challenge. Often the thing around the corner ends up being even way bigger than I dreamed it could of been and I'm left wondering how in Hades I got myself into that kind of situation again?

It's terrifying and I'm addicted to the terror.

This is good, mostly. As a follower of Jesus we should constantly be pushing ourselves to live out of the sense of urgency that Jesus left us with when he ascended up into the clouds. He came and did a lot of cool stuff and put into motion the cure to make this world what it was created to be. He himself started it, and he himself will in some way finish it ( bring on the eschatology mysteries). But there is this long awkward pause in between these two moments and the shocking reality is that this stage, the stage we are in now, seems to be completely, 100%, no two ways about it, left in our hands. With that understanding our lives should be to a large degree wild, reckless, abandoned and terrifying. We haven't a second to waste really. The work Jesus started is still an ongoing process that Jesus decides to entrust to US to accomplish.

YIKES! No pressure aye, Jesus?

In my short time in full time ministry thus far I've had the chance to observe quite a bit of other people who, like myself, are really attempting to live completely sold out to the call of God in our lives. Varied results would be a fair assessment, and an even fairer one would be how incredibly inconsistent I am in the midst of all my astute observations on others. As we rise and fall in our ministries and pursuits of being used by God, I don't sense that we don't want to be wildly effective or that we as followers of this amazing Jesus don't have the highest expectations of what he can do in and through us. Even with the most sincere intentions possible, it seems like it's a slippery slope of simultaneous massive success and massive failure... ALL THE TIME! I began to ask myself is this really what God has for us? Is serving him supposed to be such an imbalanced guessing game of blind faith and sheer determination?

One of my new favorite words is the word HOLISTIC. As a teenager I was very confused on what this actually meant. Whenever I saw this word it was usually on a business sign for a New Age massage/grocery store somewhere on Maui (yes, sometimes both services were offered at the same establishment). In my mind I intertwined this word holistic with things like tofu,aloe vera, dreadlocks and girls with hairy armpits. Maui has a shockingly strong Hippy presence with my hometown of Haiku and the next town down the road Paia, being the epicenter of utopian hippy paradise. Endless stories of hippy madness could be told, but that's entirely beside the point. I do feel though that growing up in such surroundings made it difficult for me to appreciate this amazing word... HOLISTIC. It surely has a much larger meaning than a massage technique or way to buy organic household groceries. Here are some pictures of the funky and iconic town of Paia, Maui.

This place is the Mecca of Hippy Living

Fairly self explanatory: Hippies got to get their hemp bracelets from somewhere

This isn't so exclusively hippy, but it's a great mixture of both local and hippy: Paia Laundromat

Main product sold here would probably be happiness

Street view of the Mecca

When God created us, he created us to be like him. He created us with an innate sense of wholeness that comes directly from HIS wholeness. Father, son, holy spirit... ONE, WHOLE, COMPLETE, PERFECT. We obviously don't currently operate in this dimension. We are broken, disjointed, shattered and incomplete. As human beings we have come to recognize more and more the complexity of what it means to be in these skin covered miracle factories called our bodies. We know that we need to look after these bodies in more ways than one. Our physical bodies need food, nourishment, rest. Our brain needs stimulation, challenge and growth. Our emotional well being is constantly being determined by the amount of love and encouragement we are receiving from those around us. Our inner spirit is constantly striving to be restored to its original design of being one with the creator.

When any one of these areas is out of line with how it was designed to function it often sets off a chain reaction that immediately affects the other areas. If we are physically sick it can make us feel emotionally drained. If we are heavily depressed emotionally we can become literally physically ill. In reverse, many studies show that when some people are terminally ill with things like cancer, the sheer power of being positive and full of life in their emotions seems to literally deter the physical ailments in their broken bodies. One of my sisters best friend growing up was a part of a huge family of like 8 other siblings. I remember as a kid hearing that this friends mom just made a mental and emotional decision after her 2nd or 3rd child that she just wasn't going to allow herself to get sick during the pregnancies anymore. No morning sickness or vomiting, NOTHING. The story goes that the next 6 children came completely vomit, discomfort and sickness free! She made a conscious and emotional decision that affected her physical symptoms. Kinda hard to imagine actually.

Jesus lived a FULL life. He lived a PERFECT life. He lived a WHOLE life. From the moment he arrived in a manger to the moment he ascended into those clouds, he was combatting and rectifying this broken and separated reality that human beings and all of creation seem to be completely subjected to. (Pt. 2 coming soon)