It’s not a nutritional label

So once again my church knocked it out of the park with an awesome experience and lesson at Switch last night. They kicked it off with some local up and coming rappers J and ended it with our Youth Pastor sharing her beautiful testimony. The night was all about the labels that we are given and how they affect us in life. Some of us are the nerds, the jocks, the dork, the fat kid, or in my case the kid with no ankles…..yeah that’s right I have cankles! Quick definition: calf-ankles, or in my case; Crosson-ankles, because the entire Crosson family has them. Kind of a funny, but ridiculous, label that I lived with for a while. I can remember asking a girl in high school if she would go out with me. Her answer……”You have no ankles!” Really, that’s what you’re looking for in life, a guy with well-defined ankles. Anyways, back to the point of the story. Labels are sometimes true and sometimes they’re not, but we decide if they define us or not.

When it comes to our labels, the first thing we need to do is look and decide if they are accurate or not. If it’s a bad label, but it is true, then we need to think about how we can change it. Can it be changed? Well we’ve (the entire Crosson family) found that for some reason there is not a lot you can do about cankles. Not really sure why, maybe it’s some genetic mutation that my Grandpa picked up from working at the Conoco refinery, but they’re not going away. But that’s where you take the next step. If the label you have been given is true but is something that cannot be changed then you have to look at that label and decide if it is something that matters. Do my cankles define who I am; do they make me who I am? NO!!!!! I am NOT my cankles, and they are not me. The best way to defeat these labels is to look at who God says you are. The best way I can tell you to find this answer is to find you a life verse. Find a verse that describes who you are, or who you want to be…….and then become it. I mean let’s face it, if you are a believer than you realize that the Word is the truth. So if you are to believe any label……..wouldn’t you rather believe the truth, instead of all of those lies.

So what’s your life verse? Do you have one? (If not, you really should find one) Mine is 1 Peter 3: 8-9: Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with a blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing.

For me this life verse is two-fold. One, it’s a constant reminder of what God has called me to be, of how he wants me to live my life amongst others. How he wants me to treat others, and how he wants me to love as he loves (God is Love). Second, it gives me a goal; something to work towards. If I keep this verse on my heart at all times it makes it easier to treat people the way they should be treated. Having something in writing normally results in that something coming true. My goal is written in the most important place, I’m hoping it comes true.

As I told my small group last night, when you think of your label or labels, think about what people will say of you at your funeral. Imagine yourself sitting at your own funeral listening to the pastor and your loved ones talking about you. What are they saying? My guess is that they won’t be bringing up your cankles, but will they have anything extraordinary to say about you. “He gave his life to God and the people around him.” “He treated everyone with love and kindness.” “He was a true blessing to all of us, even people he didn’t know.” You may say, “Wow, that’s a big order to fill”. You know what? It is, but so is becoming the creator/owner of one of the biggest software companies or working your tail off to become one of the best receivers in the NFL when all the college coaches told you that you were too small to play with the big boys. As you begin to fulfill your God given label, you will start to lose your man given label. I mean, I don’t think that either of these two are called a nerd or a small fry anymore. Do you?

It doesn’t matter how BIG you think the label is, if it is what God has called you to be, than be it. And by the way…….I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength (Phil 4:13), so go for it. Become that label that you are called to be, because with Christ in your life you CAN become that label.

“Whats love got to do with it?”

Last night I was reminded by someone of how long it has been since I last posted to my blog. I haven’t had a whole lot on my mind that would make a full blog post, maybe a paragraph here or there, but nothing really worth mentioning. Well……..that’s with the exception of the one huge thing that my human mind cannot let go of…….Love. I mean it’s amazing how many things will make you think about it. It even came to mind last night during our youth ministry. We had a lesson on overcoming the fear of failure. The kid on the video had been wanting to talk to a girl and couldn’t muster up the courage to do it. It made me think of that Jodeci song “Come and Talk to Me” (hope some of you got that reference). Haha anyways, it reminded me of all the fear that goes into relationships. The fear that she (or he) won’t like you……I’m not good enough for her, or the fear that the object of your love is going to let you down, that it will fail. The point was the fact that you can’t fail if you don’t try, and if you don’t try you can’t succeed; therefore you must do.

I think maybe I’ve been a little confused about what love actually is. I used to think that love was more of just a feeling. You know the way you feel about someone or in some cases something. That overwhelming feeling of joy that overtakes your body, that feeling of excitement that you get from head to toe that makes you want to do back flips. But recently I’ve been reminded that Love is actually more than just a feeling, it’s actually a verb. It’s an action, something you do…that is driven by emotion. It’s not just about an emotion that you get; it’s about that emotion that you have and then that Love that you do, that Love that you give.

In May of this year I made the decision to put my “love life” on hold. An idea that was hard to comprehend but that had been confirmed by God. Funny thing is that I think I had a misunderstanding of what I was actually putting on hold. I was putting dating….finding a spouse on hold, but I was not at all putting love on hold. Love is not just about that 'someone' that you decide to spend the rest of your life with or that someone that you wake up to every morning or even just that someone that you take out on a date. Love is about doing and if I was ever going to find someone to fill in the above I was going to have to learn how to “do” Love.

I recently read a book by Bob Goff called Love Does. If you haven’t read it, then you should. It is a very inspiring book about his life and how God’s love for him (us) translated into him pursuing (Loving) the things that God put on his heart. He turned the emotion of Love into actions that have ultimately altered the shape and direction of his life, all as God had intended. It helped me understand the difference between just living with a feeling in your heart, and actually using that feeling in your heart to drive and motivate you. To motivate you to act and make those God sent desires into a reality, ones that you can live out every day. For some reason though, it comes way too easy for us as humans to feel something and just sit back and bask in the rays of that wonderful feeling. Not realizing that the longer we just sit there the more likely that feeling is to go away. It’s kind of like one of those emergency flashlights with the crank, you know from the “as seen on TV” aisle, if you don’t turn the crank every once in a while……..you’re going to lose the light.  Love is no different. You have to act on it, you have to work at it, you have to turn the crank every once in a while and recharge that battery, otherwise that Love will fade and you will lose it.

It reminds me a lot of the relationship that we are called to have with Jesus Christ. If we don’t work on that relationship it’s easy to lose the fire, it’s easy to fall back in love with our earthly desires and slip away from the relationship that we have with Him. This was a reminder that I found way to close this last month. I was sick for like 2 or 3 weeks straight. I was worn out and wanted to do nothing but sleep and sit around on my butt. I continued to do my bible reading plans, but because of the way I felt my time alone with him slowly started to dwindle. I was no longer talking to him about how I felt and probably because of how I felt I definitely wasn’t praising him. Even when I prayed with my children at night I was just going through the motions so that I could hurry up and get to bed. By the second week I was starting to question things, things that I hadn’t questioned in a long time. Was he really there for me? Was he really willing to answer my prayers? What I realized was that as I was sick I was trying to just bask in his light, instead of seek him out and turn that crank to recharge the battery. I wasn’t doing Love, I was just sitting there hoping that He would do it for me. Not only that, but as I forgot that I had to seek Him out and work at Love, I also forgot that everything he does is in his time…….not mine. Luckily, for me and my relationship, I have some very wonderful people in my life, people that reminded me of how Love works.

Hopefully this will be a reminder to someone that each and every relationship, each and every Love, takes work. It takes dedication. If you Love something, or someone……go for it. None of us can afford to stand around basking in the rays. We have to work for the things we want. So crank that handle and charge that battery……make Love an action.