Mumford and Sons

As I was listening to one of my new favorite bands the other day and found one of their lyrics quite powerful.

In these bodies we will live, In these bodies we will die. Where you invest your love, you invest your life.

It doesn't matter what we do, we cannot change the body we are in or if we will die. The only thing we can have a say in is where we put our effort. In recent years the majority of the information I have been seeking has been within either the business or spiritual realm. So when I heard these few sentence fragments a few key words stuck out to me. Anytime love is put into something I think of God, for He is love. The other word that caught my attention was “invest.”

In a business sense, to invest means to put forth capital with hope or expectation of return greater than put in. It is not uncommon for an entrepreneur to "invest" tens of thousands of dollars to start up a new business to hope for return years down the road. The same goes for long term investments into the stock market.

The combination of love, life, and invest in the same phrase struck me. We can work our whole lives and trade our time for money as employees. Or for the select few who get into to investor market their money makes money for them. We are not made to spend our love on people or things or we will become love poor. We need love in return. If we invest our love wisely, God will guarantee a return ten fold. Don’t you wish you had that kind of guarantee in money investments! Invest your love wisely, for you do not know when the life of the investment (you) will end.

I John 4:7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.

An Experiment In Sleep

While reading some of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Meditating on the Word, I was compelled to try a theory. He states within that an essential part of living the Christian life, is starting off every morning in prayer and reading scripture. This morning I had to work at 8:30 a.m., not exactly a late start for me. If I was to be up early enough to read and pray, then my alarm would sound no later than 6:45 a.m. It seemed like a daunting task to peel myself away from my warm pillow and homemade blanket. I forced myself to do it purely for the sake of experiment. Now it is 9:30 a.m. and I am all smiles and ready to take on the day. We’ll see how I feel around 3:00 p.m.!!! I do feel much more productive right now than usual. I guess Bonhoeffer was as smart as they say.

"We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself."
                                          -Dietrich Bonhoeffer-

I've got it figured out!

It has finally hit me. I have got it all figured out. I have figured out that I have NOT arrived. I have so much to learn about life and how to interact with people that it makes my head spin. The most interesting thought in all of this is that if it took me 22 years to figure this out (and I would consider myself an observant guy) then how do others feel? All too often we get caught up with our own opinions of situations. The best thing to do is take a step back and look at it from a different perspective... theirs. I have learned this the hard way all too many times with people I love. A word of advice... don't give advice unless time has been spent looking at all the perspectives!

"A man convinced against his will, is of the same mind still"