Disciplined Breakdown - Pastor Glen

"It seems I'm losing ground
Welcome all to my disciplined breakdown" - Collective Soul.

We were discussing doing a blog and discussing titles and I asked if obscure geek references were OK. This was frowned upon as it is frequently in my house. So, I started going through Collective Soul album and song titles since Collective Soul is my favorite band. We eventually settled on "How do you love?" However, Disciplined Breakdown was a close second at least in my book.

Disciplined Breakdown is both a song and an album by Collective Soul. The Album was released shortly before I graduated from high school in 1997. I would come to know the Lord in Feb of 1998. So this album was played heavily during a very critical time in my life. I just felt an instant connection to it and I still play it frequently today.

I found out later that the album was recorded during a difficult time in the band's career, when they were going through a long lawsuit with their former management, and they had to record the album in a cabin-like studio due to lack of money. Despite, or possibly because of, the challenges they faced they ended up creating on of their best albums.

I struggle constantly with anxiety and depression and I have for quite sometime going back as far as middle school. Everyone has their own struggles. Everyone has to go through the daily motions of life such as getting up for work, doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, take care of the kids and tend to general life even when their heart is breaking.

It's a bit different for Pastors. For not only must we merely get through the day to day with a broken heart but we must preach through it. Pastoring, in it's purest form is a matter of the heart. How do you go on when your greatest tool is broken? How do you love?

"The question for us is not, How do you live through unremitting criticism and distrust and accusation and abandonment; for us the question is also, How do you preach through it? How do you do heart work when the heart is under siege and ready to fall?" - John Piper

The answer is in the Lordship of Christ. I look at Lordship in the same way that Spurgeon did.

 "The placing of the eternal God at the head of all things. I look at everything through its relation to God's glory. I see God first, and man far down in the list ... Brethren, if we live in sympathy with God, we delight to hear Him say, 'I am God, and there is none else'"  - Charles Spurgeon

Our focus has to be on the Lord and He has to be that in our lives. Lord. If He isn't what do you depend on when everything inevitably and repeatedly falls apart? Nothing that can handle the weight. It' a lesson I have to learn far to often.

Sorry that this first post was kind of on the downer side of things. Maybe I'll make the next one more cheery and may even involve a tap dancing bear!.

One last thing the next song after Disciplined Breakdown was titled Forgiveness and the song ends like this:

"So I wash away stains of yesterday
Then tempt my heart with love's display"

Glen