Low Maintenance – Travelling in the Spirit – Purity 661

Low Maintenance – Travelling in the Spirit –
Purity 661

Purity
661 02/21/2022

Good
morning,

Today’s photo of a jet taking
off into blue skies over LaGuardia Airport was captured by yours truly Saturday
morning as my wife and I were shuttling between terminals as we were preparing
for our afternoon flight to Tampa.  

Its Tuesday and as we have entered the
midway point of our honeymoon vacation, I am overcome with gratitude this
morning as I am simply in awe of how much I love my wife and how much I love
what the Lord has done in my life to bring me where I am today and I am not
just talking about a third floor hotel room with a view of Tampa Bay. 

As I look at today’s photo, I remember that
this was in the early stages of what is TammyLyn and my first experience
traveling together and how I contemplated what it would be like. I have
travelled with family, friends, and for mission trips in the past and until you
get on the road you don’t really know what someone will be like to travel
with.   You don’t know if they will be pleasant,
angry, nervous, quiet, or loud.  You don’t
know if they will be someone who looks on the bright side or if they will be
someone who will chronicle and complain about  every step of your journey. You don’t know if
they will be “high maintenance” or “low maintenance”.  

With TammyLyn,  I had an idea that she would be easy to
travel with because as a teacher and parent she has the kind and patient
demeanor of a caregiver, but I didn’t know for sure how she would hold up “on
the go”.  

To possibly complicate matters, due to the
fact that I had suffered a canceled flight out of Albany once upon a time in
the month of February before, I decided to book our flight out of LaGuardia to
be further south, or to have more options for flights if the weather didn’t
cooperate… so I added a two and a half hour drive to begin our honeymoon journey.
If you are traveling, why not to add a mini road trip into the mix?   Nothing like adding a drive through traffic of
the highways and streets near NYC before getting on a plane to properly gauge
someone’s patience. 

In retrospect, adding a drive might not
have been the best idea because although I am the seemingly quiet confident
traveler when it comes to airports I am a somewhat volatile driver as I still
struggle with being impatient and reactive behind the wheel when I am dealing
with traffic and adjusting to GPS directions to unfamiliar locations.  

In airports, I am pretty low maintenance because
“this ain’t my first rodeo” and I tend to just keep to myself and occupy myself
with music, a book, or my phone while in transit and don’t tend to make any
comments to anyone as I don’t feel the need to share my experience with strangers
and make “travel buddies”.  But on the
road, I can be quite the opposite as I tend to speed and sometimes make quick
transitions in traffic when I fail to understand the GPS directions. 

So doing a road trip was questionable because
 before I would be able to demonstrate
that I am that “calm cool and collected” world traveler at the airport,
TammyLyn would get a perfect view of the recovering “road-rager”!  There is no where to hide your worst tendencies
when you are travelling, and those habits will rise to the surface when you are
under stress.   

Luckily, most of the drive to our LaGuardia
parking destination was incident free and if anything TammyLyn got to know me a
little more as I used a large portion of the drive to LaGuardia to worship the
Lord in song.  If TammyLyn didn’t know
how much my heart is set on the Lord or how passionate I can be in worship, she
knows now. 

I tell my discipleship students and people
I counsel or encourage about the importance of worshipping the Lord in song as
part of our spiritual disciplines as disciples of Christ as it can help us
bridge the gap of knowing our faith in our heads to knowing it in our hearts,
and how worship can be a vehicle that can deliver us to an encounter with the manifest
presence of the Holy Spirit.  I stress
that the most appropriate thing we can do as Christians is to praise the Lord
in song and that when we passionately worship the Lord we can grow in our heart
relationship with the Lord and literally encounter His presence.   So if you are going to sing to the Lord, I
suggest you let go of your inhibitions, remember who the Lord is, who you are
in Christ, and what He has done for you and others, and let ‘er rip! If you are
going to sing to the Lord, bring it!

So as we listened to worship music on the
Taconic Parkway heading south Saturday, I felt the spirit to worship come over
me and I put any inhibitions I had about worshipping in front of TammyLyn aside
and I let her rip! I mean I worshipped the Lord like I did as if nobody was
there besides me and Him.  TammyLyn got a
front row seat to what had only been a private performance for the Lord and if
she had any doubts about the sincerity of my teaching on worship before, she
certainly doesn’t have them anymore.

Despite making a wrong turm just before our
final destination in Queens and getting beeped at a few times, TammyLyn and I
made it to Bolt Parking no worse for the wear and were both glad to be on the
part of the trip where we would just be shuttled and flown to our destination
in Florida.  

We got to the LaGuardia with plenty of time
to spare and spent a few hours waiting before we had a short and uneventful flight
to Tampa.   TammyLyn’s patient and kind
attitude never wavered, and she demonstrated that she was about as low maintenance
as you could get as she required no special handling and attend to her own
needs and well-being as she was undoubtedly used to doing as a mother to 5 and
a teacher to Pre-k students who demanded her focus to be on them more than herself.
   

But the “worst” was still in store for us,
as we experienced the longest line I have ever seen for a rental car agency that
I had ever seen or experienced when we got to Tampa.  Many people abandoned the line and sought
other travel means, valuing their freedom more than their non-refundable
deposits.  Some tried to book a car from
other rental agencies at the airport without luck as they were told there were
no available cars at the other companies. Others got on the phone to voice their
complaints to Budget Rental’s corporate offices to no avail..  And some made an ongoing commentary about the
status of the line and how “this sucked” for the duration of our time in
line.   We landed at roughly 5 pm and it
was around 9pm when we finally receive our rental car! 

But through it all TammyLyn remained
patient and kind and, although I did make the observation that it appeared that
the entire operation of dispensing rentals was being handled by a single
person,  we joked and supported one
another lovingly as we waited to finally get our car.  

After we made a quick run to local Walmart
for what turned out to be our dinner and for supplies for the week, we were thrilled
to finally lay down and go to bed and awoke with no residual bitterness as we
both chose to praise and worship the Lord by streaming our local church service
in our hotel room on Sunday.  

TammyLyn has remained patient and kind and
low maintenance throughout our trip, and I have repeatedly thanked the Lord for
bringing her into my life and having her agree to be my wife.  

Our time together has been wonderful and
the joy of it all is only increased as I remember the difficulties I faced in
the many years of my life where I wasn’t a Christian and was consumed by my selfish
desires and spent the vast majority of my life reacting in continuous cycles of
temptation, guilt, shame, anger, anxiety, and depression and dealing with
others far less patient and kind than my wife. 

Because of Christ, I am not the man I used
to be.  I may still struggle with
impatience and less than perfect speech in moments of stress but because of
Jesus Christ I am free of the things that used to drive a lot of the
dysfunction in my life, and I now find myself in the peace that comes from
letting go of pushing my personal agenda and just abiding in my desire to
follow and worship the Lord in all things.   

Throughout our travel day, amidst all of
the hustle and bustle and disappointments, I took the time to appreciate where
I was going, where I had come from, and where I was in each moment. 

In the hours waiting for our flight, I
finished rereading Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship. On the plane I listened
to a message by Derek Prince on Following the Call of God, and I spent time in
silent prayer and worship as I listened to an eclectic mix of pop and Christian
music where I thanked the Lord for all that He had brought me through and
provided me with to put me in the middle seat of that plane at 42,000 feet,
seated next to my Christian bride.

Even though we were “on the go” and could
have been completely focused with the details of our travel and with meeting
our personal needs of “self-care” as we were in transition,  I took the time to periodically check in with
my Lord to ask for His guidance and protection and to thank Him for the life He
had given me.      

Regardless of what plane I get on, or what
rental car they assign to me, I travel with the Lord and that journey doesn’t
end when we reach our vacation destination or when we get back home. 

So keep walking and talking with God.
Become a “low maintenance” traveler by making the decision to “walk in the
Spirit” because when you commit yourself to travelling with God, and living
according to His ways,  you can
experience peace and joy when you travel through life no matter what delays,
detours, or obstacles that may come your way.   

 

Today’s Bible verse come to us from “The NLT Bible Promise Book
for Men”.

This morning’s meditation verse is:

1
Corinthians 2:14 (NKJV)
¹⁴  But the natural man does
not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him;
nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

Today’s Bible
verse speaks of the fact that some people will consider the things of God as foolishness
and that they are incapable of knowing them without the Holy Spirit to reveal
it to them.  

One of the
biggest paradoxes of the Christian faith, has to do with the challenge of
balancing the concepts of man’s free will and ability to decide with God’s
sovereign will.  Passages like today’s
scripture indicate that it is simply impossible for people to come to God
without His divine intervention to reveal the truth to us.  

Other passages
of scripture detail the Lord’s call on mankind to repent and to turn from their
sin and to follow Him by placing our faith in Jesus.  

If the Lord decides
who will and who won’t know the truth, why does He call “all men everywhere to
repent” (Acts 17:30)?  

While there are
whole schools of thought regarding this dynamic to describe the levels of man’s
contribution, or his complete lack of contribution, towards His salvation and
relationship with God, I try not to get bogged down with theological labels and
merely encourage people to seek the Lord and their salvation with fear and
trembling.  

In spiritual
matters, I echo the sentiment of Alfred Lord Tennyson who said in his epic poem
“The Charge of the Light Brigade”, “Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do
and die”…”  – We all must choose what we “believe”
or reason to be true, and live or die with the consequences of our beliefs. 

If we don’t
know who God is, the appropriate response is to seek Him.  If we choose not to seek Him and dismiss the
biggest question of our existence, we can’t honestly make a charge of
wrongdoing to the One who gave us the free will to reject Him.

As creations of
God almighty, we are not to question the “fairness” of God’s redemptive plan
and muse over why some come to the Lord and others are spiritually blind to the
truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ.   

Other than in
the remotest parts of the world, the historical figure, and basic facts of who
Jesus Christ is supposed to be widely known. 
The details about Jesus’ life are available for anyone to read about in
the New Testament.  

Now while we
could worry about the poor soul of the “ones who never got the chance to know
who Jesus is”, Besides the mission field is waiting for those with the call to
bring the gospel to the unreached,  we
should be more concerned with the vast amounts of people that have access to
the knowledge of Jesus Christ but who have turned a deaf ear to His offer of
eternal life.  

I was lost in
sin and selfishness for most of my life. In light of a tragic loss and the
failure to find satisfaction in life, I began searching for truth and to find
an answer to the questions of the meaning and purpose to life.  

In my confusion,
I had found other answers and could have stayed in the darkness of those decisions,
but the Lord was gracious and gave me a message of His love and grace when I
was otherwise unreachable. I had shut myself from all considerations of Christianity,
but the Lord arranged for me to hear the message to save me.   

Was it my
searching that led me to the truth? Was it the Lord alone who revealed the
truth to me?   I don’t know! I’m just
glad I got saved!

Although I
earnestly sought some truth, I had rejected the Lord out of hand.  It was that one gospel message that saved me
and altered the course of my life.  I was
the natural man, and the things of God were foolishness to me. I could see lots
of things, but my heart was hard and my eyes were blind to the gospel until the
day I heard of salvation and the forgiveness of sins through faith in Christ
alone.    

So while today’s
verse may make us think that it isn’t fair that God has to give us a revelation
of His truth through the Holy Spirit, we should rejoice that He is willing to
save us at all and that He can choose to use us to pass along the truth of His
word that could save others.   

So don’t
question why some will be lost, instead share the good news of the gospel of
Jesus Christ in the hopes that the words you share with others may be used by
the Holy Spirit to cause them to live!  

Ours is not to
question why, ours is but to share the words of the gospel that can cause other
men and women to live.

 

As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org
where I always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors
to assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk. 

Today we continue sharing from June Hunt’s Codependency:
Balancing an Unbalanced Relationship.

As always, I share this information for educational purposes
and encourage all to purchase June Hunt’s  books for your own private study and to
support his work.  This resource is
available on many websites for less than $5.00.

C. Take the Codependency Checklist Test

Are you unsure about someone who is significant in your life? Is it possible
that you are in a relationship that others would call “codependent”?
If so, how would you know? Read through the Codependency Checklist and make a
check mark by what is applicable to you.

• Do you
  struggle with feeling loved; therefore, you look for ways to be needed?
• Do you
  want to throw all of your energy into helping someone else?
• Do you say
  yes when you really want to say no?
• Do you feel
  compelled to take charge of another person’s crisis?
• Do you
  feel drawn to others who seem to need to be rescued from their problems?
• Do you
  have difficulty setting and keeping boundaries?
• Do you
  find it difficult to identify and express your true feelings?
• Do you
  rely on the other person to make most of the decisions in your
  relationship?
• Do you
  feel lonely, sad, and empty when you are alone?
• Do you
  feel threatened when the other person spends time with someone else?
• Do you
  think the other person’s opinion is more important than your opinion?
• Do you
  refrain from speaking in order to keep peace?
• Do you
  fear conflict because the other person could abandon you?
• Do you
  become defensive about your relationship with the other person?
• Do you
  feel “stuck” in the relationship with the other person?
• Do you
  feel that you have lost your personal identity in order to “fit
  into” the other person’s world?
• Do you
  feel controlled and manipulated by the other person?
• Do you
  feel used and taken advantage of by the other person?
• Do you
  plan your life around the other person?
• Do you
  prioritize your relationship with the other person over your relationship
  with the Lord?

If you responded with a yes to four or more of these questions, you
may be involved in a codependent relationship!

When we find ourselves in unhealthy patterns of relating, we need to change
our focus, change our goals, and change what is hindering us from running the
race God has planned for us. Our primary focus should be not on a person but on
Jesus.

“Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily
entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” (Hebrews 12:1)

Biblical Counseling Keys: Codependency: Balancing an
Unbalanced Relationship.

 

—————————more
tomorrow————————

Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage Breaker”,
“Freedom in Christ” series of Discipleship Classes via the
mt4christ247 podcast!

at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com, You can also find it on Apple podcasts

(https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mt4christ247s-podcast/id1551615154). The mt4christ247 podcast is also available on Google Podcasts,
Amazon Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartradio, and Audible.com. 

These teachings are also available on the
MT4Christ247 You Tube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTxjSNstREpuGWuL0bF3U7w/featured

Email me
at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class materials, share your progress, and to be
encouraged.

My wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian encouragement via her Facebook
Group: Ask, Seek, Knock (https://www.facebook.com/groups/529047851449098 ) and her podcast Ask, Seek, and Knock on Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)

Encouragement for the Path of Christian
Discipleship