Stupid Fake Sharks…
August 6, 2009
“…nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward.”
If you have known me for an extended period of time, then you probably know what some of my favorite movies are. I love older movies that I used to always watch with my Dad when I was growing up. I remember sitting with him and watching Jaws, which looking back now seems pretty cheesy, but I promise you at the time I would have bet anything that the shark was real. The entire Rocky series (well most of them) is another collection of movies that I could watch almost every day and still jump up and down like a little child when Rocky gets up after being knocked down and wins the title. There’s just something about Rocky that gets me pumped to run and get in shape and do things that most people wouldn’t believe I can do. Now as you probably have noticed, I haven’t ran nor gotten in shape yet, but I am still working on it. The quote above is from Rocky Balboa, and I have quoted it numerous times. I think it’s an amazing quote because it is so true. Nobody gets through this life unscathed. Regardless of what you see when you look at people, everyone goes through rough patches, everyone has been hurt, and everyone has scars. It’s a fact of life. What distinguishes the “successful” people from the “failures” is how they react to these adversities.
A lot of people have this “me against the world” mentality, which is good because there are many situations that you face where it will be you against the world. We have learned through the many life lessons of Rocky Balboa how to deal with these circumstances. But what about the situations you are in and the rough patches you face because of something you did? I think these situations are so much harder to deal with and get through because we just don’t really know how to react to them. It always seems that a situation is a lot easier to deal with when there is someone besides you to blame. As we talked about last night, when we make mistakes, it becomes this enormous piece of baggage that we just carry around with us. This baggage weighs us down and makes it hard for us to live our lives the way we would want to. Sometimes we carry this around as a form of punishment. We always know that there are consequences to our actions, so we just think that this baggage is part of those consequences. Maybe we don’t want to carry this baggage, yet we don’t know how to get rid of it.
The title of Wednesday night’s message was “God loves you in spite of yourself.” We read a story in Acts 9 about a guy names Saul who is radically changed by God,but wasn’t even looking for it. If we had to earn God’s love, we would never receive it, yet we don’t have to earn His love, it is given to us. All we have to do is stand up and take it! I want to challenge you this week to begin to look past your mistakes and look to God. God is here right now and wants to clean the slate on your life. He wants you to know that today is a new day and the past really doesn’t matter anymore. Despite your biggest efforts to do good but ultimately fail, God is standing there waiting to put the pieces back together. In order for us to start looking forward, we need to stop looking behind us. I love you guys, come see us next Wednesday as we begin to learn more about how we can let go of the past and get rid of the baggage!
