Justin Davis's Blog, page 23

10 Things I Believe and Why

As parents, Trish and I are constantly picking up after our kids. If we aren’t picking up after them, we are getting on them to pick up after themselves. Pick up your towel. Pick up your cereal bowl. Pick up your socks. Pick up your shoes. They have a natural talent of leaving things behind. They are truly gifted in this area.

The other night I came into our bedroom and there were a few papers laying on our bed and on our bed side table. My first thought was, “I can’t believe someone left their papers in our room.” Then I picked up the papers and started reading what our 14-year old son Elijah had written and left behind.

10 Things I Believe and Why

I believe Jesus rose from the grave, because without it I wouldn’t be living for anything.
I believe this world is broken because of our fall in the beginning.
I believe since the world is broken that Jesus can mend it.
I believe that by Jesus resurrecting from the dead, I am saved. Without that belief I would be plagued by guilt each and every day.
I believe I can change the world because I was born for something big.
I believe the names that people call me are not what I am.
I believe I’m Elijah. I’m compassionate, loving, serving, a dreamer, trustworthy, crazy and faithful because that is what God has gifted to me.
I believe I can do anything though God because if not I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about anything.
I believe family, God and friends are the main things in life because God has called us to have community and worship Him.
I believe what God has in store for me is bigger than what I plan.

Are you serious?

This kid can leave papers on my bed anytime he wants.

Honestly, I was speechless. My wife is obviously a great mom! Numbers 5 and 6 stick out to me: A desire to change the world in #5 met by the resistance of others in #6.

I wanted to share it with you today because this list challenged me. What are 10 things I believe and why? Do I ever take the time to think through them?

We act out of our beliefs. What we believe about God and what we believe about ourselves are the two most powerful guiding beliefs we have. Most of our choices, mistakes and regrets are an overflow of these two core beliefs.

Don’t be discouraged today. Don’t be distracted. Don’t allow your circumstances or your past or your pain to define you. God has a plan for you.

As Elijah writes in #10, His plan is bigger than your plan.

I hope this list inspires you. Let’s all contribute to the list today.

What is one thing you believe and why?

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What It’s Not About

What if I told you that your greatest struggle, your most repeated sin (the one you have promised yourself and God you’ll never do again, but you keep on doing it) is probably only a symptom of a much bigger deal in your life?

In our story, the affair gets all the attention; has all the shock value and raises all the questions. But the truth is it was only a symptom. There was something much deeper. I think the same is true for you.

Your impulsive shopping and overspending isn’t about your need for more clothes or more stuff
Your affair or your spouse’s affair isn’t about that other specific person
Your craving to overeat isn’t about the food
Your addiction to pornography isn’t about you not finding your wife or your husband attractive
Your willingness to give too much of yourself away sexually early in a dating relationship isn’t about willpower or not being strong enough to resist temptation

Our Christian thought process is pretty simple: If we would try harder or be more accountable, then we could stop whatever it is we know we need to stop. We’re just not a good enough Christian.

But what if your sin or habit wasn’t even about that sin our habit?

Each of these situations, though they look different on the surface originate with one desire and one need: Intimacy

It’s not a very manly word, but it is a Godly word. You and I were created to have intimacy with God, and intimacy with one another. Somewhere in our life that desire got distorted. We became more prone to hide than to be known; more prone to pretend than be authentic; more prone to try to earn love than to receive love without conditions.

Have you ever felt like there are parts of your heart that no one can know about? I have for sure. So we hide or indulge or overeat or impulse shop, or pursue someone other than our spouse, or chat online or download porn or sleep around.

We desire to be known and to be loved, but intimacy is distorted and so we try to find it in a way that leave us…….regretful and ashamed.

We convince ourself that no one, including God, can really know us, because if they did, they wouldn’t love us. Rejection is our greatest fear.

Intimacy is something you can’t stop needing. You need it. But if your need for it and your desire of it is broken, then you start trying to find it and fulfill it in messed up ways. So we cheat and we lie and we pretend and we compromise. And the cycle begins to repeat itself and build on itself until one day you wake up and have no idea how you got to the place you are at.

Here is the truth today: Your Heavenly Father longs for you to experience intimacy with Him. To know Him and be known by Him; to love Him and be unconditionally loved by Him in return.

You can go through your life like I did trying to be good enough and strong enough and perfect enough and you can focus on all the symptoms of your problem. Or you can pursue intimacy with a God who loves you and a Savior who longs to redeem you.

Intimacy starts with allowing a part of your heart that isn’t known to be known by God and by someone else. Everyone can choose to take that step today.

That’s what it’s really about.

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Beyond Ordinary Update & Offer

I love everything about this picture. A church in Pennsylvania emailed us and said they wanted to give away two boxes of Beyond Ordinary at their church and asked if we’d be willing to sign them. Our publisher was awesome and sent the books to us, we signed 88 books and then sent them to the church. This is the picture they sent us. I love the guy in the black shirt in the back with both hands raised up like he’s signaling “touchdown.” I love the guy in the second row on the right that has his book turned around backwards.

[image error]I can’t believe it has been five months since the release of Beyond Ordinary We have been so blessed by YOU as you’ve  read the book, shared the book and Tweeted, Facebooked and Instagramed the book. (#beyondordinary)

Thank you so much.

We are blown away at how well the book is doing and how people are resonating with the desire to move their marriage beyond ordinary.

So, when you’re a first time author, you learn things usually by doing them wrong. Last week we were at a conference and had a shipping mix up with our books. So when we went to sell our books after we spoke, no one knew where they were. Not exactly the best business plan. So we came home with a case of books that we want to discount and offer to you.

We have 40 books sitting in our office that we will sign and ship to you this week. We are including our “Good Isn’t Good Enough” Band for free with each purchase. 

Beyond Ordinary Book and Band

If you’ve been waiting to buy the book or want to buy it for a friend, neighbor or co-worker THIS IS THE SALE FOR YOU! We aren’t in competition with Amazon or Barnes & Noble and don’t want to be in the book selling and shipping business. So once we sign and sell these books, we’ll conclude the sale.

Thank you again for believing in the message and mission of Beyond Ordinary and helping us share God’s vision for marriage and families.

If you’re interested in buying our book for $10.50 (Shipping INCLUDED) Click HERE

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5 Lies We Believe

We are in a series at Cross Point called 5 Lies We Believe. It has been a great series for us as a church to step back and really filter the things we believe and the effect those things have on our life. I spoke last Sunday on the The Search for Significance. I’ve had several people ask when the message would be online, so I wanted to share it with you today.

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5 Mistakes Many Young Couples Make Part 2

Yesterday I shared part one of two about the small, insignificant mistakes many couples make early in marriage. It isn’t that the mistakes are big, it is that if left unidentified over time, they become obstacles to the marriage God has in mind. You can read part one HERE.

Today I want to share part two. No marriage is perfect. Every married couple will make mistakes. How well we recognize and respond to those mistakes will make all the difference.

Here are 5 mistakes many young couples make and how to avoid them:

3. Don’t speak your expectations.

Most conflict in marriage is due to unmet expectations. You didn’t get from your spouse what you expected from them. You didn’t meet your spouses expectations. You didn’t help out around the house as much as she wanted. You weren’t as on time as he thought you should be. There was an expectation and someone didn’t meet it.

Every unspoken expectation will become an unmet expectation. No matter how brilliant your spouse is, she can’t read your mind. No matter how great your nonverbal skills are, he won’t be able to translate unspoken expectations to fully met expectations.

How do you avoid this mistake? Ask your spouse if you have any expectations of them that they feel like you don’t communicate. Talk through expectations. It is as you communicate expectations, you give your spouse the opportunity to fulfill those expectations.

4. Neglect sexual intimacy.

I met with a young couple a few months ago for marriage counseling and they had been married for a little over nine months. In the first nine months of their marriage they had been together sexually four times. She didn’t desire it as much as he did. He didn’t feel valued. She didn’t feel attractive. They argued about it more than they had it and by the time she would finally give in to his desire to be together, he was so frustrated he didn’t want to any more. The cycle would repeat itself about every two weeks.

Sexual intimacy is a gift given to every married couple by God to be experienced and enjoyed. It has a purpose in marriage. It is meant to be an overflow of the intimacy we experience with God and one another. To ignore it or neglect it over time creates huge distance between a husband and wife.

How do you avoid this mistake? Make sexual intimacy a priority. Sexual intimacy should be mutually offered, even though there will be times it isn’t mutually desired. This is a biblical principle that helps couples stay close to one another. (Many couples struggle in this area, so if you want more info, we wrote a whole chapter on sex in our book, Beyond Ordinary.)

5. Leave God out.

No one intends to leave God out of our marriage. If we’re honest, none of us truly leave God out. God becomes something we add on to our marriage in hopes of making it better. There is a part of all of us that believe that just because we love Jesus and go to church, we’ll have a good “Christian” marriage. God doesn’t want to be an addition to our marriage he wants to be at the center of it.

How do you avoid this mistake? The best way I have found to fight this drift in my own life is with one prayer: “God, how do you want to change me?” As I allow God to change and mold my heart, He begins to make his way into the center of my marriage. When I start asking God to change Trish or to fix something in our marriage, I neglect the change that God wants to do in me and my marriage stays the same.

There are probably 25 other mistakes that young couples make. These are mistakes that old couples make too. Our hope is that you can identify these mistakes early so they don’t have a cumulative effect on your marriage.

Which of these do you think is the hardest to avoid?

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5 Mistakes Many Young Couples Make Part 1

Mistakes in any marriage are inevitable. No one is perfect so naturally two imperfect people spending their lives together has the predicability of mistakes. But there are some mistakes that carry heavier weight than others. There are some mistakes that start small when you first get married but have a snowball effect the longer we’re married.

The mistakes we make in marriage have the potential to be used to help us grow or to carry momentum to more mistakes. This summer, Trish and I celebrate our 18th wedding anniversary. With each passing year our passion to help young couples avoid some marriage mistakes grows stronger.

If we can save couples from the mistakes we made, then those mistakes were worth it. While these mistakes will apply to any marriage, I wanted to list some mistakes we made early on in our marriage that had a building effect.

If they are identified early the damage is minimal. If they are left unto themselves, the damage multiplies over years.

Here are 5 mistakes many young couples make and how to avoid them:

1. Keep score

There is a temptation early in marriage to keep score with you spouse. You want to win an argument. You want to prove a point. You are tired of being wrong. You don’t want to be taken for granted. It is easy to begin to keep score with you spouse. You want them to know the last time they messed up. You remind them of the dishes you’ve done or the clothes you’ve washed. You want them to know the score.Keeping score is a huge mistake because it immediately puts you and your spouse on separate teams.

How do you avoid keeping score? Remind each other that you are in this together. Believe the best about your spouse. Assuming the worst will always put you and your spouse on separate teams, keeping score. When you believe the best you are saying, “I’m for you” and being for each other changes everything.

2. Focus on next not now

It is so easy in life and marriage to wish you were in a different stage than the one you are in right now. When you live in an apartment, you long for a house. When you move into a house you wish you had money for home improvement.

When you get out of college you really want to get a job. You get the job and can’t wait till you get promoted. You then start wishing for a better job, a more important job.

It is easy to do the same thing when we have kids. No matter what stage of life our kids are in, it is easy to believe that life will be easier when they get to the next stage.

There is nothing wrong with focusing on the future…unless it robs us of the joy of the present. I spent so many years of our marriage waiting for the next stage to bring me happiness that I missed out on the joy that was available in the stage of life I was in. If we aren’t careful, focusing on next will create a sense of discontentment that will affect every aspect of our life.

How do you not make this mistake? Begin to appreciate the stage of life you are in right now. Write down the things you are experiencing right now that you will never get back. Realizing that this stage of your marriage or this stage of your kids life is a once in a lifetime stage helps us appreciate it more.

Those are two of the five mistakes we want to help you avoid. Come back tomorrow and I’ll share the last three.

Anyone else struggle with these two mistakes?

 

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Marriage Adventures

The following is a guest post from our friend Carrie Starr.  Carrie and her husband Erv teach business together at Roberts Wesleyan College in Rochester, NY.  They are authors of brand new book: Marriage Adventures. The Secret to an Extraordinary Life Together.  

Check out their blog: www.marriageadventures.org.

Follow them on Twitter:

Carrie: @adventurecarrie

Erv: @profstarr

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Our marriage was doomed from the start.

Between the two of us, our parents have been married six different times.  The odds were stacked against us.

Fresh out of college, we believed our marriage could be different. We wanted our first marriage to be our only marriage, despite the flawed blueprint we’d received.

Working with college students, we’ve found that most young adults feel the same way.  They want their first marriage to be their only marriage.

They don’t want to become another divorce statistic.

Relationships are risky.

Each of us longs for adventure.  We want to beat the odds and experience something extraordinary.

We know that adventures require risk.

Marriage is the most risky relationship of all.

When we commit to someone for the rest of our lives, we make ourselves vulnerable.  We could be hurt, betrayed, or abandoned.

Yet through marriage, we also open ourselves up to the greatest possibility for adventure.

Experiencing lifelong intimacy with another person is a thrilling opportunity.

We believed it was worth the risk.

We want to help other couples take the leap toward marriage equipped to survive the adventure.

The dangers are real. The risks are high. And the rewards are incredible.

By living a bold life of adventure in our communication, our finances, and our physical intimacy, most observers of our marriage think we are still on our honeymoon.

This summer, we will celebrate our 20th anniversary!

Our new book, Marriage Adventures is our adventure story. From the moment we first met to our cross-country camping honeymoon to our Alaskan anniversary, we share the secrets of our extraordinary life together with courage and transparency.

We invite you to join us on our journey and discover how to make your marriage the adventure of a lifetime!

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The Passionate Mom

With every passing day there is a sense of joy, gratitude and sadness that over takes my (Trisha) heart and mind. In two very short years my oldest Micah will graduate from high school. Yes, high school and yes that thud you just heard was me passing out! Knowing time is short I want to make every day count!

Tuesday this book arrived at my house.

My intentions were to thumb through the book and hopefully get around to reading it over the summer since I’m still currently finishing another book. My feeble attempt to simply skim back fired and this book had me hook, line and sinker. I couldn’t put it down.

Susan Merrill is founder of iMOM.com and is also wife to Mark Merrill, co-founder of All Pro Dad’s. She is a mom of five of which, two are adopted. She says in her trailer that she never sought out to be a writer but after giving a talk on the principles she shares in the book she was approached to write one. Often times these are the best types of books.

If you are a mom or know someone who is a mom regardless of stage of life, this is a must read!

I wasn’t asked to write a post for this book. I loved it so much I just wanted to share it with you. This book is like sitting down with a close girlfriend who gets honest with passion and purpose to help you be a passionate mom in today’s world.

You can check out Susan’s web site HERE

You can buy her book on Amazon HERE

We are giving away two copies of the book. Just leave a comment below sharing with us where you’re from and one thing you love about being a mom.

Winners will be announced on Sunday.

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Wanting More

I want to be desperate for God. I want to desire an intimate relationship with God more than I desire anything else. What is true about me, and maybe true about you is that I tend to pursue and am desperate for what God can do for me, more than I am desperate for God, Himself. I am desperate for the benefits of having a relationship with God, more than I am desperate for the relationship itself. So I find myself pursuing things that I think will satisfy, but always leave me wanting more. I’m…

Desperate for acceptance
Desperate for approval
Desperate for intimacy
Desperate for relationships
Desperate for happiness

If we are honest, many of us are more desperate to improve our lives than we are to know more deeply the One who is life. We have this equation in our mind that we calculate often:

My life + Jesus = Nice Christian Life

If we are a Christian, God will give us a good marriage. If we are a Christian, God will give us a good relationship with our kids. If we are a Christian, God will give us deep and meaningful friendships. If we are a Christian, God will give us a faithful spouse. If we are a Christian, God will give us a level of happiness that will surpass all of the troubles of life. If we are a Christian, God will give us a fulfilling career. If we are a Christian, God will give us…….

So many of us sit in brokenness because we are Christians, and yet, God hasn’t “given” us what we thought He would (should).

I know this way of living, because I have lived it. I’m tempted everyday to live it again.

Maybe you are living it right now. You can’t put your finger on what is wrong, but you know deep down in your heart, something isn’t right. There is a sense of restlessness, a sense of disappointment, a sense of loss that you feel, but don’t know why. You are unsatisfied…

Unsatisfied with your job
Unsatisfied with your marriage
Unsatisfied with your kids
Unsatisfied with your church
Unsatisfied with your life

Maybe we are desperate for the wrong things…not bad things, just the wrong things. Maybe we are seeking what God can offer us more than we are seeking God.

Maybe what your marriage needs most is for you to stop seeking to be right, and just seek God. Maybe what your kids need most is for you to stop seeking to rule over them, and just seek God more. Maybe what will allow you to experience more joy at work is to seek God in spite of your circumstances.

Here is God’s promise to you today: You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. Jeremiah 29:13

Seeking God won’t change our circumstances, but it will change our hearts. That is where lasting transformation begins.

 

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The Wounded Healer

Trish and I spent the weekend in Buda, Texas speaking at The Connection Church. Early Saturday morning, Trish was sitting on the couch and I was standing looking over my notes, when she looked up from her phone with a sad look on her face.

“Justin, I want you to know Brennan Manning passed away.” She was scrolling through Twitter and started seeing numerous Brennan Manning quotes and saw that he’d passed away on Friday.

A few months after the affair, Trisha and I began reading Abba’s Child together. God started pulling back layers of our heart that we’d never seen before. I’m convinced that without Abba’s Child, our marriage wouldn’t have survived, our ministry wouldn’t exist and I would still live with unresolved brokenness and wounds.

God used Abba’s Child in such powerful ways in my life, I had to include Brennan Manning in the acknowledgements in our book:

In 2009, Trish and I had just shared our story publicly for the first time and had been advised to start a blog. We weren’t sure if we should do it.

There is a lot of risk in sharing the messy and broken parts of your life. It would be easier to not share; easier to move on from our past and not keep talking about it. Around that same time, I came across this quote from Brennan Manning:

Christians who remain in hiding continue to live the lie. We deny the reality of our sin. In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others. We cling to our bad feelings and beat ourselves with the past when what we should do is let it go. As Dietrich Bonhoffer said, “guilt is an idol.” But when we dare to live as forgiven men and women, we join the wounded healers and draw closer to Jesus.

That became the heartbeat of RefineUs. This is a community of wounded healers overcoming fear and shame to bring light into the dark parts of our heart, and hopefully inspiring others to do the same.

For many of us the church hasn’t been the place we have gone for healing, but rather a place to conceal our wounds. We live with guilt as our identity instead of forgiveness. We’ve learned that living the lie is a lot more acceptable than coming out of hiding.

I don’t know where you are in your life today. Maybe you have realized that you can’t erase your past, so maybe you can outrun it…but you are tired and worn out. Maybe your life is filled with fear and shame and you can’t see past your own guilt to even begin to embrace the love of Christ. Maybe you have tried so hard to hide your woundedness that you’ve lost your belief that healing is possible.

This is a community of wounded healers. We are mess-ups and failures. We have lied and cheated and envied and hated.

But guilt is not our idol.

Shame does not define us.

Darkness doesn’t have the last word.

Redemption is our story.

Together, with many thanks to Brennan Manning, we are drawing closer to Jesus.

 

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