TGIF

At age 35, I think I'm finally understanding what it means to be a true follower of Christ. For example, 2,000 years ago this week, Christ went to Calvary to purchase my eternal freedom. Whereas yesterday, I went to Anson to buy a truck. Now I know what you're thinking, and the answer is yes: I made sure to get one with a big enough bed to carry my cross.

Anyway, now that I've mastered true discipleship, I give you this from Rick Warren, owner of at least three different Hawaiian shirts (as seen on Larry King Live) and author of "The Purpose Driven Life," "The Purpose Driven Church," "The Purpose Driven Lunch", "The Purpose Driven Home Game," and "The Purpose Driven 2001 Ford Explorer Sport Trac."

Side note: I've noticed that while 15 million people have bought his book and been blessed by his expression of the Gospel story and how it can radically affect one's life, some within the Christian community bristle at his success and then write him off as a huckster propagating religious fluff to sell books and make a buck.

Personally, I was blessed by this offering of his from an interview with someone named Paul Bradshaw. I hope you are, too.

People ask me, "What is the purpose of life?" And I respond, in a nutshell, that life is preparation for eternity. We were made to last forever, and God wants us to be with Him in Heaven. One day my heart is going to stop, and that will be the end of my body - but not the end of me.

I may live 60 to 100 years on earth, but I am going to spend trillion of years in eternity. This is the warm-up act, the dress rehearsal. God wants us to practice on earth what we will do forever in eternity. We were made by God and for God, and until you figure that out, life isn't going to make sense.

Life is a series of problems: Either you are in one now, you're just coming out of one or you're getting ready to go into another one. The reason for this is that God is more interested in your character than your comfort.

God is more interested in making your life holy than He is in making your life happy. We can be reasonably happy here on earth, but that's not the goal of life. The goal is to grow in character, in Christ-likeness.

This past year has been the greatest year of my life but also the toughest, with my wife, Kay, getting cancer. I used to think that life was hills and valleys - you go through a dark time, then you got to the mountaintop, back and forth. I don't believe that anymore.

Rather than life being hills and valleys, I believe that it's kind of like two rails on a railroad track, and at all times you have something good and something bad in your life. No matter how good things are in your life, there is always something bad that needs to be worked on. And no matter how bad things are in your life, there is always something good you can thank God for. You can focus on your purposes, or you can focus on your problems. If you focus on your problems, you're going into self-centeredness, which is "my problem, my issues, my pain."

But one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to get your focus off yourself and onto God and others. We discovered quickly that in spite of the prayers of hundreds of thousands of people, God was not going to heal Kay or make it easy for her. It has been very difficult for her, and yet God has strengthened her character, given her a ministry of helping other people, given her a testimony, drawn her closer to Him and to people.

You have to learn to deal with both the good and the bad of life. Actually, sometimes learning to deal with the good is harder. For instance, this past year, all of a sudden, when the book sold 15 million copies, it made me instantly very wealthy. It also brought a lot of notoriety that I had never had to deal with before.

I don't think God gives you money or notoriety for your own ego or for you to live a life of ease. So I began to ask God what He wanted me to do with this money, notoriety and influence. He gave me two different passages that helped me decide what to do, Corinthians 9 and Psalm 72.

First, in spite of all the money coming in, we would not change our lifestyle one bit. We made no major purchases. Second, about midway through last year, I stopped taking a salary from the church. Third, we set up foundations to fund an initiative we call The Peace Plan - to plant churches, equip leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next generation. Fourth, I added up all that the church had paid me in the 24 years since I started the church, and I gave it all back. It was liberating to be able to serve God for free.

We need to ask ourselves: Am I going to live for possessions? Popularity? Am I going to be driven by pressures? Guilt? Bitterness? Materialism? Or am I going to be driven by God's purposes for my life?

When I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of my bed and say, "God, if I don't get anything else done today, I want to know You more and love You better." God didn't put me on earth just to fulfill a to-do list. He's more interested in what I am than what I do.

That's why we're called human beings, not human doings.

Anatomy (And The) 101

We, 35 and 34, finished potty-training Anna Claire, 3, just in time for a spring break trip to southern California. After five straight days of airplane toilets, public restrooms, and port-o-johns, I'm strongly considering having all of us switch back to diapers.

Heading up the 101 during rush hour Monday night, Anna Claire made it clear she needed to use the facilities. Being new to this routine, she remains under the impression that sanitary lavatorial options are always at hand.

(Helpful travel tip: references to freeways in SoCal generally include both a noun marker, e.g. the 101 or the PCH, and copious profanity, "Go, @#$%&*! This isn't a @#$%&* parking lot, it's the @#$%&* 405!")

So we pulled off the next exit, which just so happened to be Sunset Boulevard where everyone who's anyone in Hollywood has gone pee pee or, in the case of Hugh Grant, worse. There are roughly 10 million people in L.A., 10 million of which are likely to be found on Sunset Boulevard at any given moment, many of them behaving rather roughly. Turns out Anna Claire is not the first person to find herself in urgent need of a public potty. Which explains why the McDonald's/Starbucks/coin-op laundromat where we alighted had only a single uni-john. It had a lock that required a quarter to open and a sign that read,

"THIS RESTROOM IS OWNED BY ALL OF THE COMPANIES IN THIS BUILDING."

After an initial peek and whiff, I felt compelled to scribble the postscript,

"...AND CLEANED BY NONE OF THEM."

That was a week ago, and none of us has contracted anything that a coupla rounds of antibiotics won't cure. But beware. The next time you need to do #2 on the 101, you might want to avoid Sunset and wait for a less noxious exit. Like Portland.