Lion Chaser: Part 1

For the next 3 weeks, 200+ men from the church will be meeting together on Wednesday mornings at six 0'clock. We are reading together the book titled "In of Pit With a Lion on a Snowy Day" by Mark Batterson who is the Pastor of National Community Church in Washington D.C. These meetings are being lead by our pastor Mark Beeson. Today was the first meeting and I loved it. If I told you all about it this email would be too long to read so here are a few excerpts from the morning:

(in order for some of these to make sense you may want to read 2 Samuel 23:20-21)

- "Normal people run away from lions."
- "God-given opportunities often come disguised as man-eating lions. And how we react
when we encounter those lions will determine our destiny."
- "Maybe following Christ isn't supposed to be as safe or as civilized as we've been led to
believe....Maybe God is raising up a generation of lion chasers."
- "Too often our prayers resolve around asking God to reduce the odds in our lives...But
maybe God wants to stack the odds against us so we can experience a miracle of divine
proportions."
- "How you think about God will determine who you become."
- "Our problems seem really big because our God seems really small. In fact, we reduce
God to the size of our biggest problems."
- "Half of spiritual growth is learning what we don't know. The other half is unlearning
what we do know. And it is failure to unlearn irrational fears and misconceptions that
keeps us from becoming who God wants us to be." (John 5)
- "Think of your fears as mental lions. If we don't learn to chase those fears, they can
keep us at bay for the rest of our lives."
- "Courage is putting yourself into defenseless positions."
- "If you take a second to reflect on your life, you'll discover that the greatest experiences
are often the scariest, and the scariest experiences are often the greatest."

- "So here is my question: Are you living your life in a way that is worth telling
stories about?"

That's just the first three chapters. I would highly recommend this book. I would also highly recommend chasing your fears and letting God work through that process to take you where he wants you to go. Mark finished the morning by sharing with all of us what God has spoken to him with clarity recently and it is this: "God has provisions you know not of, more than you can ask or imagine." That's is true for all of us. What he has in store for us is better than anything we have dreamed of and I have dreamed of some pretty incredible things. It must be good.