Focus on Me

Scrolling through my social media, I find people judging others and calling them out for their gestures, actions, words, and thoughts. They notice other people’s sins and wrongdoings and post them for the whole world to see. While they post the sins of others, they hide their own sins. They complain that the world will never become better but worse because other people refuse to repent and change their evil ways.

Why do we focus on other people so much? Do we know we have a plank in our own eyes?

If it sounds controversial and hypocritical it is. Many people would rather point out the sins and wrongdoings of other than fix and change themselves. If they can direct people’s attention off of them, then they can continue in their own evil ways.

I encountered these ideas and words all my life in the church and Christian institutions. I am also guilty of doing the same thing. I want to hide my sins from others because I fear that they will judge me and dismiss me. I have come to understand that none of us can hide from God.  

Life seems much easier to point out the sins and evils of other people than to repent of our own sins and evils. If we take the time to fix ourselves, we will change. Change brings difficulties and reveals the truth.

We must all face the truth that we all have sin and evil in our lives. Jesus told the people in his message to take out the planks in their own eyes before attempting to take the speck of sawdust out of someone else’s eyes. He made it clear that we cannot put others people’s sins on a scale and ignore our own.

The world must become better. If I stand and point at everyone who must do the work to make the world a better place, I relieve myself from having to do anything. So many people use social media as a platform to inform others of what they must do to make the world a better place, while they sit and scroll on their devices and do nothing.

We can only begin to make the world a brighter and better place when we look into our own souls and make the changes that we must make.

 We don’t always know who we influence. We don’t know who listens or reads our words. One thing I know that most people remember what I did and not what I said or posted on social media.

When we focus on repenting of our own sins and changing our ways, someone changes. Someone does something to make the world a bit brighter. If we want the world to be better, let’s work on taking the planks out of our eyes.

 

Dreams in Los Angeles

 Even though this New Year, 2025, may have had a troubling start, we cannot give up on our dreams. In fact, maybe we need to rely on our dreams. Fires ravaged homes and created chaos in the Los Angeles area and recovery will take its time. Some people have a fire raging inside of them because life started with difficult times, or they have such investment in politics they cannot conceive Donald Trump as President. However, dreams exist.

Let us remember that on this day, as we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., that we can have a dream that celebrates other people and brings them to life. Over thirty years ago, Matthew Barnett had a dream to bring the gospel to those hurting the most in Los Angeles. He went to one of the most dangerous parks in the community at one in the morning and prayed. God told him to go to the home of gang members.

When he went to the home of those gang members, he just asked how he could help. They stared in disbelief. Soon, they came to his little church. They gave their lives to Jesus, and within time, Echo Park in Los Angeles became a community that helped one another because the Dream Center remains open 24/7.

After thirty years, many have come to Jesus. Homeless veterans, families, and those from rehabilitation have had a home at the Dream Center, so it does not come as a surprise that they have become a focal point of helping the community of Los Angeles.

People help when they see other people’s dreams destroyed. The Dream Center stands as a church that brings the healing of Jesus to the people in Los Angeles. When the world destroys our dreams, Jesus can restore us. For some of us, He gives us new dreams to pursue.

Your dreams may have been smashed at the beginning of this New Year, but you can recover and let Jesus restore you. Revisit your dreams. Do they involve helping other people or do they just make your life easier or better? Follow Jesus and your dreams will match his goals for your life that will also involve loving people.

The two greatest commands can be seen in the Los Angeles area after these fires…loving God and loving people. You can only love God when you love others. So take some time and find people in your life that could benefit from your gifts and talents and persevere this year to make those goals happen. In the end, you will have a better year for it.

Hope for 2025

 

A social media influencer in Southern California wanted to help people displaced from the fires, so he set up his hotdog cart in the Rose Bowl parking lot ready to feed 500 people. He posted it on social media to feed people. When people arrived, he got a surprise. Most people came to donate items.

With more social media posts, word spread and more people came with donations. One restaurant owner in Long Beach asked people to bring donations to his restaurant. He then brought two rental box trucks to the pop-up donation center.

The local news broadcasted it. It grew so large that they had to move since the first responders used the Rose Bowl parking lot. The pop-up donation center continues and people who have lost everything can get items that they need now.

It all started because someone wanted to bring hope to the hopeless. When the ashes fall, hope must rise so we can rebuild.

I started the New Year full of hope. I organized my social media posts for the month of January, including my blogs, worked on my daily habits, and on New Year’s Day saw one of the best Rose Bowl Parades in the last decade.  Then, on Tuesday January 7^th, fires raged in the Pacific Palisades. Then, other fires began erupting throughout Southern California including the Pasadena area.

Even though I no longer live in Los Angeles County, whenever the wind begins to rise, my heart races with thoughts if we are next here in Orange County. (This county sits south of Los Angeles County and about thirty miles from the fires and further.) My heart breaks for all the people who lost everything.

I still pray for the people in North Carolina and Florida where hurricanes devastated their homes, and I pray for Maui, another city where a fire destroyed communities. I don’t care if the people have great wealth or live paycheck to paycheck. I don’t care if they identify as a different religion, ethnicity, or gender than me. I care about humanity.

I had planned to write about hope. I believe that the start of the New Year brings us a renewed hope to do more and be better human beings. Once the fires broke out, I realized that many people began to lose hope, most of it in humanity, but they didn’t know the truth.

People brought food to the firefighters. The In ‘N Out truck gave free meals to the first responders, every non-profit organization has called for donations in all areas of Los Angeles, and people have responded with bringing what they can.

People lose hope when they sit in the darkness alone. The residents of Los Angeles have let the victims of these fires know that they are not alone. The media does not report all these acts of hope because they only want to share the bad news and the news that will get the most clicks revealing the tragedy.

We cannot lose hope even if our plans get shifted and changed. Jesus brings us His love and grace no matter what we have done. He reminds us that He will never leave our side. With Jesus in our lives, we must bring Him to those who have experienced a tragedy.

So, my goal changed for the New Year with hope. Look around your community and find the one area in which you can do something or donate. With your one act of kindness, you will give hope to the hopeless, which is what we just celebrated less than a month ago with the birth of Jesus.

 Let’s be the living hope for others. Who knows what will rise from these ashes. I hope it will be homes full of love for Jesus and other people. That can happen if we all just share one part of the hope of Jesus that we have.

 

Hope for the New Year

 I don’t remember how the tradition started. It may have been through a conversation with other youth pastors because I knew enough to only take students in their senior year of high school, but in my youth ministry career at Lakewood Christian Church, I brought students to the Rose Bowl Parade.

We camped out on New Year’s Eve after we celebrated bringing in the New Year at an amusement park with Christian concerts. We grabbed the last front row spot near the end of the parade. We saw the bomber airplanes at 8:00AM and the police escorts at 9:30AM. We camped out at night and had a blast. We learned that at 2:00AM everyone runs to the “blue line” in the street to keep their front row spot.

The parade didn’t disappoint. The beautiful floats, in which you could actually smell the flowers, and the marching bands, including UCLA greeting us with a Happy New Year before playing their fight song and performing in the Rose Bowl game, made the experience worth every freezing moment.

Fast forward to 2015 when I volunteered to help a coworker work on the floats. I did that for two years. I saw the hard work and met creators of floats. I brought in the New Year with a new formed pride of helping with those floats, as I watched them go down Colorado Boulevard on television.

These sweet memories remind me that the New Year has potential to be life changing. We all enter the New Year with so much hope, but many of us grow weary when difficult times call for us to rise to the occasion, and we just may not have the means or strength to do that. We just have to maintain our hope.

Hope. Once we lose hope, we give up on our goals. We lose hope when something comes into our path in life that causes us to turn. Our path does not remain straight but has twists and turns and ups and downs. We cannot lose hope but keep hope and put our trust in Jesus.

Jesus gives us hope, and He wants us to move and face our challenges. No journey is complete without a challenge. On that parade route so many years ago, we searched for a decent restroom in the morning. We faced the elements of the weather with wind and cold, and yet we stayed because the parade would come in the morning. The hope of the coming parade kept us on the street.

Each New Year we have hope. This year, let that hope continue throughout the entire year. Each new day brings hope for something beautiful to come your way. It may not be a parade of flowers and marching bands, but if we can march into each day with joy that God has given us a new day to bring His Word into the world, we might truly have a Happy New Year!