YOU'LL NEVER KNOW

I was playing basketball with my 5 year old son, Ryan this morning. After baseball season, he's now into basketball. I enjoyed baseball season because I've always wanted to coach my son's baseball team. I had this dream way before I became a dad. Pretty shallow dream, I know, but what the heck.

As I was playing with Ryan, he said, "Dad, I love playing basketball in the morning because it reminds me of Tagaytay."

I thought about it for a moment and asked him what about Tagaytay?

He said that it reminded him of times we would play together and how fun it was.

It's really the little things, that make the little difference that eventually makes the big difference. Spending time with them is like sowing seeds. You'll really never know which ones will get lodged in their long time memory and make a difference.

So... just keep sowing good memories.

CHANGE IS PERMANENT

A carpenter came to our house to fix the shelves in our storage room. In the process, we found out that he was also a plumber. The bathroom sink in our room wasn't working right. It would take 30 seconds to fill up my left hand with water whenever I'd brush my teeth. It was eternally slow but since we've gotten so used to it, we've tolerated the situation.

But when the carpenter/plumber fixed the problem, we realized how wonderful it was to have a good working bathroom sink. That 's when I remembered a principle that I learned years ago - "what you tolerate, you will never change."

Paul says in 1 Cor 14:12, "Since you are eager to have spiritual gifts, try to excel ..."
God deserves our best. So do our kids... As one of our teachers, Jay Ravelo, put it, "Excellence is not our goal. It's our standard."

God bless you as you disciple, train and launch a generation of world changers."

FIXED REFERENCE POINT

Astronauts train their minds to fix on a reference point. That's the problem with weightlessness. When they are in space, they are trained to focus on a particular reference point or else they lose their bearing. They also have to be strapped in someplace, or they float. Merely pushing a simple button will be hard to do if they are not fixed. That is why they have to wear shoes with suction cups to plant themselves onto the ground.

Even when they sleep, it doesn't matter whether they sleep on the "top" of the bunk or on the opposite side of it, the "bottom" of the bunk, or even sleep standing up. There is no "top" or "bottom", no "up" or "down" in space. They shut their eyes and their inner reference tells them that they are lying down.

In a society with many different reference points, we all the more need to stress the infallibility and inerrancy of God's word. In a postmodern world, people believe that “what is true for you may not necessarily be true for me.” We have become a society with no absolutes. But the basic truths from God’s word remain the same - God is good, sin is wrong and Jesus is Lord.

The Bible says in 2 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” The Word of God is our fixed reference point. We need to drill this into the hearts of our young disciples so that they will not be caught in the weightlessness of post-modernism.

God bless you as you disciple, train and launch a generation of world changers.