Words of Wisdom From Tony

So…our typical weekdays begin at 5:45 am. Most of you are sitting down for dinner and we are getting up for the day. Upon awaking, we get Tekle up and get him ready for school. Thankfully, a friend drives him to and from school every day. It saves us on time (4 hours a day) and gas, which runs anywhere between $5-$6 a gallon. We then have our quiet times and workout. It feels by 8am, we have lived a lot of life. Leah works out with Rachel (the Ugandan formerly known as Sauda), and Bo and I head over to workout with Alfred and Ainslie (friend, and home owner of our last homestead). We setup P90X on the laptop under a mango tree, use weights made of old car parts welded together and have a homemade pull up bar which fits nicely between two palm trees. It is a pretty sweet set-up.

For those of you familiar with P90X, you know that Tony leads a great workout, but he is not known for pearls of wisdom to live your life by. But, the other day when we were working out he said, “You know the problem with most people? They quit too soon. There is something in them that says, “This is too much pain”, and they just quit.” I don’t know about you, but when it comes to working out I am often that guy. A few reps in, things are good, then it starts to get hard and I start thinking, “I can’t do this anymore.” So I quit, wait for the pain to stop, and then jump in again when I feel ready.

I sat outside of an office building on Tuesday afternoon after an appointment waiting for my boda-boda (motorcycle taxi) friend to come. After a few minutes of just watching life go by, I started thinking of Tony’s words earlier in the day. “Am I that guy in other areas of life too? Do I quit too soon? When things get hard do I stop and wait for the pain to go away?” There are times where I am afraid to turn the next page of the story of my life – small or big. There are times when I wonder what will be next and can I do it? You know those times when you feel like God might be telling you something and it seems difficult, or impossible, so you do nothing? Or those times when you are in deep and doing the right thing is just too hard, so you stop. Whether that be in a relationship, work, parenting, or fill in the blank. That’s when we must remember to trust in God’s character, in who He is, not what He is presently doing in me. He is carefully churning and crafting the details of my life. He is engineering it all. Even if I have royally screwed it all up, in His grace and mercy, He is putting it back together again. And in all of it He is creating a deep sense of dependence. His purposes are taking us somewhere, probably somewhere we have never been before. Because it is there that something start to happen. It is in those later reps, the ones where we want to stop, that we start to see the depths of God that we have never seen before.

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us the same power that raised Christ from the dead – Ephesians 1:19

If resurrection power is at work in me, than I should expect some resurrection. The thing we constantly forget is that there is always death before the resurrection. That is the part we don’t like. That is the part where we want to quit. But without death, there is no life. Did you ever wonder why Jesus died on Friday but didn’t raise again until Sunday? How come He didn’t just show up Saturday morning? It would have made it so much easier on everybody. But that is not what He did. There was death and then there was some pain, and there was some confusion…and then there was new life! I think that is how it often works as God works in us. If my goal as a follower of Christ is to be like Christ, then some of me must die. And if some part of me must die, then it will be hard, and I will want to quit. But it is in the not quitting, in the enduring, in the allowing Him to do something in me, in the death, where He often does His best work. But don’t forget that through all of that comes new life. To be raised up into a new creation, new life, is not about being good, smart, accountable, or even faithful – we need to be dead.

So I say to you, don’t stop. If there is something in your life that God keeps bringing back around, press into it. If you know that you should do something, but you are scared of the pain, rejection and heartache – lean towards it, push through the pain. What is good is difficult & what is difficult is rare. We have all struggled for most of our lives against the fear of being last, lost, least, little or dead – we need to trust that in those very conditions Jesus is present. It is all OK. We are safe. Just because it is hard does not mean it is bad. In fact, our best growth comes from the pain, the suffering and even the death. Listen to Tony.