Restoring Rapport

In this post, I'm going to explain the difference between "expectancy" and "expectation." One exists within healthy relationship, and the other kills healthy relationship. "Expectancy" is the good one. It's the natural result of good relationship. Think about how you look forward to seeing your friends and visiting with them simply because they're your friends. There's a joyful "expectancy" and excitement that exists within the friendship. It's like a kind of happy anticipation. "Expectation" on the other hand, is something that kills good relationship. "Expectation" is when you begin placing standards on other people and expecting them to meet your requirements. And while that may sound very easy to identify and avoid, expectations have a way of slipping into our relationships without us realizing. We often don't realize we've put a standard over someone until they fail to meet that standard. Let m...

You've all heard it. Most of you have said it. "Church isn't a building." We think we understand in our minds that the Church is the Body of Jesus and not a building. We say the temple of the Holy Spirit is us and not the building we meet in. We say Church is an action and not a location. Yet despite all this, sometimes we still fall into the trap of thinking a building is the Church. Don't believe me? Let me ask you some questions. How many of you have heard people shout to children who were running in a church building: "NO RUNNING. Don't you know this is God's house?" WRONG. A church building is not God's house there's nothing more sacred about your steeple-crowned building than the meth lab across the street. We say we understand that "Church" is God's people and not a building or a business. But our actions speak differently. Still don't believe me? Let me ask you some more questions. How many of you think tha...

Oh boy. This is one of the single hardest yet most important things we can learn and practice. You practice it with your children, you practice it with your spouse, you practice it with people you interact with, and even people you work with. Correction and confrontation are unavoidable and important in life, and therefore, being able to correct and confront in the right way is a skill we all benefit from. It's something that's absolutely vital in any relationship. Without correction, we can harm our connection with each other, and without confrontation, we might not know what we were doing that is harmful. When correcting and confronting, it is absolutely critical that we keep the end goal in mind. It is crucial that we know what "correction" and "confrontation" are supposed to be, and what they are not supposed to be. The purpose of correction and confrontation should ALWAYS be to make the connection between people better and stronger. The goal of genuine...

What exactly is worship? That's a question that's been quite hard for me to understand for several years. In this post, as always, I definitely don't claim to have a perfect grasp of what I'm discussing. Worship is something that I've been trying to understand for a while, and I still have a lot of holes in my understanding of it. So take everything I say with an understanding of that. I believe one reason that it's hard for me to mentally understand worship is that it's hard to understand with the head. It's really more of a heart action I think. Choosing to express thankfulness, communion, and love for God and especially with Him. Worship isn't JUST a feeling that you get when you're worshipping your Creator either. Like so many other things in life, it's a choice to worship your Creator that then causes the feeling. The feeling is the reward of the choice. I'm not saying that we should make the choice to worship God JUST to get the f...

If you're an unmarried individual, have you ever wondered if it is healthier to get married when you're younger or when you're older? And if you're a married individual, have you ever wondered what it would have been like to get married younger or older than you did? Those questions seem pretty simple on the surface, but when you start to think about it, it really becomes more complex than you imagined before you started turning the gears of your mind. Haha. Let me further explain those questions by defining what I mean by "younger" and "older." I think of getting married "younger" as getting married when you're 18 (or younger) to 21 years old. I think of getting married "older" as getting married when you're about 25 to 30 (or older.) The range of 22 to 24 is what I consider to be about the "normal" age that people get married. My views on a lot of subjects are kind of heretical, and this issue is no exception...