prayer « robot with a heart

first post

September 19, 2008, 10:48 am

this site has been in the works for quite a while on and off, in between projects and the busyness of life. things have been happening that make me want to write… and the things that have been happening make this first post very appropriate to the name of this site.

i’m a robot.

i do nerdy things. i play with computers all day. i code for fun. i develop websites at work. i run linux and open source software on my desktop and laptop. my girlfriend calls me a robot.

likewise i deal w/ the world often in a very linear systematic way. the analogies i make in my head (and sometimes come out) usually are very uhhh… nerdy. i look at my room like a fragmented hard drive… i know where everything is, it just takes a while to get to them. someone else (and sometimes me) organizing my room is like dropping the drive and i though things are “orderly” theyre like lost clusters. if i have a lot of tasks to do, i imagine myself being an OS managing time resources and doing tasks round-robin… or if i’m asked to do a task, i think of all my dependencies as parameters that need to be passed into a function (that is… me) in order for output to come out… blablabla this paragraph is too long. i think you get the point.

unfortunately this robotic way of doing things got transferred to my normal daily life… with real human beings! and humans are messy, inconsistent, unpredictable. very unlike my nice robot friends and functions on a computer. i often expect clean-cut input/output from people. just plain raw facts and actions based on how things actually are and i forget that w/ people it’s rarely that way. this past week i pretty much got hit left and right w/ rebukes and talks about why this robotness is failing.

after many talks and lots of self reflection i finally decided (well more like felt compelled) to get down on my knees and pray: “God humble me and give me a heart”. i think God was waiting to hear that from me because he sure answered fast but i know i’m still a work in progress…

i need a heart.

originally i was gonna end the post right up there but i just realized i sound like the tin man in the wizard of oz. okay thats it!

Permalink

Tags: heart, prayer

Comments (0)

forgetting god’s promises

July 19, 2008, 11:50 pm

just got home from a day out w/ family… but i wanted to get some thoughts that got me last night during prayer meeting. yes yes, i know usually friday prayer meetings rub me the wrong way but once in a while i get something heavy that causes me to really pray. i think my hands start to shake or i start breathing more heavily than i usually do… or maybe its just that i dont pass out and fall asleep.

something pb said prompted me to pray for the sins of our church…the main topic i think pb asked us to pray for 5 or 6 times… he just stated it in 5 or 6 different ways, but to me as i was praying it was just one topic. and what i was praying for was that we would know god. all the specifics pb brought up like “lack of faith”, “building our identity on something other than him” or “tiredness of leaders” and so on all came back to “knowing god” for me. here are some thoughts i typed onto my phone bc i couldnt find a pen around:

we know how to LOOK LIKE we know god, but we don’t know god. i don’t think i need much explanation here.
we don’t know that our god is a god of promises. god’s promises come through his word and we know that what god says will happen. when god says he’ll take care of us we don’t really believe that. when god tells us that he is good we know it but we don’t believe it.
the next thing is almost cliche… i almost don’t to state it but i did write it down, but i’ll expand a bit on it: we don’t seek God, we seek his gifts. i think too often we seek to have certain gifts of the spirit more than seeking to know god more deeply. we seek the gifts of tongues or of prophesy but do not seek the knowledge of him and his love.
not thats its totally automatic but i think knowing him makes the other specific things that we prayed for come more naturally: community, missions, freedom.

in brief that’s about it.

Permalink

Tags: church, god, prayer