Bangor Chronicles: Swimming

My mother and I took adult swimming lessons for five weeks. It was a lot of fun. I learned how how to the breaststroke and mastered my freestyle and backstroke. My breaststroke is a work of a progress but it is correct. Just need to build up my endurance.

One thing I learned is that with swimming, muscle memory is hard to accomplish but is very important. It is hard to change something you have doing different from what the stroke calls for. Knowing what you are supposed to do and having the timing is hard.

When we think about life, we need a form of muscle training. We need to remember the right path to go and not depart from it. More and more, sin is becoming normalized. We rationalize our sins so we can keep on doing what we are doing. We want to continue doing what we are doing and because sin makes us feel guilty, we lighten it up to make us not feel guilty.

Where does being complacent and not remembering the things we are supposed to get us? NO WHERE! When we swim the wrong way, we are going to continue to swim the wrong way. The longer we swim the wrong way, the harder it is to learn a better way to swim- the right way.

Just like our muscles need to be trained to swim the right way- our heart and our minds need to learn to live the right way. How do we train our hearts and minds to go the way it should go? Some of it is basic common sense- going to church and praying. DISCLAIMER: I do not judge anyone who does not go to church and still share in the Christian faith. I believe it is more important to live out our faith and living for God then it is going Church  every Sunday. Church is only a building. Living it out is so much more important. Knowing where you are going is more important. Having friends to help retrain your muscles is important. It is important to train your mind using a part of Philippians 4 that tells us where we are suppose to focus.

Philippians 4:8 And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.

To be completely honest and transparent, I really struggle with this and I am really working on it. I have been negative about a lot of different things. I have become cynical about God. I have been seeing things through a worldly lens and have seeing things as coincidence instead of something that had been orchestrated by God.

We got to learn to swim the right way. We need to approach live the right way. We need to see sin as what it really is and not rationalize it and make excuses.  We need to train our minds so we can in the righteousness that we called to.

Bangor Chronicles- Zach gets Baptized!

On March 4, 2018 I had the honor and privilege of seeing my precious nephew Zachary get baptized! It was such a special day and he had the congregation laughing! As parents today, raising their children in the Christian faith is harder then ever. When parents like Zachary's have their child baptized or dedicated it is so refreshing. It gives hope to the world! One of the reasons I want to work at a Christian preschool one day is because of this. I want to support these parents and let them know that they are not alone. Zach has a family filled of faith and because of that Zach will know the way he should go. Proverbs 22:6 promises "Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it. (NLT). I know this is true because I was raised in a devout Christian home. As a child, I remember being in church every time the doors were open. I was a Deacon's kid and my whole world centered around Jesus Christ and the church. The hardest part of being raised in a home of faith like I was is is making faith our own and not something that becomes complacent. Going to church or believing in God simply isn't enough. We need to make it personal because God is personal God. I expect Zach will have issues in his walk because we all do. I will do my best to encourage him and help him understand faith means nothing if it is not personal. I want him to feel comfortable asking the hard questions about faith such as "Why do bad things happen to good people?" It is good and healthy to have these questions. These questions help us develop our worldview. An example of this concept is when we ask "Why does God allow bad things to happen?" We will be more prone to finding the answer, searching and seeing God in those situations. After 9/11 more people went to church then ever before to help them answer that question. People who are not Christians even ask these questions because whether they admit it or not they want know that there is a God who can meet them where they are and heal their wounds. This is why we saw an entire nation, an entire world, searching for God after 9/11. I want Zach to learn how to be a strong boy and men of faith in this world. I want him to see past the headlines. I want him to be secure enough in himself and his faith that he is not easily swayed by the actions of his peers. I want him to go by his own drum and know that if he loses friends in the process it is their loss. I am so blessed to have been raised in close-knit family filled of faith in which I learned how to make my faith my own and not just see is as part of my family. I think that is the most important thing Christian parents can teach their child- to make their faith own and not something that is just a part of their family. I am certain that this is how we will raise Zachary. The family raises the child with the parents! I am blessed to know the type of home my nephew will be raised. The way our parents raised us is being passed down because just like the verse in Proverbs, we didn't depart from it.