Thankful Thursday: He Rocks!

This week, Iris has asked us to share “five rea­sons that I am thank­ful this week and why I think Jesus rocks/I ‘dig’ Him.”

First, though, I hope you noticed the new Word Press theme. The pre­vi­ous theme was a stop­gap mea­sure until I could get every­thing trans­ferred over from Blog­ger and set up here on Word Press. I have spent many hours work­ing on this tran­si­tion and it is still not com­plete, but I am pleased with how it is com­ing along.

I am very happy that I made the switch to Word Press — thank­ful that I received an answer to my prayers about whether or not to make the change.  The migra­tion has proven time-consuming and some­times frus­trat­ing, but very much worth the effort expended.

I am also thank­ful that the tech­nol­ogy is start­ing to make a lit­tle more sense to me — still on a very rudi­men­tary level, of course. But I finally got the sta­tic pages that I have been long­ing for (the links across the top) and check out the Sitemap page which has me more tick­led that I can describe. ((It is still a work in progress because I am in the process of orga­niz­ing cat­e­gories, cre­at­ing excerpts which will enhance the archive list­ing, etc.))

I’m look­ing for­ward to final­iz­ing this process so that I can focus solely on the writ­ingI do here with­out con­stantly tweakng the theme, lay­out, etc. I feel like I have finally found my “blog iden­tity,” so to speak, and for that, I am extremely thankful.

Jesus Rocks! for infi­nite rea­sons, but nar­row­ing it down to the five that are most impor­tant to me:

He is the ulti­mate behav­ioral role model. 

When in doubt, I try to remem­ber to con­sider how he would han­dle a sit­u­a­tion. I don’t always suc­ceed, which leads to fre­quent “V-8 moments” — some­times a long time later. But I have found that if I have the com­po­sure to stop and looks at a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion from that van­tage point, I always make a bet­ter deci­sion than when I self-reliantly plunge in.

He loves me uncon­di­tion­ally.

It doesn’t mat­ter how badly I botch things up. He reaf­firms that his love is bound­less, unlim­ited and never failing.

There are peo­ple in my life who love me as uncon­di­tion­ally as any human being can, but it is not quite the same because the best human rela­tion­ship is never with­out some dif­fi­culty, no mat­ter how minor. Not so with the Sav­ior, of course.

He is utterly reli­able.

The most ded­i­cated per­son can for­get a date, occa­sion, appoint­ment because of our imper­fect human nature. But Jesus is com­pletely reli­able, always avail­able, always ready to listen. 

He is the ulti­mate multi-tasker.

Jesus han­dles mul­ti­ple tasks and an infi­nite num­ber of lines of com­mu­ni­ca­tion effortlessly.

The other day I hit a new record: I was work­ing here at my desk in front of my com­puter and had per­sonal and busi­ness e-mails arriv­ing simul­ta­ne­ously. Until that point, I had expe­ri­enced being on one tele­phone when the other rang, but on this par­tic­u­lar morn­ing, I was talk­ing on my per­sonal land line when both my per­sonal and busi­ness cell phones rang. The per­son I was talk­ing to was laugh­ing because he could hear the e-mail sounds and then both cell phone ring­tones, plus the tele­vi­sion was run­ning in the back­ground. About that moment, some­one walked by the house (the door was open) and my dogs began bark­ing. I thought to myself, “This is the moment I was warned about. I have achieved not just sen­sory over­load, but sen­sory melt­down!”

Remem­ber that scene in Bruce Almighty when he got all the e-mails and became totally flus­tered? That’s what I felt like!

But Jesus han­dles all of it, giv­ing per­son atten­tion to the mega-gazillions of indi­vid­ual needs com­mu­ni­cated to him every moment of every day. It is beyond human comprehension.

He made the ulti­mate sac­ri­fice so that I can live each day with con­fi­dence and assur­ance of eter­nal life.

I have a lot to worry about every day, but where, how and with whom I am going to be spend­ing eter­nity is not a con­cern. Hav­ing the “peace that passes under­stand­ing” on that par­tic­u­lar point is lit­er­ally what makes life bearable.

I was speak­ing with an indi­vid­ual recently whom I con­sider to be not just a pro­fes­sional peer, but also a dear friend. Some­how the con­ver­sa­tion drifted into per­sonal philoso­phies and he revealed to me for the first time that he is an agnos­tic. I was quite shocked and found myself chang­ing the sub­ject ((Any sort of wit­ness­ing or proste­ly­tiz­ing would have been, given the set­ting and cir­cum­stances, totally inap­pro­pri­ate. More­over, he is aware of my beliefs and could ask me ques­tions or ini­ti­ate a dis­cus­sion about Chris­tian­ity were he so inclined.)) because I could not think of a response. I’ve thought a lot about him since then — as well as other friends and col­leagues who are agnos­tics or athe­ists — and have con­cluded that one of my human fail­ings is my inabil­ity to under­stand how such folks find the strength to even get out of bed in the morn­ing, much less trudge through the day.

I think that is because I have been a Chris­t­ian my entire life. As I wrote in “Eight 13 Things About Me” a few weeks ago, I never had a con­ver­sion expe­ri­ence. Rather, I was bap­tized at the age of three months, grew up in a Chris­t­ian home and, until early this year, was always an active church mem­ber.  So being a per­son of faith is the only way to live; I can’t imag­ine any other.  I have never had a “cri­sis of faith” where I doubted the exis­tence of the Divine.  ((I say this not to brag, but merely to explain what my faith jour­ney has been like.)) 

I think my friend’s rev­e­la­tion was a mes­sage very specif­i­cally tar­geted to tell me that this is an aspect of my jour­ney that I must work on so that I can be a bet­ter role model and exam­ple to oth­ers, ready to talk about faith and spir­i­tu­al­ity in a non­con­fronta­tional, gen­tle manner.

I have so much else to be thank­ful for this Thurs­day, not the least of which is the soft, cool breeze waft­ing in through my win­dow which is offer­ing a needed respite from the hot sum­mer weather that I love so much.

Have a blessed, thank­ful Thursday!

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