​If you're like me, when bedtime comes you're ready for bed. You're ready to turn out the lights on another day, close your eyes and peacefully put the day behind you.

In many ways, though, when it comes to God, he is far from done with the day.

I was reading Psalm 16 recently and the verses I shared below caught my attention. Especially these words:

In the night also my heart instructs me.

I recently talked about how our heart has a small brain of its own. I talked about how powerfully the information and the images stored in our hearts get relayed to our brains. Thousands of years before science told us this, David was writing about it in a Psalm.

It's no surprise, really, that a God who is constantly begging us to "be still and listen," would use the still and quiet of the night to do some of his most meaningful work in us.

Just like many of you have often sat around at night patiently or not patiently waiting for your kids to fall asleep so you could work on things you needed to work on, God is also waiting for us to fall asleep so he can work on what he needs to work on.

It just so happens what he needs to work on is us.

Many nights I go to sleep thinking about something I want to write about in the morning. Many mornings I wake up with inexplicable clarity about those things I didn't have when I went to sleep. And some times, I wake up with something completely different on my mind and I'm left wondering, where did that come from.

The answer is, someone was at work while I was asleep.

Here is something important about that. It's why I think David's next line in this Psalm is so important. What we keep before us during the day, that is what God is going to use our hearts to teach us with while we sleep.

If you're reading this right now, there's a chance it's being stored in your heart and God just might use this to instruct you while you sleep tonight. Count me grateful to be a part of your dreams 😀.

What we read during the day matters.
The music we listen to during the day matters.
The television and social media we absorb matters.
The words we use and the tones we use with each other during the day matter.

All the things we keep before us during the day are the things our heart is going to use to instruct us in the night. You can think about it as planting seeds in our hearts during the day that will bloom in our brains at night.

I think in some ways that helps us be more purposeful about our day. In everything we do we can be asking, is this something I want my heart to be talking to my brain about when I got to sleep tonight?

In many ways, as you go forward with this day, you're writing your heart's lesson plans for this night.

Write beautiful plans today.

​For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to be a writer. Every time I'd get serious about it, though, the work and commitment required to be one would too easily wear on me and I'd give up.

The most exhausting part of it was I was never really good with grammar and punctuation and sentence structure. I read books and watched videos about where a comma goes. I familiarized myself with why I wasn't allowed to start a sentence with a conjunction. I tried to commit myself to placing the nouns and verbs in the exact right places to make sure their was proper "flow."

I'd write a sentence, read over it to make sure I'd complied with all the writing rules of the world, then move on to the next sentence. I'd repeat this for a paragraph or two and then close it up and say, oh well, I'll try again tomorrow.

Then one day I decided that I didn't want to be a writer. I decided I'd rather just tell stories.

Do you know the most beautiful part of that decision? When you decide you just want to tell stories, you decide you're going to tell stories to people who HAVE stories. And chances are really good their stories aren't perfect. So they're probably somewhat delighted to read your story isn't so perfect either.

Including the part where you put your periods and commas in the wrong places.

For many years, that's how I was with my relationship with God. I spent all my time memorizing the rules. I'd look back on every decision I made and every conversation I had with friends and co-workers and analyze them through God's commands and guidelines.

In doing so, I almost always came away feeling like God was a movie producer screaming "cut cut cut."

I say this all the time when I'm talking to different groups. If some genie in a bottle handed me an eraser and said, here you go Keith, here's a life eraser. Today's your lucky reset day. Erase away any decade in your life. Wipe your life clean of it forever.

I always say I'd take that eraser and run as quickly as I could toward the decade of my 20s. Oh the enthusiasm I'd have watching those ten years disappear. With each wipe, I'd get to witness destruction and darkness and lifelessness vanish - like magic.

I know now, though, that's not how God sees that decade. God looks at those years and says, oh, I can make something out of that. I love the material you've given me here, Keith. I'm going to use those years to create redemption and healing and unconditional.

One thing I've learned from God on that one is I too often run around looking at other people's lives, and if even on the inside, I'm screaming "cut cut cut." I have an eraser ever ready to hand them and tell them it's your luck day - I'm going to let you erase that decision out of your life.

Then God grabs the eraser from me and says, not so fast. I think I can create something out of that.

​Our identity is not anchored to our best or our worst moments. We live in between them.

That's pretty powerful.

How much of my life do I spend letting success tell me I'm better than I think I am, or letting failure tell me just the opposite?

How much of my life do I get consumed with pursuing some goal that I think will show the world I'm great, and how much of my life do I spend hiding from the world because I feel like some bad day or mistake told me I belong in the basement?

Some days that feels like the balancing act of life. We spend life trying to undo or recover from moments that didn't go so well, or chasing some dream we think will forever put the low moments in life behind us.

To me it's pretty amazing that God saw this balancing act coming. He knew the most important part of our lives here on earth was the "in between." And God knew the biggest hurdle to us living our best in between lives was us beating ourselves up over our worst moments or getting too full of ourselves in our best moments.

So God made a couple of things clear to us from the get go.

One, we are all full of low moments. God said life is going to be challenging and you are all going to make boneheaded mistakes. He said I've got your back in the challenges and I'm going to spend zero time beating you up over your mistakes - so you shouldn't either.

And two, God said if you're following me your futures all look identical. You're going to die and then you're going to spend eternity with me.

God said I don't need you drug down by yesterday or overly consumed with tomorrow. I need your attention in the here and now. Because God seems to think if we beat ourselves up too much for what happened yesterday or get too caught up thinking we're going to be a big big star tomorrow, then we're going to be completely distracted from loving our neighbors today.

Too often that's what our best and worst moments are about. They are distractions. Maybe that's how the devil keeps us thinking about ourselves. Maybe he's afraid if we quit living in our worst and best moments, we'll start living our in-betweens with the focus God created for us.

God created us to focus on loving others. The easiest way to lose sight of that is to have our sights fully focused on ourselves. Our best and worst moments are always inviting us to focus on ourselves.

​We become what we imagine.

Maybe you don't believe that, but watch a few commercials on television and you'll quickly discover a lot of businesses and companies out there believe it.

They want you to imagine the you who can't live without the newest iphone - and have you decide that you can't.

They want you to imagine that you can't have fun or a good time without alcohol - and have you decide that you can't.

They want you to imagine you're the only person on the planet who hasn't watched Ozark - and have you decide you need to spend the next 24 hours fixing that.

There's also social media quietly asking us every day, non-stop, to imagine what it would be like to be someone else - as if who you are isn't good enough.

There's the big houses and the fancy cars we pass every day begging us to imagine what our lives would look life if we could only upgrade them.

Life wants us to be in a constant longing for an upgrade.

Most days the noise of this world is all about people and things and circumstances competing to be center stage in our imagination, convincing us they can be that upgrade.

Because who and what we spend most of our time imagining we'll be - we'll that's what we'll spend most of our time trying to become.

But you know, to Christians, God said we were made in his image. We don't have to listen to the noise of this world to figure out who we are. In fact, we should spend most of our time trying to quiet the distractions that want nothing more than for us to believe we have no idea who we are. That way the world can clear that up for us.

The healthiest use of our imagination would be imagining who God is. The more time we spend imagining who God is, the more time we'll find ourselves letting him shape who we are, not the latest Budweiser or Apple commercials.

Over and over the bible tells us God is love. And that love is most visible in how we treat one another.

I think God is saying turn off the TV. Go sit quietly on a trail or a park bench. I think God is saying open up your bible or your devotional and imagine. Imagine that God loves you and loves all of your neighbors in spite of the things you've heard about them or said about them. Imagine that the people we think ill of God wants to love the most. Imagine all these things.

And then become what you imagine.

​1 Corinthians 2:9 says, "Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it so much as dawned on man what God has prepared for those who love him."

For those who share my faith, I imagine they would say that's where the "mystery" of our faith begins.

For those who don't share it, I imagine they would say that's where the irrationality or complete lunacy of our faith begins.

Frankly, I can subscribe to both characterizations. As a believer, I can say it is both a mystery and completely irrational to fully launch on the ocean of trusting the invisible.

The definition of rational is: based on reason or logic. It's hard to find much reason or logic in something that's never been seen or experienced before.

I've lived a rational life. I've lived life confined by only trusting the things I can see and can be explained. I'm not the only one. I've lived life demanding answers. I've lived life needing to know exactly how this will work out before I take the next step. I've lived life hanging out with people and trusting them only after I've run them through a comprehensive background check.

I've learned a couple of things living that rational life.

One, rational is relative. What's rational and logical to one isn't so rational and logical to another.

And two, today's known can quickly become tomorrow's unknown and vise versa.

We are in a time when so many knowns, things we've been able to see and feel and touch and trust in, so many of those things have been dismantled.

You have to go to school to be educated. You have to go to church to experience church. The restaurant I go get my fish at every Friday night for 20 years will always be open to serve me. The healthy family member or friend I know and love will always be there.

One thing I think this pandemic has taught us to at least some degree is, for us all to experience life at it's fullest, we have to launch on the ocean of trusting the unknown and the unseen and the irrational.

Maybe for you that's not God. I completely get it. God's just the invisible part of my life that's made so many previously unseens and irrationals and nonsensicals make sense.

The irony for me there is, the more I trust in God, the more he becomes less invisible to me.

But we're all in a spot where moving forward in life requires doing so without all the answers. Doing so requires leaning into experiences that are unfamiliar and previously invisible to us. Doing so requires us to consider that sometimes lunacy is the most sane and opportunistic direction in our lives.

Lest you think this is another of the countless opinions out there about when and how and where to "open up" our country, it is not.

This is a deeper reflection on when and how and where to open up my life, and how sometimes allowing the possibility of the invisible might launch me on a very visible and trusting journey I once thought was impossible. One I see a beauty in life I once thought was completely irrational to imagine.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been reading through the book of Psalms in the bible. I have to confess, these early Psalms have left me wanting to reach into my bible, take hold of David and scream, "dude, you have to get a grip on yourself."

This morning's Psalm, Psalm 13, starts out with these words from David:

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?

And then this same Psalm, just a few sentences later, ends with these words from David:

I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me.

And that has been the theme of these early Psalms - David crying out with where are you God, followed quickly by oh wait, there you are.

This morning, though, the more I found myself wanting to skip ahead to the Psalms where David gets a little more stability in his faith, I felt God grabbing my hand and saying, no, you need to stay right here. I heard him saying this isn't about David - this is about you.

Bob Goff reminded me this morning God didn't want me to stay in Psalm 13 to scold me as much as he wanted me there to remind me.

God wanted me reminded that even a great King, a man with enough faith to defeat a giant, even that guy can have faith as up and down as a roller coaster. God is using David's story to remind me what an up and down story my own life has been.

I think the moral God wants me to see in that story is that the answer to every down I've ever experienced in life was the up I ultimately found in God.

I'm reminded this morning of the song Run to the Father. The first time I heard it several months ago, these words brought tears to my eyes:

I run to the Father
I fall into grace
I'm done with the hiding
No reason to wait
My heart needs a surgeon
My soul needs a friend
So I'll run to the Father
Again and again
​And again and again

It was that again and again and again and again that got me.

Because on the other end of each of those "agains" in my life, God has been there.

So this morning when I find myself asking David, "really, David, this again?"

I heard God - not David - answer yes - again - and I will be there waiting on him.

​I think fear is always trying to dictate the terms of life.

Fear likes to keep our hopes rooted in moving targets.

Fear knows when our hopes are tied to the economy, hope fades the moment the economy begins to collapse.

Fear knows when our hopes are tied to our health, hope fades the moment a deadly virus arrives.

In fact, it's a bit ironic, fear lives in fear.

It lives in fear of us ever collectively having hope in a target that sits, unwavering, unmovable in the face of any challenge.

In Psalm 11 this morning, David has people in his ear telling him the world is collapsing. You need to run and hide David. You pride yourself on doing the right thing, they tell him, well you are no longer living in a world where doing the right thing makes any difference at all.

And David says - in Psalm 11:4

The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord's throne is in heaven; his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man.

David is saying maybe this world is collapsing, But God is still God. God is still where God is. And he still sees me and he is still waiting on me.

David said my hope isn't found clinging to the moving targets of this world, my hope is found in the home God has prepared for me.

Here's the thing we need to know about that home. At least how I've come to see it and experience it. God didn't send us an email or a text or a fancy invitation in the mail to come live in this home with him. He came to earth personally to literally touch lives with a hope that never moves.

He came into the lives of people whose health had collapsed, whose economies had collapsed, and when he walked out of their towns and out of their lives, he left behind people who were experiencing a hope like they'd never experienced before.

Those biblical stories would be a farce to me except for the reality I too have experienced that shift from hopelessness to hopeful. I too have shifted from living in a dark place when the things of this world collapsed around me to living within the light of a home that is waiting on me.

But I always have to remember, God didn't wait on me to get home. God came to live in me long before he'll say come live with me forever. God came to be an unmovable hope in my life long before he'll bring me to his unmovable home.

The other thing I need to remember about that. And it's probably not "the other thing" as much as it is "THE thing" - God didn't come live in me as an unmovable hope so I can sit around patiently waiting for the u-haul to arrive and take me to my eternal home. No, God came to be an unmovable hope in my life to keep me constantly stirred to be an unmovable hope in someone else's life.

We were created to walk each other toward an unmovable hope. We were created to walk with each other when the economy collapses. When health collapses. We were made to walk with unmovable hope together.

And you know who celebrates most when we walk away from how we were made. Fear does. The fear that wants to dictate the terms of this world is counting on us to cling to moving targets and not each other.

​I was reading a blog post yesterday by Seth Godin that talked about our "moral imagination." I suddenly found myself pondering deeper than I ever had, what exactly is morality?

As a Christian, I guess I've always thought my faith guides my morality. Does that mean because I am Christian I am always moral? And moreover, I have a lot of friends who are not Christian, does that mean they aren't capable of being moral?

The simplest definition I found of morality is this:

Morality is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper and those that are improper.

That definition says it all, really, when it comes to the blurred lines of morality. It all boils down to what we personally think is a proper decision and what is an improper one. That's true both when I judge my own morality - "am I making a proper decision with proper intentions" - and when I judge your morality - "are you making a proper decision with proper intentions."

Proper and improper. How many battles do we have going on in this world because what one sees as very logically proper, another sees as completely improper. How many battles do we have going on because of our differing views on morality.

Oh, how much different the world would look if we all had a common view on proper and improper.

I started thinking about some things we all agree on as proper and improper. Not 100% mind you, but generally speaking.

What I decided was, again, generally speaking, proper becomes improper when our intentions and decisions start becoming harmful for others. Most "moral" arguments I hear are based on the "good" or "bad" this will do to other people.

I think the biggest problem with that - probably why we all have a hard time agreeing on what is good and bad for other people, we are not wired to think about others. We are wired to look out for ourselves. It takes real work and effort and really some supernatural strength to truly and wholly consider the good of others.

When Godin was talking about imagination, he was talking about the things we spend a lot of time imagining for ourselves. We imagine being healthy and prosperous and comfortable.

Maybe the measure of my own morality, my own moral imagination, is how much time do I spend imagining how to make others healthy and prosperous and comfortable. How much of my day is spent imagining my potential? How much of it is spent imagining yours?

One of my favorite bible stories is the story of the rich young ruler. He came to Jesus and told Jesus, hey, I'm following all the laws. I'm doing everything a good moral man should do. Tell me what else I can do to be more moral. Jesus told him to go give away all his stuff to the poor and come follow him so they could love on others even more.

The man walked away dejected. I think maybe because he came to Jesus believing he was moral, but then Jesus changed the rules of morality on him. At least as the rich young ruler saw it.

Jesus wanted the guy to see moral isn't following guidelines, moral is a way of thinking.

Jesus was asking him, basically, are you spending more time thinking about what's good for you, or about what's good for others.

I think we've come to define morality by political party or by religion or by skin color or by the college we did or didn't go to or the neighborhood we live in. I think we do that because it makes morality black and white. It makes it personally easier for us to answer a very difficult moral question - what is proper and what is improper?

I think we do it because it is easier some days to follow spoken or unspoken rules as a way of determining proper than it is to ask ourselves how proper our hearts are.

For me, I can't help but wonder what the world would look like today if everyone spent their day imagining how to make life better for the people around them. I'm not going to spend any time today trying to figure out how to make my life better - I'm going to spend my whole day wondering how to better yours.

Radical? I suppose. But I'm not considering what is hard or not hard. I'm wondering how much better the world would be if we all did that. I'm wondering if whether Christian or not, Democrat or not, I'm wondering if we had a common morality centered on imagining the possibilities for others instead of self, I'm just wondering if the world would be a better place.

I think the rich young ruler walked away knowing the world would be better if he gave away all his stuff and spent his life hanging out with Jesus serving others. I think he walked away dejected because he knew he couldn't so it. He walked away dejected because his morality was easier when it was simply about following rules.

I didn't plan on coming here with a part 2 today. But God often inspires me to write about things he needs me to think about, not things I want you to think about.

So I spent my 2 hour walk yesterday reflecting on this idea I wrote about yesterday - that our heart talks to our brain 9 times more frequently than our brain talks to our heart. And I got to thinking about that more and decided what my heart is likely most days saying to my brain is - quit being so daggone lazy.

My brain is wired to keep me safe. As a result, I think my brain's first impression of everything that doesn't look familiar to me - at best - is stay away from that.

At worst - my brain is quickly deciding that everything unfamiliar is bad.

Maybe that bad is a place I've never been to; it's unfamiliar. Maybe that thing is a person that doesn't look like me or isn't from the same place I'm from.

Our brains are really quite lazy. They want to stop us at a first impression and get us moving swiftly along in life to the next thing and to the next place. Things and places that look familiar and comfortable to us.

All of our brains are that way. They are lazy. That lazy is often synonymous with judgmental.

I thought about my trip to Honduras last summer. Prior to going, the news was filled with stories about people south of our southern borders trying to come here. Many of these stories painted pictures of people who were dangerous and desperate and deceitful. Intellectually, I knew these stories weren't true. Yet, still, a lazy mind many days doesn't think much deeper than the evening news.

Then I went to Honduras. I handed someone a pair of shoes that hadn't had shoes for months. That person smiled and then they hugged. And my heart started shouting to my brain, I don't care what you think about this person. I don't care how unfamiliar you think they are or how different from you they may seem. This person, my heart demanded to my brain, is just like you.

This person cries and laughs and loves. This person feels joy in feeling wanted by another, and sorrow in feeling like the world has forgotten them.

When I came back from Honduras, my brain was forever changed about the people south of our border. My heart insisted on it.

You know, I believe our brains are wired to quickly and efficiently identify how different we are from one another. Our hearts are wired to override that snapshot and challenge us to find our common humanity.

I believe we are living in a world that too frequently lets our brains do all the thinking.

When it comes to our politics and our religions and our people groups and our neighborhoods - we've migrated and settled where our brains have convinced us is familiar and safe and comfortable.

Our hearts, on the other hand, are begging us to know there is beauty in the unfamiliar. Our hearts are begging us to recognize, by settling into our own safety, we've left behind so many who are hurting in unnecessary discomfort and danger. Our hearts are begging us to listen to the stories of peoples lives that our brains have written off.

Maybe there's a reason God wired our hearts to talk to our brains 9 times more powerfully than our brains talk to our hearts. He knew our brains were going to be quite lazy.

​There are days I'll read my bible and something completely unexpected will grab my attention. It's like God jumps out of the page, holds his giant God hand up and says, stop right there.

Today that occurred just ten words into my reading.

I will give thanks to the Lord with my WHOLE heart.

Today I was reminded there are some parts of the bible we are more prone to take literally than others. I wondered why David would say WHOLE heart here. Did he literally mean give thanks to God with our WHOLE heart.

I've been reading lately about how intelligent our heart is. Did you know our heart sends 9 times more information to our brain than our brain sends to our heart? Our heart has a mini brain of its own. It has 40,000 neurons that can sense, feel, learn and remember.

Are you old enough to remember the "When E.F. Hutton talks people listen" commercials. Well, you could say, when our hearts talk, our brains listen.

Here's the thing about the heart, though. The heart gets intelligent through relationship. It senses and feels and remembers by being around another person, not reading about them. The heart is relationship driven, not knowledge informed.

That's why it was so important to David to always be crying out to God. To always be spending time in prayer with God. To always be found quietly away from the noise of the world to give his heart - his whole heart - space to be with God.

I got to thinking about Jesus' words in Mark: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."

Again, what if these words are literal. Not just the words, but the order.

What if Jesus knew our bodies were designed to be driven by our hearts. Hearts first. What if he knew that if our whole hearts were filled with love for God, then we'd be in a position to love him with our souls and with our minds. And then - on the foundation of all that love - that's where we'd find our strength in life.

David is saying in this Psalm, my whole heart is thankful for God - that's why my mind can count my blessings. It's why I can feel joy for God. It's why I can tell my brain to sing out the words of praise to God.

I think it's a meaningful practice to read our bibles. To read anything about the true character of God is valuable. But our relationship with God is driven much stronger by our hearts than it is by our minds.

It's driven by spending time in prayer and meditation with God. It's driven by serving and being served by hearts pointed to God. It's driven by crying out to God instead of lashing out at people.

It's driven by asking ourselves the question: do I want to take these words into the world today and settle for being smarter, or do I want to take them with me as a challenge to be more loving?

When we are loving one another, we are loving God. When we are loving God, our brains listen. And they will likely - with more consistency - make loving choices.