Project Rwanda<\/a>.\u00a0 Ritchey made a butt-load of money designing the cockpit of mountain bikes according to\u00a0Don.\u00a0Well, he didnt\u2019 actually say butt-load, that\u2019 s me talking, but whatever he said meant the same thing. But like a lot of people who get busy making money, Ritchey lost a sense of himself and his wife in the process.<\/p>\nHe came home one night to find the wife gone, the house cleared out. Don said that Ritchey spent the next year sitting in an empty house reading Christian books, growing more and more depressed. (If you ask me, there\u2019s enough badly written Christian books in the marketplace to depress an entire\u00a0third-world country.) Then a friend invited Ritchey to join them on a trip to Rwanda.<\/p>\n
In Rwanda bikes are main form of transportation. Wooden bikes. Yep. Wooden bikes. Tires and all. Anyway, that trip got Ritchey to thinking and pretty soon he was using his considerable gifts to helping the people of Rwanda.<\/p>\n
I love that, don\u2019t you?<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what I call God\u2019s poetry \u2014 taking something bitter and\u00a0creating something pure from it.<\/p>\n
Using a storyline diagram, Don gave examples from the life of Joseph about how even the negative turns in our lives \u2014 the thing\u00a0meant to destroy us \u2014 can, in the hands of a Living God, transform us.<\/p>\n
The way it did for Ritchey.<\/p>\n
Like Don said, the true choices we really have in life are pretty limited, I mean beyond whether you\u2019ll have that burger with or without fries.<\/p>\n
A lot of bad crap happens to us that we never planned\u00a0for \u2014 like when\u00a0Joseph\u2019s brothers tossed him\u00a0into a pit and shouted I hope you die, simply because\u00a0he\u00a0was his\u00a0daddy\u2019s favorite.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, despite your best efforts to the contrary you end up in jail, or at the very least enslaved to\u00a0things you never imagined.<\/p>\n
So what\u00a0should our response be in such\u00a0a time?<\/p>\n
Declare like Joseph, Don suggested, \u201cAll I can do is be awesome.\u201d<\/p>\n
Or as one fellow said tonight \u2014 Embrace the negative turn your life takes.<\/p>\n
Most of us never get around to that.<\/p>\n
We \u201cendure\u201d the negatives.<\/p>\n
We \u201cpersevere\u201d the crisis.<\/p>\n
But\u00a0nothing says \u201cI trust you God\u201d like embracing<\/em> the negative turn.<\/p>\n\u201cI\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve ever seen anyone live that out,\u201d said one gal.<\/p>\n
I have.\u00a0 And buddy, I\u2019m here to tell you that when you see someone embrace the negative as a God-given opportunity, you never forget it.<\/p>\n
The Redhead that I wrote about in Will Jesus Buy Me Double-Wide? <\/em>did that. She looked at the cancer and said, \u201cOkay, well all I can do is be awesome.\u201d<\/p>\nAnd she was.<\/p>\n
Right up to the very end.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the kind of story I want to write for my own life.<\/p>\n
One that says, well, okay, God, all I can do in the midst of all this is to\u00a0be awesome.<\/p>\n
Not through the power of positive thinking, but through a relationship with God that is so intimate trust is my first and only reaction.<\/p>\n
When we have that kind of relationship with our Master we will walk comfortably and confidently in front of others\u00a0 \u2014 the way Lucy did across that stage tonight \u2014 and sleep peacefully at the feet of the One who loves us best.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just between you and me, Don Miller isn\u2019t all that big of a deal. Just ask\u00a0Lucy. It was she, not Don, who took center stage at Portland\u2019s Armory theater tonight. Lucy strutted across stage in a silky chocolate fur, drawing laughter and applause. What man does that?\u00a0Wins the heart of an audience\u00a0just by walking across […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[453,893,1023,1375,1660,1753],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-don-miller","tag-joseph","tag-lucy","tag-project-rwanda","tag-story-conference","tag-tom-ritchey"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>Just between you and me, Don Miller<\/a> isn\u2019t all that big of a deal. Just ask\u00a0Lucy. It was she, not Don, who took center stage at Portland\u2019s Armory theater tonight. Lucy strutted across stage in a silky chocolate fur, drawing laughter and applause.<\/p>\n