3d • General discussion
Right Answers Require Right Questions
For the last near twenty five years now I've been mostly known by the nickname “Pastor Max”.
From time to time some clown, trying to be rude, will ask, “Oh yeah??? PASTOR Max??? Who are YOU pastor of?!?”
I always just smile and tell them, “Anybody that no one else wants, those are my congregation. The broken ones that everyone else has given up on, those are MY people! I love them, and I'll try to shepherd as many as the Lord sees fit to allow me to be there for.”
I was raised by a good woman for the first seven years of my life.
Then she went off the rails.
By the time I was in fifth grade my home was a war zone in the sense that my mother had declared war on ME, and she attacked me twice a day, seven days a week.
Between the time I came home from school usually around three thirty or four o'clock, and the time I went to bed — somewhere around ten or ten thirty, I would get physically and verbally abused.
I felt real, adult hatred for the first time when I was twelve.
Up until then, the attacks just broke me frigging heart, man. I was a gentle hearted kid. I couldn't understand how someone who said they loved me so much could say the things to me that this person screamed in my face daily.
I was twelve. I felt real, bitch I would shoot you in your face if I had a shotgun kind of hatred.
And that confused me and hurt me as much as anything later, because it opened up lines of thoughts that I'd never had before about another human being.
I really did love everybody, man… regardless of race or how much money you had or what kind of house you lived in… and I'd never felt anything like what coursed through the very veins in my body when this woman bent over me with her eyeballs literally bulging in rage, screaming in my face with the spittle flying that she should have laid my head down behind that back tire and crushed my head in the driveway when I was a baby like she started to, and told God and everybody else it was an accident….
I remember the feeling of a fifty five gallon drum of ice water being poured over my head and slowly, like some kind of Arctic oil, sliding down my head and neck and shoulders and down my body until I stopped there cold and literally numb.
My lips were actually numb, I still remember that, when I stammered, “Mama, you don't mean that….”
Only to watch her intense hatred and rage intensify as she confidently and with relish assured me, “Ooooooh, yes I do!!! I should have killed you when you were born!!!”
And you might be wondering what on earth I did to accrue such a venomous attack from my own mother… but what I did was be at home when she got there.
Whatever actually set her off that day I'm not sure I was ever aware of. It didn't matter. If it hadn't been that it would have been something else. She was mentally ill, she had finally broken, and I was the whipping post, the target.
Not surprisingly, I began gravitating more toward the outlaw and one percenter biker folks we were always around, when before I had kept all their kids at a distance. Because I was a “good kid”.
I was another Beaver Cleaver and I wasn't apologetic for that.
But that anger and hatred I had felt that day… that has changed me.
I'd gone away from that encounter NOT hurting for a change. Just freaking PISSED, man!!! And it felt safe.
Before long I realized, when something hurt me, if I hid behind the anger, and embraced THAT instead of the hurt, I was protected from the bleeding out that my soul experienced every time someone new I trusted put a knife in my back.
Wasn't too much longer that I decided it was better to just not trust anybody to begin with.
That was MUCH safer.
Problem is, when we're building those walls to keep everybody else out, we're walling ourselves into an emotional prison that is literally going to alter our brains construction and have our neurons firing along new neural pathways that were never supposed to be there.
So we wind up more lonely than ever, pushing everyone away, self sabotaging our own successes in everything from the work we do to our relationships because, simply put, consistency means familiarity… and at this point we're just not willing to be known by anyone. Our anonymity is our greatest strength.
Because WE don't need ANYbody, do we?!?
…meantime, we're drowning. Making every wrong choice you can make because the lens of our entire perspective is broken and filthy.
Our perspective becomes so skewed about everything that has to do with life that we no longer know how to ask the right questions.
And asking the wrong questions, friends, we can't possibly come out of it with the right answers.
I'll give you an example:
I've actually had someone say to me, “In a world SO full of evil and ugliness, how COULD there be a loving God in control of everything…?”
But, see, the question comes from the heart of someone whose perspective has already been warped. And the question doesn't reflect the TRUTH of our existence.
Here's what I mean:
Have you ever sat outside somewhere and looked at the day or the evening around you, perhaps as the sun rose or the sun set, that just almost took your breath away?
Have you gazed out at a meadow or a field at the wildflowers and just sighed, they were so amazing?
Do you SEE the beauty of nature around you…?
Now:
Have you ever been hugged by someone when you REALLY needed it?
Have you ever just laughed because you saw some kids playing and their joy was infectious? It got you too?😃
Have you ever held someone you were in love with, who you believed at least at the time truly loved you back? Have you felt that beautiful soul connection that two people can have…?
Has a piece of incredible music ever caused you to lean your head back and close your eyes and ride with the rises and falls of the instruments?
Have you watched a movie with some angelic storyline that left you emotionally moved and genuinely touched inside, wanting to do better yourself for having viewed whatever it was you were watching?
So, this is real life we're talking about here. Most of us if not all of us have experienced all of these throughout our lives.
Again: We're not making stuff up — we're talking about actual, real life experiences that we have in common, right…?!?
So then, our perspective should at least INCLUDE all of these good things when we are considering the deeper things of the universe… especially when our very eternities depend on what we conclude about it all.
In that case, a much more honest question, a question based on a consideration of ALL of the information (not just the parts that allow our Adam scarred hearts to feel sorry for themselves and wrap us in wrath), the RIGHT question should go more like this:
“In a world SO full of evil and ugliness, how COULD there be SO MUCH Love and Beauty if THERE WEREN'T a loving God in control…?”
See… THAT question would cause us to look a little deeper for the Truth of our existence.
THAT question might just get us over our pity party and set us on a course of REAL awakening to the reality of what's going on around us.
And the reality is this, friends:
There has been more specific, direct biblical prophetic fulfillment in the last seventy seven years since Israel became a nation than in the entire nineteen hundred plus years of Christianity before.
The Bible has shown itself trustworthy more times than I can count off hand and the very detailed things that we are warned will come right before the end…
….well, it ain't coming anymore, neighbors. It's here. We're living in it, right now.
And Christ is coming far sooner and entirely differently than modern Western Churchianity has been telling everyone for the last seventy years.
It's crucial that we all get in our Bibles and meet our God! It is absolutely imperative that we KNOW that we know in Whom we have believed, Family!
Forever is a long time to be with about this one.
And you are quickly running out of time.
You're here, so you've got a chance to turn it all around.
Don't wait like I did until the Lord takes His restraining hand off of your life and allows you to choke on the fruit of your own ways until you can't breathe without it hurting your soul.
Until you wind up spending half of your life behind prison bars because you just had to try to be Captain of your own soul and God let you give it a shot.
This I know:
🎯If drugs and alcohol could really help, it would have helped me, cause I tried it.
🎯If ungodly relationships with loose partners could grant peace to anyone, I would have found it, cause I tried it.
🎯 If giving in to the anger and violence could fix what's wrong with us, it would've fixed ME… cause I tried it.
🎯 If pagan religions, witchcraft, psychiatry and sociology, dozens of psych pills… if any of this could really help anybody it would have certainly helped me, cause I tried it.
🕊️ But at the end of it all, none of it did anything but make the damage worse in the long run, ESPECIALLY the corn ball religions I studied.
Being a psychology major in college helped me learn WHAT was so screwed up between my ears, but it had no real answers for the brokenness.
“….here, just take these pills.”
Then God knocked me to my knees with the gift of Faith in His Son. And the guy that rose up off of his knees that day was NOT the same critter that went down on that floor!
God changed me, people.
And He'll change you.
And my favorite answer whenever someone asks me, “How do you know that all of this Jesus stuff is for sure even real?” is this:
“Friend, I really was one way, and now I actually am completely different… the things that happened in the middle, THAT was Jesus!!!”
It wasn't anything else!
I tried EVERYTHING else!
But when I REALLY went before the King of Creation with my hat and my heart in my hands, ready to sincerely bow down my life to Him and acknowledge His RIGHT to be Lord of my life… when I chose to accept the free gift of eternal life through Him, He changed everything.
And no matter what you think you've done or how far away from God you truly have ran… no matter what kind of devilish wickedness you are guilty of… His Grace is sufficient, neighbor. The work is already finished.
All you have left to do is take it. And I urge you to think on th
ese things seriously before you close your eyes tonight.
You're running out of time, Friend.
Thank you for hearing me out.
1
0 comments
Right Answers Require Right Questions
powered by
skool.com/cross-talk-war-room-6905
We're here to leave off the traditions of men and walk with you through the Garden of God's Word as we grow in Faith and Knowledge together.
Suggested communities
Powered by