In just a few weeks, we will host our annual New Life Leader’s Conference. Our entire team looks forward to this time every year because it is a chance to have conversations and learn from some of the best pastors, leaders and volunteers on the planet. When I attend a gathering of local church practitioners like this one,  I pray for several things to happen for all of us.

1. Fresh perspective

There is nothing like getting away to a new setting to bring new perspectives. We sometimes cannot see the forest for all the congregational trees engulfing us every day. Coming away to a gathering of leaders from diverse backgrounds and experiences can give us a fresh set of eyes. Many times, I have come to these gatherings wrestling with decisions that need to be made and the answer comes from one sentence from a speaker or during a random worship song or sideline conversation. Also, I know I am biased, but there is not a more beautiful spot on our planet than Colorado in late September. Trust me on this one.

2. New friends

Some of my best friends were introduced to me at leader’s conferences. All of us need more friends in the ministry and settings like a conference provide space for conversations and relationships that can last a lifetime. In fact, we are limiting registrations to only 500 to make sure that no one gets lost in the crowd and everyone has a chance to engage in a real learning environment.

3. Personal renewal

Jesus often withdrew to lonely places, away from his primary assignment, to pray, reflect, refuel and to reengage. The same is true with pastors today. We need to retreat, to take off our “pastor” hats and simply become a follower again. Sitting still and listening intently can mean the difference between burnout and finishing strong. Every day, we will take our time in worship and tune into what God is saying to us. We will make sure there is plenty of space for reflection, rest and renewal.

You need to be here, so stop what you are doing and register right now!!

“The Lord watches over the alien and sustains the fatherless and the widow.”

Psalm 146:9

I gathered with hundreds of people to worship and pray on a Wednesday night not long ago. Only a handful of us spoke fluent English and about the same number were legal US citizens. I spoke to them while a young woman stood next to me in the pulpit, interpreting my words into Spanish. Moments earlier, she had led us as we sang “The Revelation Song” in the same language. I was only 20 minutes from my home and my church.

That night, I again realized my city was more diverse than the mostly white, middle-class suburbia where I spend most of my time. That night, in my own city, I suddenly felt like the outsider, invited into a gathering where culture and language divided us. Our only common denominators were the scriptures we studied, the Christ we followed and the communal prayers that echoed upward into the cold night air.

These were not hardened criminals on the run, but families who had worked all day and studied in classrooms since early morning. They were grandparents, high school students, and married couples. I did not hear all their stories that night, but I heard a few. I met men who had built a successful landscaping firm with hundreds of clients and there was a woman who went from cleaning a few homes to running her own business with multiple employees. Her pastor had told her that America rewards honest, hard work. She believed him.

I found new friends that night and a new viewpoint. God knew I needed a new frame of reference in order to get a new perspective on the plight of immigrants in our country. I know many of my friends and those in my congregation will argue that “our laws need to be followed” and “we need those jobs for our own citizens”. I understand the anger and frustration caused by the broken promises from politicians and fanned by the fearmongering from pundits on TV. I just wish you had been with me that night.

Everyone does not fit neatly into my story. There are bad people who have come to our country illegally and have committed atrocities. They need to be deported and sentenced. Those are the few, though, and do not represent the remaining 11-million living here peaceably and quietly.

When I am caught in this tension, I sit still and listen to Jesus speaking to me in the scriptures. I know for certain he loves them as much as me. He wants them to thrive and not be subjected to threats and pain. He has watched them die from dehydration in the deserts. He hears their prayers and knows them by name. He speaks their language and understands their dilemma. He knows they miss their families and they feel unwanted and rejected in the only place they can go for help. Jesus also had to flee his country once and live in a distant Egypt. I am sure he and his teenage parents broke some immigration laws along the way. I am also certain someone in Egypt helped them because no one survives long in a distant land without some new friends.

I wish the immigration system was less expensive and easier to navigate. It is neither. I know this is a political land mine and I’m already bracing myself for the onslaught of comments meant to enlighten and correct me. I confess, I do not have all the answers to a very complicated social crisis, but I was there that night and I worshipped with them. I felt the same Holy Spirit at work that I sense every Sunday with my own congregation. I believe if we would gather with our brothers and sisters, hold hands and pray for one another, we could be a catalyst for hope in each other’s lives. We can help solve this. Jesus will not be offended, I promise.

This is a brief excerpt from my new book, Speak Life, which releases in September. This part of the book tackles the topic of gossip.

Engaging in gossip is not altogether different from my experience of eating too much fried catfish every single time I’m back in Louisiana. If you know anything about catfish, then you know they are disgusting creatures. They’re bottom-feeders that consider algae, insects, and leeches “fine dining.” But if you catch one of those suckers, roll the thing in cornmeal, fry it up in near-rancid oil—without exaggerating, I just can’t get enough.

Comfort food like no other, I tell you. It tastes so good and goes down so easily—but a few hours later, your innards begin to revolt. You search desperately for some way to get the effects out of your system—“Maybe a shower will help. Or a workout?” you think. “Yeah, I’ll sweat it out.”—but you should realize your search is in vain. The toxicity is in your system now, and you’re just going to have to let it run its course.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why, when we channel surf past TMZ, do we have to flip back just for a second to see what’s being said? Yes, it slides down easily. Right before it makes us sick.

We do this because inside every one of us lives a little bit of Salacious Crumb-like fascination with the perils other people face. Do you remember him, the yellow-eyed monkey-lizard from Return of the Jedi?

Salacious Crumb was the court jester for crime lord Jabba the Hutt and had a maniacal, cackling laugh you don’t soon forget. The terms of Crumb’s employment were straightforward: if the strange beast managed to amuse Jabba at least once daily, then he would be allowed to stay and to eat and drink as much as he wished. If he failed to do so, he would be killed. To accomplish his do-or-die goal, Crumb mocked anyone and everyone—except his boss, of course—doing virtually anything to get a laugh.

The part of him that resides in our sometimes-deceitful hearts is that part that cranes toward salacious crumbs of another’s misfortune or grief. Collectively, our self-esteem is very low, and so when we hear someone quietly say, “You won’t believe what she did . . .” even across a crowded room, we can’t help but inch our way toward the gossipy morsel in the hope of learning something bad about someone else so that we can feel better about ourselves.

And despite our protests to the contrary, Christians can be the worst at this. We nod our heads in agreement that good favor with God is gained not by works of righteousness but by unmerited grace, even as we troll for ways to elevate ourselves by rolling around in the details of someone else’s plight like a dog in the carcass of a dead skunk.

“Well, if he’s struggling with porn, then maybe this lust thing I’m wrestling with isn’t really so bad after all.”

“Wow. She said that? I’m not as horrible a wife as I thought.”

“What? He got picked up on a DUI? I may drink a bottle of wine a night, but I would never, ever get a DUI.”

“I can’t believe it. He was sleeping with her all along. Only a fool gets caught!”

Juicy morsels, swept from the table of despair; but aren’t we all prey to swallowing them, bite after delectable bite?

“You are my beloved,” God says. “You are my prize. I have loved you with an everlasting love. You don’t have to earn it; it’s already yours.” And yet we keep on fighting for ways to prove that we’re not as bad as the next guy, or the next gal.

“No proof necessary whatsoever,” God whispers, even as we turn to a friend and spread the smut.

It happened again today. I was having a normal conversation at Panera Bread with someone I know, and then without any notice, he took a hard left turn, no clutch. Within seconds, he had delved into chatter about a mutual friend of ours. “Hey, did you hear about . . .” was how it began. I felt my head shaking before I had a chance to process the fact that by shaking my head—and, in effect, answering his question—I was encouraging him to go on. I didn’t want him to go on, but before I gathered my wits enough to discourage him, he’d continued.

Before I even realized, the catfish was sliding down again.

Gossip is two things: it is sharing the right information with the wrong person, and it is sharing the wrong information with anyone. As the immediate details this man was sharing flooded my consciousness, I realized I was neither part of our mutual friend’s problem, nor part of his solution.

The information being passed to me had no business being shared. I held up my hand to stop my friend from going on, but it was too late. I already knew our mutual friend’s situation—probably a situation he didn’t want me to know. (If he wanted me to know, he would have told me himself, right?)

I thought back to the night before, when Pam and the kids and I were at our friends’ house. They had just gotten a new puppy. All the kids were jostling the poor pooch around so much that after an hour or so, the over-stimulated dog vomited all over Callie.

Callie came rushing downstairs to the basement where the adults were watching a ballgame, and said, “Dad, the dog just threw up all over me.” She wanted me to help her clean things up, but as I took her in standing there with goo all over her shirt, I thought, “I’m not going to get out of this situation without also getting slimed.”

That’s gossip, in a nutshell: signing up to get totally slimed.

Throughout my day I ask myself a question as often as possible in the hope of keeping negative agreements at bay. This question has kept me out of the ditch on more occasions than I can count and is the safety net that runs underneath my life at all times, guaranteeing it will catch me in the event I fall. The question is this:How does this thought I’m thinking, this assumption I’m building, or this agreement I’m making line up with the Word of God?

If the thought, assumption, or agreement squares with truth, then it can stay; if not, it has to go—it doesn’t get any simpler than that.

Throughout the Bible—all the way from Genesis to Revelation—warfare imagery is evoked, and in ten out of ten of those occurrences, God is referring not merely to battles fought with hands and feet and horses and shields and swords but to the battles fought in our minds. This idea is what was at the core of the apostle Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthian church to “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God” (2 Cor. 10:5). The “demolishment,” according to Paul, would occur as those Christ followers took “captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ,” language considered strong (violent, even?) to first-century ears.

In Paul’s day, one of the ways Roman forces intimidated conquered cities was to chain the governors and other leaders of those cities and parade them through the streets, indisputably conveying the message, “Your situation is helpless and hopeless! Even your leaders have been defeated and shamed. Rome is here to stay.” Roman conquerors were masters of the siege, going to any lengths—starvation, humiliation, rape, and death—to take over the world. It is this imagery Paul looked to when describing how we are to conquer our thoughts.

“Take them captive!” Paul insisted. “Strip them naked until they are totally exposed. Bring them to a place of earnest submission, no holds barred.”

The stakes were high for cities Rome was overtaking, and the stakes are high for us too. If we don’t overtake our own negative agreements, proving their impotence by parading them through the streets, they will fight with all they have to exert their will on us. Thoughts become words, words become actions, actions become habits, and habits form who we are. To take our thoughts captive is to consciously declare whether our lives will be governed by truth or by lies.

NOTE:

This is an excerpt from my new book, Speak Life which releases in September.

When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick.

Matthew 14:14

For 49 years, I have been a heart patient and it seems as normal to me as walking or sleeping. I’ve learned to live with a heart that needs special meds to work well and sometimes needs medical maintenance. Three times I’ve had major heart surgery – first, when I was only months old, while the latest was in 2011 when my pulmonary valve was replaced. There have been countless miracle stories along the way – from my poor, rural family being introduced to the world’s best pediatric cardiologist in 1967, to having my life saved by a tiny device that was only implanted because a surgeon felt the whim to test me for a condition that no other doctor had diagnosed.

It’s a miracle that I’ve survived a heart disease that took nearly every young child’s life in the 1960’s. It’s a miracle that I have played sports, traveled the world, climbed and hiked through the mountains, and have had more than enough energy for a wife and two teenagers. I’m blessed to have lived a full life despite the constant reminders of a heart that is not always perfect or cooperative. There have been some scary days, but I’m not afraid. I’ve always known my life is in the hands of the One who made me.

I’m writing this to everyone who has ever heard troubling news from a doctor and felt alone or fearful. I understand because I’ve heard the same reports and felt the same dread. I’ve also been a witness of the faithful presence of Jesus and have found indescribable comfort from knowing Christ is, indeed, with me. He is with you, too and that’s more than enough. That’s not just some syrupy, sentimental cliche designed to numb you into some fantasy. Jesus, instead, gives us a new reality to proclaim over our sickness.  He is Lord and He is faithful. He is good and He is near.

Do not give up hope and do not be afraid. Both were constant reminders from Jesus, because, I suspect, he knew we would need to be constantly reminded. My prayer is for healing, wholeness and Divine repair for all that has been lost or broken. I pray that all of us would be a witness of the faithful presence of Jesus and would not spend a second of our lives feeling forgotten or lost.

And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.

Matthew 28:20