Thursday, May 15, 2008

"Excuses, Excuses"-- Insights

If only you could go back and let "Junior High Brent" know that most likely most guys his age, in the same circumstances would end up doing the same thing. Even at the age of 37 I think if I ran across an episode of Scooby Do I would sit there with great expectation hoping that Scrappy would appear. We can admit that now, but back in those teen years we do not have the realization that almost every guy is in the same shoes that we are. If we haven't grown out of cartoons by the time we are forty we certainly hadn't grown out of them during our Jr. High days. A truth like that would have saved all of us a lot of shameful feelings about ourselves.

What does God do with Excuses? He brings truth to them! Whether we are talking about Moses or our own lives, He sees through our excuses and calls us on them. Moses' excuses were based on feeling inadequate and insecure with who he was. God didn't give Moses a chance to believe his own excuse of why he was the wrong person for the job Right away God made it about who He was and not Moses.

As I walk away from your (Excuses, Excuses) article I am realizing that we have to look at excuses from two perspectives. First is on a personal level, where we all need to reflect on how we label our own excuses. What are we trying to hide with our excuses? Maybe we make excuses to put the blame on others, or maybe our excuses are made to hide our ugliness from the rest of the world. Either way, and no matter what the reason is that we make so many excuses, God wants us to call things as they are, and with this action we can have freedom.

The second perspective is seeing how we can use others excuses as ministry opportunities. Whether there is truth in the excuse or not, there are opportunities to open the door for deeper conversations. In the example of your "bizarre excuse", I am sure the young musician wasn't late to practice because of the incident the night before. He got away with not having to give a truthful account of why he was late because everyone was preoccupied with his injured face. For this teen he used his "victimization" to hide the truth. Imagine what could have been revealed if at some point you took him aside and said, "I'm sorry your nose got caught up in the bass, but can I ask why you were actually late tonight?"

I think people gain respect when they challenge someone's excuse, especially if it is a real poor one. Even more important, I think people gain respect when they reveal truth in someone's life. As a youth leader, once you prove that you care and cannot have the wool pulled over your eyes then teens tend to listen and be more truthful. This kind of happened with Jesus and the woman at the well. As soon as the woman realized Jesus knew everything about her she knew that there was something divine about Jesus. With that realization about Him, she opened up and gave her whole life to Him. Likewise we shouldn't let these ministry opportunities go by. With an excuse there is a shame, hurt, embarrassment and/or ego that needs to be healed and freed.

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