#3 - Rules for Life {Reflections}

What is up everyone?

My name is Ryan Brailey and I am the pastor here at Central, and welcome to our midweek podcast called Reflections.

By the way, I'm in here in studio with Mike Lauer.

What's up, mike?

It's a hot one out there today.

It is hot.

Just outside our room there's like 30 infants Somehow.

We came into Mike's office, which is also our studio, and they're like a bunch of our little lambs, students, infants, crumb snatchers outside the door, so you might hear them.

I think it adds to the ambiance.

We love it and you might hear them yelling or playing.

But anyway, welcome to our Reflections podcast.

Today I wanted to share with you a few just five of my own rules for life.

Many years ago, I read a book by a now sort of quasi-famous psychologist named Jordan Peterson.

It's called 12 Rules for Life.

His book was a national bestseller and I read it and I loved it.

I thought it was just great, this idea of like, hey, making some rules for your own life, having some intentionality to your life, what are the things that you value, what are some principles you picked up along the way, and to try to live your life by them and govern your life by them.

And so a friend of mine and I years ago began kind of drafting our own.

I'm not gonna turn it into a book at all, but I did mention it in a sermon a couple of weeks ago and a number of folks commented on it and wanted to get together later and talk about some of my rules for life and even share their own, and I love it.

So I'm gonna share with you five of mine.

They're like half baked, so forgive me and bear with me, give me grace, but I hope you enjoy them.

Maybe they can spur you on to write some of your own.

Or if you have some of your own, give me a holler.

I'd love to hear them.

But here they are.

Here are five of mine.

I have like 15 of them and here are five of mine.

Are you ready, mike?

I'm ready, all right.

Rule number one it's actually rule number two in my rules for life, but this is it rule number one for today.

If somebody asks you to dance, dance.

I was a DJ for weddings for a number of years when I first moved to Minnesota back in like the late 2000s, and I loved it.

I'd go to all these cool venues around town in Minneapolis and St Paul and I would see the craziest stuff, as you can probably imagine.

So one night I'm at this swanky venue downtown Minneapolis and there's this guy just hanging out by the DJ table, kind of playing the wall.

He's a bit of a wallflower.

And this young lady comes over and asks him to dance.

And I was like, yes, do it, go dance.

You guys need to get out there and do your thing.

But he told her no, and I was crushed.

I'm like what are you doing?

And he was too embarrassed, said he didn't know how to dance, and my response was dude, nobody knows how to dance, but get out there and dance anyway.

And that night he never did it and I was I mean, I was broken hard for him.

And so I immediately in that moment like, hey, one of my rules for life is if somebody asks you to dance, you get out there and dance.

As I've told you before, in the book of Ecclesiastes, the author of that book says that life is vapor.

It's here and then gone.

It's this mist of vapor, like it's sort of it's only momentary and it's this precious, precious gift.

And so everything we do show up and get out there and dance.

So rule number one if somebody asks you to dance, get out there and dance.

Number two go out into the woods and howl at the moon.

Stay wild, live within the system, but don't forget the origins, the untamed nature of it all.

So rule number two is go out into the woods as often as you can and howl at the moon.

We were in Israel earlier this year and we were in the Jordan River and we went to this on purpose.

We went to this, really this untamed wild part of the Jordan River, not the part where everyone's buying their $5 white robe to get rebaptized, where there's tons of people.

We went to a part where there's nobody down there, and it was this overgrown wild part of the Jordan.

And we just thought and talked about the story of how crazy it is that John the Baptist, who's the son of a priest, a man who was sort of raised in the tradition, in the box, in the continuum, and here he is.

He leaves the system, goes out into the wild, into the wilderness, and he's out there dunking people underwater.

It's unbelievable.

And guess who shows up?

Everybody, a whole bunch of people show up and actually Jesus then, of course, shows up and it begins this movement that you and I are a part of the Christian movement and so our whole movement begins with this wild-eyed prophet out there dunking people underwater, and I love it.

And for me, I've always had an easy time understanding Jesus and his humanity and his love for us and the intimacy of that whole picture.

I love that.

But one of the things I've been overwhelmed with lately is sort of the untamed wildness of God, the unknowableness of God.

And so rule number two is to remember that go out into the woods, howl at the moon, stay wild, live within the system, but don't forget the origins of it all.

All right, number three I love this one.

It's speak life to young people, even when they're behaving like fools.

Speak life to them, be an old wizard to them.

When I was younger, in my early 20s, I had two men that I worked for.

Their names were Barry and Peter, and they would often, even though I was a complete knucklehead and I was like very raw, fresh out of the wrapper, didn't know what I was doing half the time they would pull me aside often and just speak life to me and call things out of me and say, hey, ryan, here's what we see in you and the words they gave me were like little seeds that just took root and it was almost also like someone throwing cold water on my face, like just waking me up, and I loved it and I'll never forget one time I was teaching at Bethel.

I was at Bethel University teaching a theology class and to wrap up the class I got everyone, all the students, in a circle and I went around with a cup of water and I anointed them with water and I told them I'm gonna speak over you, what I believe is the deepest truth of the whole universe.

And I just went around, I called them by name, looked them in the eye, marked them with the cross of Christ in their forehead and told them Mike, you are the beloved son of God.

And after it was over, this young man must have been 19, 20 years old came to me, was just crying like bawling, had tears down his eyes and he was like no one's ever said anything like that to me in my whole life and I was struck by that.

So my call to you and to me today is to speak life to young people.

It's easy to bag on them or to criticize or condemn or complain about them, but I would say go in the opposite direction and speak life over them, even when they're acting like fools.

Rule number four stop caring about things that just don't matter.

I've realized there are so many things in my life that I give my attention to and expend energy on, that just do not matter.

Social media is a great example.

On social media we have all kinds of people giving their deeply impassioned opinions and thoughts and ideas about things that have nothing to do with us, and I'm like one day I was on there reading through these things and I thought why do I even care and why am I spending time reading about all these opinions that other people have, whom I don't know, talking about things that have nothing to do with and aren't even in my area?

And there are many things in our lives that we give our attention to that really just don't matter.

So what are the things in your life that seem to occupy your mind, space or your day or even your energy that just really, at the end of the day or in the grand scheme of life, just don't matter?

Let those things go.

Okay, that's it for today.

Those are my five, five of my rules for life.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and any rules you might have for your own life, and I'll talk to you soon.

Peace.