Author: Nelson Hannah - Touching Soul and Spirit

Bush hogging helps me clear my head (no—that’s not hunting wild hogs in the bush). It’s a farm implement one hooks to a tractor and mows the grass, weeds, or bushes that have gotten a bit out of hand. This week I climbed aboard my Ford 2600 tractor, set the height I wanted to cut, engaged the power take off, and off I went. For the next several hours it was just me, the tractor, and the field I was cutting. I had plenty of time to chill out and think even though the temperature was hovering close to one hundred degrees.

God often speaks to me during times like this from his creation. As I was grinding the weeds into mulch, a rather large field mouse was forced out of his liar in the weeds and headed for a safer place. I didn’t think much about it until I made a round and headed back. Then out of nowhere I saw a reddish copper blur descending at breakneck speed toward the ground where the field mouse had fled. It was a rather large red-tailed hawk. In a blink of the eye, the hawk and his field mouse filet were headed for a private meal in a dining room in one of the pine trees that surround the field. It all happened in a matter of a few seconds.
Later that afternoon, I flushed another large rodent out of his cozy condo in the underbrush and the very same thing happened—table for one and a free range mouse steak served rare off the grill in Chez Pine Tree. This hawk was racking up and waiting for me to set him up with the prime cuts.
As I pondered my contribution to the decimation of the of the field mouse population, I began to hear God’s unmistakable voice in my spirit. I had been witnessing far more than a lesson in nature’s food chain; I had been witnessing a picture with tremendous spiritual meaning. Let me show you what I mean.Every person is like a garden or a field that must be tended or maintained very carefully. If we neglect that care—if we are inattentive to God—if we are careless and allow sin to take root—spiritual weeds start to grow. And if left untended for very long a fruitful garden or field can soon become overrun and turned into an overgrown jungle.
Weeds attract vermin like rats and field mice and allow them the cover to feed and breed without too much fear in the natural. Spiritual weeds also attract vermin of the demonic nature, and that undergrowth allows them to hide and carry out their work undetected. A little neglect, spiritually speaking, can quickly produce bondage in many different areas without a person even knowing it.
The only thing that gets rid of these spiritual weeds is confession and repentance—a high powered bush hog guided by you or me. Confession and repentance is our responsibility. Every so often, all us need to climb up on the tractor of prayer and unleash the bush hog on the weeds that have taken root in our own garden spot. (Stay out of your neighbor’s field—that’s his responsibility alone.)
“What about the hawk?” you might be thinking. “Where does he fit in all this?”
Oh, he’s there. Whenever we confess and repent, the enemy has no place to hide—no ground from which he can launch his attacks. He has to run, and when he does, the Hawk of heaven—the Holy Spirit—attacks with his talons bared and the enemy is no more. Gone in the blink of an eye.
What about your garden or field? Is it neatly manicured and mowed, or filled with underbrush and weeds? The Hawk of heaven is there—there high above your field…waiting. Why not crank the tractor and put the bush hog in gear?

A couple of years ago, I was working in my barn and needed a small roll of wire hanging from a nail near the roof. I found my step-ladder, set it up on the level floor, and climbed up to retrieve the wire. For almost 25 years, I’d worked off a step ladder every day, so I didn’t even give it a thought. I just went up it like a squirrel. I stopped at the last OSHA approved rung—two steps from the top and reached to get the wire, but it was just out of my reach. So, I climbed up one more rung and reached to grab it.

The ladder went one way, and I went the other. In all those years of construction work, I’d never fallen off a ladder—not even the ones that were precariously set in really dangerous places. Here I was, with all four legs of the ladder squarely set on level ground, and now I was flying through the air with the greatest of ease. As I fell, it was if my life clicked into slow motion. I fell between an old cast iron warm morning coal heater that had belonged to my great-aunt and a roll of extremely sharp barbed wire. I landed with all my weight on the ball of my back (on my shoulder blades) with my feet in the air.

It’s amazing how much force can be achieved by two hundred or so pounds in the space of about 5 feet. I can now say this from personal experience: it’s not the fall that hurts; it really is the sudden stop that creates the biggest problem. When I hit it the floor, it knocked the breath out of me. I’m not sure how long I lay there because I was a little dazed and unsure what had happened or where I was. So I just lounged there in a crumpled pile on my shoulders with my legs and feet sticking up in the air and my head in the dirt—expecting at any moment to feel a rush of excruciating pain as my spirit and soul departed from my now shattered body. But the pain never came, so my thoughts of certain departure were a bit premature.

Instead, I rolled over on my side and my legs finished their plunge to earth. I was stunned. I couldn’t figure out what had happened or how I’d gotten into the position I now found myself in. So, baffled and bewildered I just lay there. As I looked up I could still see the little roll of wire still hanging from a nail near the roof of the barn. I could also see the ladder and it confused me a bit because the last thing I remembered was standing on the step marked “Do Not Stand On!” All of a sudden, reality hit me as I stared up at the wire and the empty ladder. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up…

It was at that precise moment I remembered the sequence of overextending my reach, losing my balance, and crashing to the floor like a meteor. I remembered from where I had fallen.

To figure out what had happened and to learn a valuable lesson from the experience, it was necessary for me to re-assemble the pieces of that event—one memory at a time—from the beginning to the end. It was essential for me to remember where I had fallen from and why. It would have been easy to have gotten up, brushed myself off, made sure no one had witnessed the crash, and then went on my merry way. No harm! No foul!

And that my friend is what we tend to do in our relationship with Christ. It is so easy to make a wrong turn in our relationship with Christ—to be on the right road but going in the wrong direction and not even know it—to become enamored with the good things of God, while forgetting to nurture and care for our relationship with God. We can easily get caught up in doing all the right things for God and not be within a hundred miles of God. We can be involved in a myriad of ministries, activities, or spiritual disciplines and totally loose contact with the Lover of our Souls. We can possess a fantastic spiritual resume and have no real relationship with the God, who loves us without measure. We can be on the right road—just going in the wrong direction.

In a relationship, action without affection is always a recipe for a disaster, i.e. a long fall with a loud crash. The sad thing is most of us don’t even feel the sudden jolt when we hit. We just roll around for a time and expect things to be the same. After a while we get up, dust ourselves off, make sure no one was looking, and go about the business of serving God, never realizing we have slipped and fallen, or that our relationship with him has cooled. If we never comprehend we have fallen—we will never see the need for a personal revival. If we don’t take a few moments now and then to remember what our relationship with Christ was like in the beginning, we will never look up and realize how far we have fallen.

Of the human experience, one of the saddest realities is the adult who never achieves his or her dreams. Statistics reveal this description fits eight out of ten of us. Perhaps even sadder is the fact that most of this eighty percent won’t even remember as adults the dreams they imagined as children. That’s a disheartening stat for a dreamer.

Our childhood dreams are clues to the destiny God has for each of us. Yes, I believe those dreams are given to us by God in seed form. He plants them in the cracks and crevices of our soul and spirit, and over time, they sprout in our heart and mind. If we partner with God, those dreams begin to produce fruit and move from the realm of imagination into the realm of reality.

As children, we are all fitted with an aptitude for imagination—the ability to perceive something before it has become a reality. Imagination can be the stuff of far-fetched fantasy or the genesis of a reality yet to be discovered or created. Both find their residence in the heart and the mind of a child. And this imagination fertilizes and irrigates the dream God has planted in us.

But sadly, most of those dreams are stolen. We accept the limitations of others, their crushing words, our insatiable appetite for acceptance, or we bow to the altars of reason, intellect, and cynicism. Those dreams entrusted to us by God are eventually lost under the debris of unbelief somewhere deep within in the dusty, cobwebbed corridors of a no longer needed childhood imagination.

Our world desperately cries out for a handful of dreamers who will once again entertain those God-sized dreams. We long for a few visionaries, who glimpse through their imagination what God’s reality for this world looks like. We crave some romantics who will lead us out of this malaise of skepticism and back into the authenticity of a society marked by genuine love. Without the ability to transact in the currency of the imagination, the hearts of those who profess to be Christ-followers will calcify and eventually petrify, leaving the world to its own hopeless, apocalyptic implosion.

We must reclaim our God-given capacity to dream. Dreaming is not a waste of time, it is a necessity to rescue and redeem our limited time. I challenge you to ask God to awaken the dreams he’s sown into your soul and spirit so long ago. Stop gorging yourself on what culture, society, intellectualism, or business says is equitable, acceptable, and financially feasible. Stop listening to the naysayers and the doomsdayers. Blow off the dust, take it in your hands, hold it close to your heart, and nurture that dream until it becomes all that God says it will be.

Let the dreamers arise and ascend until these divine aspirations move from the fertile fields of imagination into the fruitful place of realization.

“Burning the candle at both ends” vividly captures the portrait of the day-to-day mêlée most of us call life. Our tasks, responsibilities, and obligations seem endless. Far too often we slog through our day like a “dead man walking” escorted by the tormenting twins of busyness and weariness. Hollow and unfulfilled, most of us don’t even recognize the twists and the turns in this dead-end trip until we’ve already arrived at its destination—exhaustion.

Like candles we were created to be light. Light displaces darkness. Darkness cannot quench the light regardless of how small the luminous glow may be. The only way darkness can claim victory is if the light is extinguished from lack of fuel. An empty tank, whether it’s our soul or our sports car, is the handiwork of neglect.

A candle is nothing more than a wick wrapped in wax. They work in partnership to sustain light once the candle is lighted. They are useless alone on their own, but together they produce an energy that sustains light. Candles are designed to burn slowly, but if you light both ends at the same time, it will rapidly burn out in half the time or twice as fast, whichever you prefer. We are not candles!

I know, I know. I can hear your excuses of why it’s that way and why you must continue your frenetic pace. But really—how’s that working for you? Are you creating a masterpiece or churning out the same old tired stuff. Do you embrace Monday like a lover, or long for Friday like a punch-drunk boxer yearning for the bell? Here’s a fact: we were designed to operate by our Creator at a high level of efficiency, creativity, and longevity. We were not designed to burn up or out.

Exhaustion stunts our efficiency, saps our creativity, and greatly diminishes our longevity. In other words, our wax melts into the carpet, our wick turns to ash, and our flame is extinguished leaving our spirit, soul, and body stranded on the shoulder of life’s highway. When—not if—that happens, deadlines, appointments, conferences, blogs, book tours, posts, tweets, meetings, and all those “essential” endeavors and endless activities become the dirt that will bury us.

If you don’t care for your soul—no one else will! Perhaps you don’t have the time or the money to take a vacation to some exotic spot, but you can trim the wick or replenish your fuel supply. Here a few suggestions:

• Disconnect from your mobile device, leave it in the house or office and take a 15 minute walk outside.
• Power down your computer, turn off the lights, lean back in your chair and close your eyes. A short nap never hurt anyone.
• Find a quiet place and have a conversation (talk and then listen, or better yet, simply listen) with God.
• Exercise regularly and eat healthy.
• Breathe deeply and dream a few minutes every day.
• Go for a ride in the countryside (get off the interstate and travel the backroads).
• Crank up your imagination and release the playful kid trapped inside of you!

Exhaustion is a choice; it’s not mandatory! Take care of your candle and its light will guide you where busyness is afraid to go.

Pope Francis has taken America by storm! Whenever a country receives a papal visit you expect teeming crowds of expectant, excited people, waiting for hours to catch a glimpse of their leader. He is, after all, the shepherd of the largest Christian flock in the world. But—this pope and this visit were different from those in the past. Pope Francis’ popularity was astonishing on all fronts. The press and the politicians fawned, while the faithful lined up for a touch, a prayer, or a selfie. Even the non-Catholics were gushing with admiration and respect.

The question begs to be asked—why?

Perhaps the reason is simple: Jorge Mario Bergoglio seems intent on imitating Jesus. The real Jesus—the high definition one found in the Bible, not the weak, wimpy caricature of modern culture—is still very popular with the average person struggling to make it through the day. Francis has chosen humility over arrogance. He has chosen people over power and politics. He recognizes the pain of suffering and is compassionately moved to do something about it. In essence, this leader of over 1.2 billion Catholics has chosen Jesus, not another pope, saint, or trendy cause, to imitate. He leads by serving—what a novel idea!

That model happens to be the Jesus paradigm of leadership and what an example to mimic. Perhaps the time has come for all of us to replicate that pattern in our daily lives. Perhaps it’s time to not just ask “What would Jesus do?” in areas of morality, but in every other area as well. For those who wear the “Christian label,” it would serve us well to remember it means “little Christ.”

Perhaps the secret to Pope Francis’ popularity is that he is willing to decrease—to disappear—so that Christ might increase. Perhaps that popularity belongs not to Francis, but to the Christ he works so hard to emulate.