Greetings and wrestling with the word Should

Okay so Margie told me that i should start writing down some of our MK conversations, i am guessing for serveral reasons so i decided to do it in blog form so that we don't have to worry about filling up email, or if you don't want to check it for a while finding the email in your old archives. I just figured this would be easiest. I am not sure how this will go but i will just post and if you guys want to discuss or question or whatever feel free to post no pressure though okay. No one is required to come up with good answers good questions, reading in a timely fashion ect ect ect. The only rule is this be honest and open we all love eachother so let the chips fall as they may. Feel free to add input to that but I want to get on to my posting.

Okay so i am being coached by this guy named Dennis and through that coaching he challenged me to think through several different issues. One of the first issues that has come up is my struggle with the word should. As Dennis and i talked through it he offered this insight to get me started in my thinking. He thinks that I define responsibility in my life with the word should, ie responsibilty = should. Pick what you want, I should go into missions, i should read my bible, i should tell my wife i love her, i should pray to God ect. He followed up the insight with the question does the word should help or hurt my ability to be intimate (with God, Rach, ect).

One note real quick I am sorry for this but i will be processing this as I write so if I take to long feel free to skip around ect. Anyways I definitly struggle with this word should and i struggle with it because i feel a lot of pressure to be a responsible person. There is this fear that i have in me that if i am not driving myself with these shoulds that i will be irresponsible and thus will fail GOD. THere are also a lot of people i don't want to fail but i will just assume that if i am failing GOd i am probably failing people. The problem i am discovering is that i have never actually examined this fear i have just let it drive me, let it form me and at points let it consume me. But if i pause to examine this fear and ask the simple question would i feel intimatly pursued if God was driven by the word should. The simple answer here is absolutly not. I saw this preview the other day on tv where the woman said to the man "I Want you to want to do the dishes", the man's response "Why would i want to do the dishes." Funny to me at least, anyways the key is in that first statment, we want to be pursued out of love and desire, so that our pursuer does the dishes lovingly not out of duty but to show their loved one their love because the simple act will show that they were thinking about them. This is the way i want to be loved and yet to often i don't love this way. Okay so why then am i consumed by this fear that i will be irresponsible. Dennis once told me that in parenting especcially in the ministry sometimes things are caught not taught (ie parents may not have intended and probably didn't intend for us to develop this philosophy but we developed it because our brains are always trying to make sense of things). Okay so as a kid i am around an already established ministry and i see it working out and i simply register in my brain that this is what it looks like to serve God. Then as i grow up rather than develop new paths my brain automatically identifies this philosophy at the root of what it means to serve GOD. Take math for instance once you learn two plus two you have it, then all of a sudden you are in Algebra and as your learning it you don't think that maybe you need to go back and realearn 2 +2, your brain simply says four because that is the way it works, unless you challenge it. So if i was taught two plus two was five, i would just believe it until at some point i felt the need to challenge the root of my knowledge. The problem here is that with math it is pretty easy to see if you are concretely right or wrong, with God and serving him the process is never finished, but we don't like to go back and check our foundations we just like to build and build and build. This could lead to a problem though because even if most of your foundation is built on the rock you might have at some point put an addition onto your house and built it on sand. Okay enough with the metaphors, so basically i am no running into the need to redefine responsibility in my life because should to me is the wrong definition. One other side to this is that with the word should as a definition control is placed in my hands instead of God's which according to my sin nature this is good but according to my new spirit this is bad. Obviously i can't change this on my own but if i had to currently redefine responsibility i would change it from should to can. Because of Jesus I can worship God, I can love people, I can live in purity, because i am filled with the spirit i can pray and commune with the Lord my Father and Creator. One note on this 30 year old philosophies don't just change overnight, they require constant work, just like it says in Ephesians take of the old and put on the new. Let me end with this metaphor. When i was working on the boats 2 years ago i spent much of my time repairing and painting the bottoms of boats, the reason is that this is the part that is in the water and since Maryland has brackish water, it is really rough on the bottoms of boats. So if you take care of it well you pull your boat out in the winter scrape of the old paint and repaint it so it can withstand another summer of sailing, the problem was with the people who were to cheap to do it, I worked on one boat where i removed seven layers of old paint, it was in rough shape ran poorly and the removal was so hard but when i finally got it down to the gel coat (the actual bottom) I put on some new layers of paint, it looked good and ran well. I think in some ways we are like these boats in brackish water, we live in a sinful world and thus our bottoms take a severe wearing, and we need to haul out clean up and repaint, thus i think this is what Paul was saying in Ephesians when he talks about taking off the old and putting on the new and then goes on to talk about the armor of God. Okay well i am sorry if this didn't make any sense but this are my current thoughts on the subject, i am interested in your thoughts and responses. Love you guys,
In Christ
Rob