Each morning just before the dawn surfers wake up, grab their gear, paddle out and head out into the surf. There they look, listen, feel, notice, observe, calculate, analyze and determine based on all those factors what the surf will be like that day.

Water is a mighty force. The waves on the North Shore are among the mightiest. It’s important to acknowledge their power.

To fear the Lord means to acknowledge God’s great power, God’s complete authority over us, and all of creation, and God’s terrible hatred of the pollution of sin.

While healthy parents reflect the love of God, unhealthy shame-filled, uncaring, unloving parents can do just the opposite; especially those who call themselves “Christian.”

God disciplines us like loving parents.  God wants us to experience a healthy sense of “for your own good” fear.

The greatest challenge most people face is their unwillingness to live in and under the love of God. They either don’t know how to experience God’s love, run away from God’s love (as I have) or outright reject God’s love. There are, of course, many reasons for these reactions. Most of which traces back to poor human role modeling by “loved ones.”

In the midst of a loving relationship we can experience God’s wrath.

God disciplines us.

God does so to redirect us from our sinful self-destructive path back onto a journey of joy and peace. The Bible explains that God wouldn’t be a loving God if there was no discipline: “My dear child, don’t shrug off God’s discipline, but don’t be crushed by it either.

It’s the child he loves that he disciplines; the child he embraces, he also corrects.

God is educating you; that’s why you must never drop out. He’s treating you as dear children.

In the quiet can learn that we are lovable and that we can be and need to be loved.  When we rest in God’s love — truly allow God into our being — we can acknowledge our imperfections, we can feel our wounds, we can see our scars and admit our sins. When we rest we can be quiet. In the quiet is God waiting for us.

“Be still, and know that I am God! Our God says, “Calm down, and learn that I am God!” 1

Today, this is my quiet whisper.

1 – Psalm 46:10, NLT, CEV

You and I can learn to become more loving. We can teach one another to be more loving. Only through humbly admitting our unloving side can we really find help, healing and wholeness.

That’s what the fear of God does, it allows our brokenness to draw us closer to God in dependence and interdependently closer to other people.

This is a treasure worth more than gold.

This is mysilentscream!

In an atmosphere of love, resting in God’s intimate love, we can finally experience an awareness that our value is settled in God’s mind. God will not, cannot, love us more or less.

We tend to develop conditionally dependent relationships with people. Relating with God is different than that. It’s rational to choose to “act lovingly” our of fear.

We can obey God because we fear the wrath of God. On the other hand, God invites us to learn that his wrath is fearful, but that a loving relationship with the Almighty will naturally lead to obedience.

When I have allowed God to come close, as close as I have so far, it can feel overwhelming. I forced back tears just now thinking of how special I felt. At the same time, I know that I willfully and consciously pushed God back because it felt so…overwhelming, that I felt like I couldn’t house God’s love inside of me.

I was on a trip with a group of TreeHouse teens.  I was praying.

“For your own good.”  That’s the kinda phrase that adults used to get me to do something I didn’t want to do without explaining all the details for me.  Why they undoubtedly had wonderful reasons that “for your own good” was sufficient, inquisitive minds like mine were never satisfied.

While some people might have chosen to use their good judgement or “common sense” to avoid such mishaps, I did not.

Ignoring “for your own good” warnings was a choice, but ignoring “for your own good” has left me with many scars to prove my unwillingness to heed the “for your own good” warnings. 

Pecky’s. I can barely remember that name, Pecky’s.

I googled it. In the gazillion possible places that google.com could find something it could only find two references to “Pecky’s” & “Schiller Park”, both on Facebook.

One was by a guy I graduated high school with. Having felt grateful that Paul Z kept the legacy of Pecky’s alive, I wrote him a thank you note.

Pecky’s & A “Player’s Coach”

Overcoming Fear

Eric Valli, a professional photographer, is dangling by a nylon rope from a 395 foot cliff in Nepal.

Nearby on a rope ladder is another man, Mani Lal, doing what he has done for decades: hunting honey.

Here in the Himalayan foothills, the cliffs shelter honeycombs of the world’s largest honeybee. At the moment, thousands of them are buzzing around both men. Lal, a veteran of hundreds of such attacks, is calm. Not so Mr. Valli.