I’m married, and if you are too, then statistically speaking, one of us is going to get a divorce.

I’m not writing that to be sensational, but I just want to be clear that it’s a big deal. And I don’t know if we Christians do a very good job of treating it as such.

Look at it this way: if one out of every two neighbors on your street got mauled by a bear, would you be more careful about bears? Would you buy books on how to keep your house safe from bears? Would you carry a gun and bear spray if there were in fact such a thing as bear spray? Probably. Yet, when it comes to divorce, we don’t do many equivalent things. And the ratios are equally as high as that bear scenario.

When was the last time you and your wife visited a counselor for just a tune up? What was the last book the two of you read together to strengthen your marriage? If you have kids, how many dates do you go on every month?

I fail at most of those things, so please don’t read finger-pointing in this post. My wife and I have far more fake dates at home (dinner after the kids are in bed) than real dates and for Valentine’s Day we got each other a hot water heater. It’s a “State Select” model which I’ve been assured is one of the sexier hot water heaters available. The finger is pointed at me. I just think divorce is something we should think about and maybe work on changing in our generation.

(This was one of the earliest posts I wrote on this site and felt appropriate for the tail end of love month.)

p.s. What’s the best marriage advice you ever heard? Mine was that “In most relationships there is a “how person” and a “wow person.” When the wow person tells the how person ‘I’ve got a crazy idea, we should start a business and then learn how to paint and then go camping, etc, etc, etc, the how person will ask questions like ‘where will we get the money for that, what about your job, when would we have the time?’ They think they’re contributing to the conversation but the wow person often takes it as an attack against the idea. So instead of saying “how” when a wow person comes up with a lot of ideas, the how person should say “wow” because the reality is that the wow person is going to execute maybe 1 out of 100 of the ideas and just wants to share the overflow of ideas with his wife. I’m the wow person in our marriage and my wife is the how. And that simple idea really rocked our world. John Woodall at North Point preached on that once.

So what’s the best marriage advice you ever heard?

I interpret any two people closing any door in the entire office at work as a private meeting that is being held to discuss my imminent termination.

When I hear the sliding door sound that our cool offices make when we seal them shut, that little panicked voice inside me says, “You’re going to get fired.” When I am left off a meeting invite, I automatically think, “Why did that guy leave me off the meeting? Does he know I’m a dead man walking? Is he thinking ‘what’s the use of inviting Acuff to this meeting, he’ll be fired soon?” And I start to worry that I might be turning invisible. Like that photograph of Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, I’m disappearing and unless someone plays “Earth Angel” and two people make out, I’m gone.

That’s ridiculous. It’s embarrassing that the running dialog in my head gallops to that so quickly like a drunken gazelle. (See, even that analogy was lacking because I’m stressed.)

But as dumb as that is, as complicated and tangled as the thoughts in my head feel, I think they come back to something I’ve written about on this site before, something that is impossibly simple …

I want someone to tell me that I am enough.

I want someone to validate that I matter. That I am valuable and important. Like Thom Yorke said in the song “Creep,” “I want you to notice when I’m not around.”

And it turns out I’m not the only one.

Two weeks ago news broke that Alex Rodriguez, arguably one of the greatest baseball players of our generation, took steroids in 2003. If you don’t follow sports, this was a huge deal. It’s the equivalent of say, Samson using performance enhancements or finding out that David had used a pistol on Goliath instead of a sling.

That a professional athlete used steroids isn’t that interesting to me, but in his confession interview with Peter Gammons, Rodriguez said something really revealing. When asked why he did it, when asked why after signing the biggest, most lucrative contract in baseball history for $252 million, he risked it all by taking steroids, he replied:

“When I arrived in Texas in 2001, I felt an enormous amount of pressure. I felt like I had all the weight of the world on top of me, and I needed to perform, and perform at a high level every day. Back then, it was a different culture. It was very loose. I was young. I was stupid. I was naive. And I wanted to prove to everyone that, you know, I was worth being one of the greatest players of all time.”

He wanted to prove to everyone that he was worth being one of the greatest players of all time. That when the Texas Rangers signed that $252 million contract, Alex Rodriguez was worth it. He wanted the fans and the owners of the ball club and people that watch him on television and journalists and anyone that ever came in contact with him to believe he was worth it.

He wanted to know that he was enough.

The unfortunate thing for me and Rodriguez is that no one on the planet is going to be able to tell us that to our satisfaction. Not a stadium full of fans, not every coworker I’ve ever had. Not a sports journalist. Not my web traffic or technorati ranking or eventual book sales.

That’s the problem with asking other people to tell us we’re enough. They can’t. They didn’t make us. They didn’t knit us in the womb or imagine us thousands of years before our parents danced at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. (That’s Back to the Future reference number two for those playing along at home.)

Even our friends and family members, the people that know and love us best can’t satisfy the deep desires of our heart because they didn’t put them there. They don’t know where they’re hidden or even know what this crazy work of art called “our lives” is supposed to look like.

And when we ask other people to tell us we’re worth enough we end up doing crazy things. Like taking steroids or lying in bed awake at night wondering why your name wasn’t on a Microsoft Outlook Meeting Invite.

Fortunately for you and me and Alex Rodriguez I went ahead and asked God if we were all worth it. He said “yes.” He said He sent His Son because He wanted us to know how very “enough” we all were. He said to feel free to ask Him that same question yourself. Go on, I dare you to. I promise that regardless of whether you’re one of the greatest baseball players that ever lived or a stay at home mom that feels invisible sometimes, the answer is going to be yes.

Before I met my wife, I stored my money in empty Midori bottles instead of a savings account. (Feel free to read that sentence again because it’s a doozy.) After graduating from college, while at my second “real job,” I decided that the best long term financial plan for me was probably to cash my check in dimes, unroll the dimes and then place them inside sticky, empty bottles of Midori liquor.

I was like some sort of suburban pirate, living with my parents, storing my hard earned booty in bottles. I was what the ladies call “a real catch.”

A decade later, I’ve grown up a little. I now have a savings account and direct deposit and a dozen other little things that are slightly more sophisticated than my bottle financial plan. And I don’t think about money much now. It’s not that we’re rolling in cake, we just know where it’s going, we’ve done the Dave Ramsey thing, and have discovered how to spend less than we make. Revolutionary idea, right? Our money automatically goes where it’s supposed to go without me getting that involved. Including our tithe check. That one marches off to a few different places each month and I can cross the word “generous” off my Christian to do list.

One of the places we give to is an orphanage my Uncle helped start in Kenya. They have over 300 students, many of which were orphaned by the AIDS epidemic or who themselves suffer with the disease. It’s an amazing place and I am genuinely happy that we are able to sponsor six different kids right now. But I realized during a conversation in my small group the other night that I’m giving all those kids something that doesn’t really matter to me. I’m not sacrificing to give them anything. I’m not really even changing my life all that much to create room for them in my heart. I’m giving them a check my wife writes, with an asset I don’t think about that often, money.

The asset I care most about, the one that is my most precious resource right now, the one I covet most desperately? That one I am hoarding for myself. That one I don’t even give them a scrap of. That one is just for me.

That one is time.

I could probably fill a suitcase with the amount of letters the six kids in Kenya have written me and my family. That’s like a small basketball team and they are able to generate quite a lot of mail. But do you know how many times I’ve written them? Zero. Sure, I give them money, and occasionally if I bring the mail in that day and see a letter from them, I will think to myself, “Oh yeah Africa. We’re so kind to give them money.” And then I’ll go right back to living my life without giving them a second of thought for another month.

The kids know too. They are well aware that I am not writing them letters. One of them wrote us a few months ago and said something like, “I pray that God will give you the strength to write me a letter.” Ouch.

The worst part is that I can’t claim I don’t like to write. I love to write. I’ve written the equivalent of a 1,000 page book on my blogs in the last year. But I haven’t written those kids, because I’m not generous with my time. I get the small hit of feeling good about myself because I’ve given money, but meanwhile have really kept the resource I care about most to myself.

And on top of that, I can’t even act like the Bible doesn’t address stuff like this head on. I mean it would be nice if I could pretend this issue was fuzzy and gray, but it’s not.

In 2 Samuel 24, David wants to build an altar to God on the threshing floor of a guy named Araunah the Jebusite. Araunah, possessing perhaps the only obscure Biblical name none of my friends have used for their kids, offers to give David the threshing floor for free. David’s response is instant and unfortunate:

“No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.”

It’s unfortunate because it convicts me about the personal costs associated with my offering. When I give a tiny portion of the money that God has given my family to help those kids in Africa, I am not giving something that costs me much. For me to give them time, for me to not go jogging one night because the African kids are going to get that hour instead of me, or for me to use one of “my” Friday nights to write six letters and pray about each of them, that costs me something.

Which is why that’s what we did last week. I wrote them letters. It cost me an hour and I felt that cost, but I can’t keep offering things that cost me nothing.

And that’s the question today:

Are you offering things that don’t cost you anything?

If God grades on a guilt system, then I want to be upfront with you, my house in heaven is going to be sick. I don’t know if we’re still judging things by their proximity to “the hook,” but if we are, you should consider my heaven house to be “off.” There’s going to be waterslides, everywhere. Not just in the pool, but between rooms. You want to get a Capri Sun from the kitchen? Hop on a waterslide. You want to go watch CS Lewis arm wrestle Aragorn from Lord of the Rings in the Ruckus Room? Hop on a waterslide.

That last thought didn’t even make sense. What’s a fictional character doing in heaven? Am I really going to call my living room the “Ruckus Room” because that’s where the Ruckus happens and the floor is made of trampoline and the walls are made of blue cotton candy and to get in you have to open presents and watch old episodes of So You Think You Can Dance? Yes, that is exactly what I am going to do, especially if the amount of shame we inflict on ourselves has anything to do with how big our mansion is in heaven.

If self-induced shame is calculated at all into the blueprints of the beyond, my house is going to be a lot bigger than yours, because I am amazing at guilt.

Even as I write this, I’m feeling guilty. It’s like an out of body guilt experience. I’m feeling guilty about something as I write about guilt. Just phenomenal.

My greatest source of shame, the record I like to spin the most is called, “The Ways Jon Lets God Down.” Have you ever heard that one? It’s got some jams on it, including:

1. Jon should know better by now but still makes the same mistakes.
2. Jon gets arrogant when something good happens and only comes to God when life is raining.
3. Jon wrestles with the simplest elements of faith and will never be a good enough Christian.

I could go on and on, it’s an album I’m really familiar with, but lately, it’s getting harder to play it. Lately, as I’ve started to explore my shame with God, I’ve started to think that maybe God sees my shame and desire to beat myself into submission with guilt differently than I do. Maybe if I asked Him, what He thought, He’d say:

“What if you struck yourself in the head with a chain every time you felt guilty or ashamed for letting me down? What if, you physically punished yourself every time you were not perfect? What if the self abuse was physical and external, instead of mental and internal? Would the scars cry for help? Would the pain you were causing yourself seem cruel and unnecessary? Would your heart break if you watched that person? This is what I see when I watch you Jon.

My son, my son, who told you that the crucifixion was not over?

Who told you that is what I require? That is not me. My blood debt was paid long ago. And yet, you bleed. With the knife of good intentions you cut and try to edit out the parts of yourself you imagine I’ll not like. You slice and cut and bleed and fall and hurt.

I see it all. And I grieve. I grieve the joy you’re missing. I grieve the lies you’re believing. I grieve. I grieve. Stop, please stop.”

I didn’t really want to write that today. It’s been sitting in my five star notebook since December 10. And saying the word “blood” is one of those Christian words that kind of make you look like a snake handler. You’ll never hear a rapper at the Grammy’s or an athlete throwing out a verbal high five to God say, “Big shout out to God. Thank you for the blood of Christ.”

I probably look like a complete Christian freak right now. But I never realized that by beating myself up, I was putting on a parade of pain before the Lord as a way to enter His presence. And I never really thought about that hurting Him. Not because He’s disappointed, but because He loves me. Madly, passionately, unabashedly, He loves us.

So let’s put down the chains. Your house in heaven is going to be big enough and you’re more than welcome to use my Ruckus Room. I promise.

I will accept anyone’s friend request on facebook. I don’t discriminate. I don’t filter out weird people or hate on anyone that has a unibrow, like me. I see facebook as a cool chance to connect with readers of this site. So if you ask me to be your friend, please know I am going to accept that offer. (Let’s do it. Let’s be friends.)

But I never accept friend suggestions. If you’ve never used facebook, a friend suggestion is a feature where you can send a note to someone and essentially say, “I think you should be friends with this other person.” You get the other person’s name and a little photo of them. If you choose to accept it, then you send that suggested person a friend request.

It’s meant to be a neat little way to connect people, but I’ve started to get some random suggestions. Someone will send me a suggestion like, “Tammy Smith, Red Bluff High School.” I’ll look at it, quickly realize that I don’t know Tammy Smith and think, “If I accept this friend suggestion, Tammy Smith, a high school sophomore, is going to get a random friend request from a complete stranger, that happens to be a 33-year old married man, living in the suburbs of Atlanta with his two kids, who doesn’t even use his full name on facebook and kind of has a weird smirk in his photo.” Wow, the only thing missing from my induction into the creepy hall of fame is perhaps a mustache and a scar running down my cheek from a knife fight I got into behind a dumpster at a truck stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.

That’s a completely silly thought, but while thinking about that the other day at 5:00 in the morning, I realized that I approach witnessing to people about God in a pretty similar fashion. (I know, whoa, did he just leap from the New Jersey Turnpike knife fight story to witnessing to people about the everlasting love of Jesus Christ? Yes, yes I did.)

The truth is that sometimes I drop Jesus into someone’s lap like I’m sending a random friend suggestion on facebook. I don’t really tell them much about Him. I don’t really invest in the life of the person I’m talking too. I don’t even really listen to their story. I’ve just rushed to the end of my agenda and essentially said, “Yeah, yeah, regardless of what’s going on with you and your whole situation, I’d like to send you this friend suggestion to connect with Jesus. Here you go, vaya con dios stranger.”

It’s kind of like a Jesus drive by, me just spraying folks with the name of Christ and hoping it sticks. I don’t think that’s a particularly good thing. I can’t imagine that’s what God had in mind when He gave us the great commission. So what can we do to change that? How do we not just “friend suggestion” Jesus?

I don’t know. I’m all out of silver bullets, and to be honest there are about 3700 other blogs that have better advice about sharing your faith. But I have started to do something differently in the last few months. I’ve started to ask people questions I genuinely want answers to. Instead of asking a question and then forcing the conversation back into my framework regardless of their answer, I’ve tried to just listen and let people talk and remain engaged in what they have to say. The more I’ve done that, the more I’ve been amazed at how willing people are to open up when you actually listen. And sometimes, when I feel like God is cool with it, I get to ask my favorite question of all, “Who is carrying all that with you?”

Because everyone has an “all that.” Whether you’re going through a divorce or the most wildly successful season of work in your life, everyone has an “all that” they’re carrying. (Sometimes success is the most crushing “all that” you can face because what you thought would make things perfect just isn’t and that’s pretty terrifying.) 99 out of 100 times the answer to that question is “no one.” One woman told me she didn’t want to burden her happy friends with her sadness so she keeps it hidden. One man told me he wasn’t a guy’s guy and since he didn’t understand football it was hard for him to form relationships with other guys.

Time after time, the answer to the question “Who is carrying all that with you” comes back as “no one.”

But it’s not one of those questions you can ask and then disappear as soon as you’ve friend suggested Jesus. You have to be willing to carry the “all that” with the person you’re talking with. You can’t fade into the weeds of life like dissolving into the sea of profiles of facebook. That’s why witnessing is hard. That’s why it’s easier to friend suggest Jesus to strangers than it is to introduce your friend Jesus to someone.

It’s not right, but I think that’s why it happens. And I’m tired of it happening with me.

We’re going through a period of tough economic times right now and advertisers are starting to get pretty desperate. People aren’t spending money like they used to, so brands are forced to make some outlandish claims.

My favorite is one I recently saw Harley Davidson make in last week’s issue of Sports Illustrated. Here is what the subhead of their magazine advertisement said:

“For over 100 years, we’ve unleashed a lot of souls. We’ve made men bolder, women stronger and shrinks poorer.”

That is adorable.

The idea that sculpted metal and rubber from a factory in Milwaukee is going to unleash your soul is so over the top ludicrous that it travels passed ridiculous and comes all the way back to hilarious.

And I’m cool with Harley. I think they have a great brand, an amazingly loyal fan base and an important role in American pop culture. I like all those things, but what I like the most is how upfront they are about wanting to be your idol. Rarely does something desiring our adoration come right out and say, “Think of me less as a motorcycle and more as a soul liberation machine.”

I wish all our idols were that obvious. I wish that when I got a glimpse of something I was tempted to idolize, I would laugh at it like I laughed at that Harley Davidson ad and move on. But I usually don’t. Usually I sit and stay awhile. I feed my idol an hour here, an hour there until it grows big enough to start eating weeks and months. Even something that starts good, like a new job opportunity, can grow into a monster of attention, as I start to ask it to rescue me, to save me from boredom and give me adventure and happiness and complete me. To unleash my soul.

If I’m being honest, the book I’m writing and this blog are two things I constantly find myself attempting to idolize. There are some mornings when I wake up and think, “Oh magical blog, please validate my worth today, through the power of Google Analytics and web traffic, tell me I’m somebody special and important. Free me from my normal life and grace me with your awesomeness.” And just when I started to deal with that in counseling, the book came along and I was back on the idol band wagon, “Oh book, you’ll probably be able to cure cancer and poverty and the bird flu within the first 15 pages. If I sell enough of you, I can retire and buy a Galaga machine and never need to stress out again. Let’s vacation together on a book tour and get one of those double bikes and splash each other in a water fountain like the cast of Friends. Here’s every free minute I have today, take them, they are all yours. In the immortal words of Chris de Burgh’s famous whisper, ‘I love you.’” (Yeah that’s right, I just referenced the song “Lady in Red.”)

So what am I doing about it? Giving the book and the blog back to God hourly, sometimes even minutely. (I didn’t know “minutely” was a word until about 2 seconds ago, interesting.) I keep letting go of them, over and over again. But it’s hard, because unlike the Harley ad, the blog comes with an air of holiness. “You’re writing about God. Come on, it’s about sweet baby Jesus, don’t you want to be a good steward of your talents and your time. Give in.” And that’s true, but I can still take that good thing and corrupt it. I can still take something well intentioned and pollute it with my ego, my selfishness and my brokenness.

And that’s why idols are so tricky, because even good things like our kids, our marriages, our jobs, our books and blogs, can become idols if we’re not careful.

So what are you idolizing right now?

Am I the only one that wishes every idol was as honest as Harley Davidson?

If Men’s Health magazine was true, you would never need to buy more than one issue. If the articles that promised flat abs and less stress and better sex really worked as promised, you’d never need to have a subscription because every issue is the exact same thing. This was the thought I had while standing at the magazine rack at Wal-Mart watching my daughters read My Little Pony books. (Long live Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie by the way. Toola-Roola is a punk. I don’t even know what Toola-Roola is into, at least Rainbow Dash is all about rainbows.)

As I stood there though, I noticed something else kind of weird. The promises that the front cover of men’s magazines make were eerily similar to the promises that the back cover of Christian books make. So I thought it might be fun to play a little guessing game and see if you can figure out which is which:

1. “Build your perfect life and strip away stress for good”
A. Front Cover of Men’s Magazine
B. Back Cover of Christian Book

2. “The Secret to Effortless Success”
A. Front Cover of Men’s Magazine
B. Back Cover of Christian Book

3. “Total Health Starts Here”
A. Front Cover of Men’s Magazine
B. Back Cover of Christian Book

4. “967 Secrets of Happiness”
A. Front Cover of Men’s Magazine
B. Back Cover of Christian Book

5. “Supercharge Your Brain”
A. Front Cover of Men’s Magazine
B. Back Cover of Christian Book

6. “Keep Yourself Happy”
A. Front Cover of Men’s Magazine
B. Back Cover of Christian Book

7. “Gain control over your mind”
A. Front Cover of Men’s Magazine
B. Back Cover of Christian Book

8. “Uncover the proven process that will lead to a life of success and total fulfillment”
A. Front Cover of Men’s Magazine
B. Back Cover of Christian Book

9. “The Anatomy of a Successful Life”
A. Front Cover of Men’s Magazine
B. Back Cover of Christian Book

10. “Stress Proof Your Brain “
A. Front Cover of Men’s Magazine
B. Back Cover of Christian Book

11. “Living Life without Limits”
A. Front Cover of Men’s Magazine
B. Back Cover of Christian Book

12. “10 keys to fulfilling your destiny”
A. Front Cover of Men’s Magazine
B. Back Cover of Christian Book

13. “10 Essential Success Secrets”
A. Front Cover of Men’s Magazine
B. Back Cover of Christian Book

14. “Hold on to your hair – 5 new cures”
A. Front Cover of Men’s Magazine
B. Back Cover of Christian Book

OK, that last one was easy, but it reminded me of that Richard Marx song, “Hold on to the Night” and I promised myself I’d make at least three Richard Marx references on this site in 2009, sooooo one down. (Click here for the answers to the quiz.)

I didn’t use the titles of the books because I’m not trying to denigrate those authors. I haven’t read what’s inside the books and ultimately, I’m not sure what this little exercise means. But standing there that day in the midst of My Little Pony land, seeing how similar the two types of headlines were, and knowing that publishers of both items used those sentences because they knew those would motivate people to buy the products, I had to question my own motivations.

Am I that different from the world?

I’ve got God, the very power of Christ inside of me, shouldn’t my desires be different and not so interchangeable?

Do I ever go to God with a laundry list of better demands? Give me a better marriage, a better ministry, a better life, a better job, a better everything?

Do I chase the blessings of God sometimes more than the presence?

Do I ever treat God like a really good self help guru that is there to meet my needs?

Do I look weird scribbling this all down in a small moleskine notebook by the magazine rack in Wal-Mart?

Yes, yes I do. But I don’t want God to simply be a new vehicle for the things I want. I want God to be what I want.

I want Him to be enough.

Have you ever bumped into the unexplainable? Something that didn’t line up with your expectations of how this life works? A moment that didn’t make sense but yet was still happening all the same?

Chris Cornell did. He’s from Soundgarden and Audioslave. Here is what he said in a recent issue of Rolling Stone about hearing Jeff Buckley sing:

“Hearing Jeff’s live at SIN-E EP was one of those moments that happens only a few times in your life as a music fan—it was something otherworldly … that’s not about technical ability, that’s something else.”

In that same issue, Billy Joel struggled to make sense of Ray Charles:

“But there was something else I didn’t realize until we sang together in the Eighties, … When he sings, he’s not just singing soulfully. He is imparting his soul. You are hearing something deep within the man.”

Robert Plant, lead singer of Led Zeppelin, had the same problem trying to capture Elvis:

“There is a difference between people who sing and those who take that voice to another, otherworldly place …”

Regardless of their faith backgrounds, each of those musicians couldn’t escape the urge to leave their ordinary vocabularies behind in their attempt to explain the unexplainable.

There’s something else.

Something “otherwordly.”

A soul being imparted.

The temptation is to read quotes like that and think you have to be a superstar to become unexplainable. That you have to be famous or big or important. But I think that each day, God gives us all a chance to be the unexplainable. To help someone when it doesn’t make sense. To love someone who is refusing to love us. To share something that on the surface leaves us with nothing of our own.

That is what evangelism is to me, the simple act of being the unexplainable.

That is my goal this year.

When cool goes right and God asks me to go left, I want to do the unexplainable.

When easy is up and God asks me to go down, I want to do the unexplainable.

When fake is free and honesty is expensive, I want to do the unexplainable.

I want to live my life in a way that raises questions. I want my actions and my attitude and everything I am to encourage people to think, “There’s something else.”

That’s my hope for you this year. That’s my hope for me this year.

Let’s be the unexplainable.

The other day, I thought about going to seminary for about 14 seconds. I don’t want to become a minister or go back to school or even have my knowledge of God sharpened in a great learning environment. I just want to be right.

I was curious about seminary because I don’t want to “get God wrong.” I have tons of friends that went to seminary for the right reasons. Me? I figured that if I spent a few years focusing on the Bible and seminary, I could eventually become bulletproof. I could add a layer of scriptural Kevlar to my writing and have a great argument to shoot down anybody that tries to disagree with me.

When I realized that my desire to read the Bible was to win arguments, I felt kind of gross. I want my motives to know God better to be pure. I want them to be noble and not self serving. I don’t want to treat God like a really, really, really good self help guru. When I read the Bible, I want that desire to come from a thirst for the truth and an all consuming need to be close to God’s Word and His heart.

And when I realize it’s not, when I see the brokenness of my motives, I want to run away. To go figure my motives out, fix them and then come back to God when they are pure and not self serving. But in the middle of wrestling with that, I felt like maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe, if I quieted down for a minute, God wouldn’t kick me off His doorstep until I had the right motives, maybe He would say,

Don’t you see what you’re doing? This is the enemy’s favorite lie. This is the idea of needing something else when you’ve already got me. This is the same lie that he told in the garden. Adam and Eve already had my presence, but he told them there is something they were missing. This is simply a way for the enemy to put conditions on something that is unconditional, my love. What you’re saying is that your motives aren’t pure. They aren’t noble. You come to me with a wish list sometimes. Your heart is in the wrong place. You feel guilty and distraught, because your heart isn’t right. Well stop. Stop thinking you must stand outside my presence waiting until you have the right motives to come in. You will never be noble enough on your own to come into my presence. That is why I sent Christ. You will never have a heart that is pure enough before you can come into my presence. I alone can purify and sanctify your heart. That is something that happens in me and through me, never before me. I make motives noble. I make hearts pure. Not you.

I never really know if something I write is just for me, like maybe I’m the only one that struggles with the idea of trying to sanctify myself. That perhaps, I alone try to get things looking noble and pure before I come into the Lord’s presence. That maybe this is a sign of spiritual immaturity and other people have already figured out this issue long ago.

But if you’re like me, and you doubt and you get tangled up in trying to put conditions on grace and forgiveness and God’s presence, I’ll go back to what I’ve written about a number of times. The prodigal son story.

He didn’t get things right before he came. He brought all the junk with him. He brought all the failure. He brought all the mistakes. Luke 15:20 says, “He got up and went to his father” and the very next verse says, “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.”

As many times as I’ve written about that story, I’ve never paid enough attention to the phrase “while he was still a long way off.” That’s me. I want to think that I’ve come a long way in my faith, that I am maturing and growing and getting closer, but the truth is, I am “a long way off.”

The expanse between my heart and God’s feels large sometimes. We feel miles apart, but that is OK. God spans the distance. He runs. He loves me even though I am a “long way off.”

And He feels the exact same way about you.

Wait, wait, wait, please don’t leave.

Since I started this site 438 visits have come from people that searched for the word “porn.”

First, let me say that searching for porn and landing on this site must suck. Honestly, if I had searched for that (which I have before) and landed on a site that specialized in comparing GI Joe characters to the Bible, I would have left instantly. And you did. The average visit by someone looking for porn is 7 seconds long.

But have you stopped to think about how crazy it is that you landed here?

When you search the phrase “porn” in Google, you get 252,000,000 results. There are a quarter billion web pages you can land on, so how did you get to mine?

I guess we could say it’s coincidence or that maybe you already looked at the other 251,999,999 other pages and mine was the last available. But you probably already know what I’m going to say – maybe it was God. God is weird and wild like that and I think He loves getting people to end up in different places than they expected. But let’s not talk about Him right now.

Let’s not talk about the church or Christianity. The only thing I want you to know is that you are not alone. (That sentence sounded a little like a hallmark card but you know what you I meant.) Porn tries to isolate you. Our society still fails to really admit it’s a problem. When people get caught in it they’ll claim alcoholism or drug addiction or a million other issues before admitting something sexual. And a DUI is just something celebrities do on the weekend. The famous have made rehab a common idea that holds far less shame these days. But porn is still a dragon of sorts.

I don’t know where you are. You might be in the middle of medicating as fast and as furious as you can. You might be swearing off it for the millionth time, white knuckling away the temptation, trying to be perfect and earn back whatever it is that you’ve lost. You might be realizing that’s impossible and that you deserve a break and need to relax. You might be starting the circle all over again in the middle of medicating as fast and as furious …

And on top of that, this is the hardest time of year isn’t it? In addition to all the triggers of family and holiday expectations, it’s so easy for us to fall into the resolution trap. Nobody starts a resolution on Tuesday, December 16th we tell ourselves. Let’s wait until January 1st to really focus our energy on making a fresh start. This time will be different. January 1 is when the new me comes out. In the meantime, I’ve got two weeks for one last hurrah with porn and then it’s time to get serious.

If porn could carry a knife, it would stab you. It’s a jerk like that. But if you ever need any resources visit http://www.xxxchurch.com/. Those guys are great and they get it.

Sorry this visit was so weird. Chances are, it’s only going to get weirder if God’s trying to let you know how much He loves you.

Jon