Check out this video Kevin and Tiffany recently shared on their blog ( KevinsRecovery.com ) showing the changes, and what life is like as a paraplegic:

“We’re still praying for a miracle & are sure hoping that’s Jesus’ plan, but we’ll see where He continues to take us.” -Kev and Tiff

What an encouragement his life is to the rest of us when it comes to suffering well and trusting God when it really counts. They still need our prayers, so let’s not forget them.

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-  The Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis

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A few things that riding a motorcycle has in common with life:

• You are where you look: focus on where you want to go next. It’s important to know who and what is behind you, but you cannot let it become your focus. Lose your focus and you’ll have some close calls or something worse.
• If you’re doing it out of pride, rethink it. That applies just as much to picking your first bike as it does to racing strangers on the road.
• Taking a passenger along changes things. You may need to make adjustments for their sake.
• Stay alert. What’s around you is constantly changing. The environment you’re in, the people you’re around, the obstacles in the road. Be aware of them in case you need to adjust speed, change courses, or even come to a stop.
• Gear up. Get prepared before you ride by buying good gear, then take the time to actually put it on. Laziness is no excuse when avoiding something that could hurt you. Maybe you just wanted to feel comfortable instead, but you’re going to regret that in the long run.
• Take in advice from those who are more experienced than you. Watch them to understand, listen to their tips, and avoid their bad choices.

I’m sure my friends who have been riding for longer than I have could give additional advice or go more in depth, maybe about carefully choosing who you ride with, or slowing down for the curves. Of course the two subjects here don’t completely relate, and we’re not even diving into deeper motivations behind these simple bullet points, so I won’t stretch the analogy to make things fit. For example: Ride like everyone is out to run you over is great advice on the bike, but paranoia in life is not such a good thing. It’s true that on a motorcycle you can do everything in your power to prepare for the worst and still get into trouble, just as in life the same can happen, but I’ll be the first to admit that the choice to ride a motorcycle is not nearly as safe as choosing to be in a car, where you’re more protected from whatever is coming at you–that is if safety is your number one concern. So the analogy breaks down, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from it.

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This oversimplifies, however. Freedom cannot be defined in strictly negative terms, as the absence of confinement and constraint. In fact, in many cases, confinement and constraint is actually a means to liberation.

If you have musical aptitude, you may give yourself to practice, practice, practice the piano for years. This is a restriction, a limit on your freedom. There are many other things you won’t be able to do with the time you invest in practicing. If you have the talent, however, the discipline and limitation will unleash your ability that would otherwise go untapped. What have you done? You’ve deliberately lost your freedom to engage in somethings in order to release yourself to a richer kind of freedom to accomplish other things.

This does not mean that restriction, discipline, and constraint are intrisically, automatically liberating. For example, a five-foot-four, 125-pound young adult male should not set his heart on becoming an NFL lineman. All the discipline and effort in the world will only frustrate and crush him (literally). He is banging his head against a physical reality–he simply does not have the potential. In our society many people have worked extremely hard to pursue careers that pay well rather than fit their talents and interests. Such careers are straitjackets that in the long run stifle and dehumanize us.

Disciplines and constraints, then, liberate us only when they fit with the reality of our nature and capacities. A fish, because it absorbs oxygen from water rather than air, is only free if it is restricted and limited to water. If we put it out on the grass, its freedom to move and even live is not enhanced, but destroyed. The fish dies if we do not honor the reality of its nature.

In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions. Those that fit with the reality of our nature and the world produce greater power and scope for our abilities and a deeper joy and fulfillment. Experimentation, risk, and making mistakes bring growth only if, over time, they show us our limits as well as our abilities. If we only grow intellectually, vocationally, and physically through judicious constraints–why would it not also be true for spiritual and moral growth? Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn’t we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it?

The popular concept–that we should each determine our own morality–is based on the belief that the spiritual realm is nothing at all like the rest of the world. Does anyone really believe that? For many years after each of the morning and evening Sunday services I remained in the auditorium for another hour to field questions. Hundreds of people stayed for the give-and-take discussions. One of the most frequent statements I heard was that “Every person has to define right and wrong for him- or herself.” I always responded to the speakers by asking, “Is there anyone in the world right now doing things you believe they should stop doing no matter what they personally believe about the correctness of their behavior?” They would invariable say, “Yes, of course.” Then I would ask, “Doesn’t that mean that you do believe there is some kind of moral reality that is ‘there’ that is not defined by us, that must be abided by regardless of what a person feels or thinks?” Almost always, the response to that question was silence, either a thoughtful or a grumpy one.”

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- The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, by Timothy Keller. This quote is found in the chapter “Christianity Is a Straitjacket,” where Keller goes more in depth on this issue. More resources for this book available at www.TheReasonForGod.com

Read the rest of the book to hear Keller’s additional responses to the following commonly-held reservations people have against Biblical Christianity:

1. There can’t be just one religion.
2. How dould a good God allow suffering?
3. The church is responsible for so much injustice.
4. How can a loving God send people to hell?
5. You can’t take the Bible literally.

…along with serious reasons in favor of faith in God.

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From the DesiringGod.org website:

The Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, LA, is the largest and historically one of the bloodiest maximum-security prisons in the USA. In 2009, Desiring God and John Piper were invited to Angola to learn about prison life, hear from men who have been radically changed by the gospel, and minister to many of the 5,000 inmates.

Don’t Waste Your Life Sentence confronts you with the realities of inmates who, though their lives appear to have been wasted, often have a greater grasp on eternity than those on the outside.

Watch the trailer below. If you’re near Minneapolis Minnesota, join Bethlehem Baptist Church for the film premier and the prison ministry they do. (Info here).

“It maybe that your presence here will enable you to see better than the people in my church can see.” -John Piper

“It’s easy to get into trouble. But it’s so hard to get out of.” -Inmate

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Today marks the 269th anniversary of Jonathan Edwards preaching his most famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in Enfield, CT. I’m reading through it after pastor Rick Holland’s wife Kim posted a tweet mentioning it. Though I won’t try to summarize it because I just can’t do it justice, the point Edwards was making, as Capitol Hill Baptist Church shows us, was that God’s grace was the only thing keeping his listeners out of hell at that very moment. This message, based on Deuteronomy 32:35, played an important role in the Great Awakening that swept through America in the 1740s.

“The strongest have no power to resist him…”

“God is not altogether such an one as themselves, though they may imagine him to be so.”

“God has laid himself under no obligation by any promise to keep any natural man out of hell one moment.”

“However unconvinced you may now be of the truth of what you hear, by and by you will be fully convinced of it.”

“But the foolish children of men do miserably delude themselves in their own schemes, and in their confidence in their own strength and wisdom; they trust to nothing but a shadow.”

“God hath had it on his heart to show to angels and men, both how excellent his love is, and also how terrible his wrath is.”

“And now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has flung the door of mercy wide open, and stands in the door calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners…”

“Men’s hearts harden, and their guilt increases apace at such a day as this, if they neglect their souls: and never was there so great danger of such persons being given up to hardness of heart, and blindness of mind.”

• One week from now, the sin I fight against inside of me will have a magnifying glass put over it by the constant closeness of another, and yet one week from now, God’s process of sanctification for his children will give my wife and I the opportunity to begin dealing with deeper underlying problems that we never knew God wanted us to confront in our own lives. As Rick Holland describes marriage, it’s “an unconditional commitment to an imperfect person.”

• One week from now, I’ll be financially responsible for someone. Yes, there will be tension, but it’s how I deal with my own selfish pride in that moment that counts.

• One week from now, I’ll finalize my full commitment to her alone, in the form of a vow before God, witnessed by friends and family.

• One week from now, I will be bound to reject the temptations of in any way pursuing other women, appearing to do so, or even accepting the advances of any other woman, for the sake of Karen knowing she is the only one that matters to me. Call this a positive bias in her favor or a discrimination against the pursuit of all others if you will.

• One week from now, there will still be just as many, if not more people watching to see how things turn out for the two of us, or as Stuart Scott put it in The Exemplary Husband, “We need to remember that we already are some sort of example to others. The question is, what kind?”

• One week from now, I will be committed to her safety, to the point where I will not be tolerant of that which harms her. This intolerance will apply to physical threats, emotional dangers, spiritual misguidance, or anything that threatens to destroy my relationship with her.

• One week from now, the two of us are committing to a first-year ban on the habit of the passive entertainment of television-show series that we’d rather not even give the chance to distance us from getting to know each other. We’ll revisit the need for this voluntary ban after we’ve had more time to analyze it’s potential benefits.

• One week from now, I’m not going to stop giving her flowers or chocolate! (And we’ll still be going out on dates).

• One week from now, we’ll be able to look back on our convictions about why we made the choices we did, and the relationship will become all that much more valuable to both of us as we reflect on the purposeful and sometimes temporarily painful discipline it took to faithfully wait for each other, despite the constant temptations that at any point could have overtaken our resolve if it weren’t for the daily grace of God. 1 Corinthians 10:13: “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.”

• One week from now, the excuse that “I don’t know if we’re compatible” will be as convincing in my mind as the rhetoric of a four year old telling his mom he doesn’t want to take a nap, as Karen and I discover that OF COURSE we’re not naturally “compatible” in popular culture’s expression, because only God’s grace can truly walk us through, rather than around, the inevitable challenges we will face in living with each other. (thanks Paul Tripp for the idea behind my analogy!)

• One week from now, all the advice we’ve received from the hours of counseling sessions, the overview books, and the DVD segments, not to mention the great role models of our parents and close friends, will become more valuable resources that we look back on to help guide us through miscommunications and disagreements that will arise from the dark sin we all have inside of us as part of fallen humanity that can only look to God for true hope.

• Lastly, a year from now, I’ll probably look back on this list and laugh a little, thinking of all the other things that I had yet to learn about marriage, about my relationship with Karen, and most importantly about God, since that determines our perspectives on everything else in life.

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