The Powerful Connections Between Faith, Hope, and Love

1 Corinthians 13:13 says "three things will last forever--faith, hope, and love--and the greatest of these is love" (NLT translation). Paul's emphasis on faith, hope, and love interests me quite a bit. Recently when thinking over the ideas of faith, hope, and love I realized how interconnected they truly are. Let me explain...

One cannot really love without having hope that their love will be received and one cannot love without having faith that their love will not be abused. Similarly one cannot really have faith without loving the one they have faith in and one cannot have faith without hoping that their faith will not be wasted. Also one cannot have hope without having faith in something and the result of hope is love.

The connections between those three fascinate me beyond end. In fact, if you don't mind I would like to keep going with this.

Faith
When we place our faith in something or someone we usually love that person or that thing to some degree. We trust them (or it). When we are young we place our faith (our trust) in our parents because we love them and they love us. Our pets have faith in us because we show love and affection for them. As a result they generally show care and love back to us. One of the examples that comes to mind of this is Hagrid (from Harry Potter). He has faith in his half-brother Grawp to become civilized because Hagrid loves him. He won't give up on him because he loves him and has faith in him.We know we can put our faith in God because He loves us. That love assures us that we can trust Him. Faith and hope are also connected. When we put our faith in something or someone we hope that our faith will not be wasted. When we sit on a chair we have some amount of faith in it and we hope it will not break. Now for a major step in analogies. When we put our faith in God we have ultimate hope because we have been promised some incredible things from Him like protection, unconditional love, and of course eternity with Him. As Christians we can live with a wonderful sense of hope because of the faith that we have in God.

Hope
Now to turn that around. Similarly one cannot have hope without putting their faith in something. No matter whether someone is an atheist or a Christian everyone has faith in something. Some people have faith because of their faith in themselves. Some people have faith because of their faith in science. Some people have faith because they believe God will redeem them. No matter who you are everyone has faith of some kind. Even in the little things we have hope due to our faith. We have hope that cute boy who sits kitty corner to you in second hour likes you because your friend told you that he did. Your hope comes from your faith in your friend. You have hope that dinner will be good because your nose is telling you it will be good and you trust your sense of smell. Hope and faith are forever linked and it is amazing to think about! Hope and love are also connected. One connection that can be made is this: when we have hope we react in love. When we have hope that God has redeemed us because of His love for us we react with love too. We love our neighbors. We love God. When we are hopeful about our future it allows us to be joyful and therefore more loving towards others.

Love
When we show love to another human being or an animal or even to God we love hoping that our love will be received. We hope the other person will express love back to us. We hope our kids will appreciate the care we show them. We hope that special someone will love us back. Even with pets we hope for their returned affection. Whenever we love we also have this unspoken hope inside of us. At the same time faith also works with love. When we love we have faith that our love will not be abused. When we marry someone we have faith that they we will be faithful to us. When we love God we have faith that He will accept our love. Sometimes people even love wild animals hoping they will love them back. Those people are usually misplacing their faith. However, when we choose to love God we can know our faith will never be misplaced.

I hope you enjoyed reading about the deep rooted connections between faith, hope, and love. Which of these three are you best at? Which one would you like to become better at?

"How I Met Your Mother": a TV Show with Unexpected Depth to it

Although the show has quite a bit of questionable content, there are so many incredible quotes and amazing life lessons to be found in How I Met Your Mother. I wouldn't necessarily promote the show (I have given it up for long periods of time simply because there is a lot of content I don't care for) but I do think you should take a good look at what the show has to say. I think you'll find the lessons to be quite valuable and not present in many shows or movies. This post focuses on just a few of the great lessons taught in How I Met Your Mother.

"If you’re looking for the word that means caring for someone beyond all rationality and wanting them to have everything they want no matter how much it destroys you, it’s love! And when you love someone, you just don’t stop. Ever. Even when people roll their eyes, or call you crazy, even then, especially then!"  - Ted Mosby, Season 9: Episode 17
No where else have I seen such an accurate description for love. There are so many different kinds of love and I think this one quote covers them all. When you truly love someone you don't think of yourself as much as you think of them and their happiness. Love is irrational that way. Don't agree with that definition of love? Well, maybe you aren't looking at the right places. As humans we can't love people properly. We sin and we make mistakes. But Jesus showed us love in the perfect form. Jesus showed us love that is irrational. It didn't make sense for Jesus to love us but that didn't stop him. Jesus paid the price for us because he wanted it all for us even though it cost him greatly. And Jesus never stopped loving us - not ever. Jesus taught us about love originally but How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) reprises that teaching and teaches all people what love truly should be like.

"Because sometimes even if you know how something’s gonna end that doesn't mean you can’t enjoy the ride."  - Ted Mosby, Season 2: Episode 14
Life is often unpredictable but sometimes it is not. We know that certain things will come to an end. We know on our freshman year of college that four years from now it will all be over. We could choose to not engage with it because it will be over eventually. That certainly is an easier route. It hurts less to do that. But just because something will end doesn't mean we can't enjoy the time we have with it. Life is better when you engage in it and HIMYM teaches us that.

"The littlest thing can cause a ripple effect that changes your life."  - Ted Mosby, Season 2: Episode 15
It is amazing to me looking back at my life how one person, one conversation, one place can so drastically alter the course of my life. For instance, six years ago I met a girl named Zoe. She told me about Eagle Brook Church (EBC). At the time my family was looking for a new church so we went for Christmas services. We continued going there and have been attending there for over five years. It was because of EBC that I became a follower of Christ, decided to pursue a degree in pastoral ministry, first stepped onto the UNW campus, joined youth group, led a small group of middle school girls, and have gone on two out of my three mission trips. Zoe led me to EBC and that has changed my life dramatically. From where we are standing we often cannot see how our current actions will affect our future but looking back we can better realize the effects of our actions.This show reminds us of that.

"Look, you can’t design your life like a building. It doesn't work that way. You just have to live it… and it’ll design itself."  - Lily Aldrin, Season 4: Episode 24
As much as we try to plan out our lives for ourselves things never look how we think they will - whether that is for better or for worse. People come into our lives and change things. Opportunities come into our lives and change things. Disaster comes into our lives and change things. We can't write in pen in our planners because when it comes down to it things will change. We just have to trust that everything will be alright in the end and learn to take things as they come. How I Met Your Mother is a show filled with the unexpected and none of their lives go exactly as planned.

"You can’t just skip ahead to where you think your life should be."  - Lily Aldrin, Season 5: Episode 20
We often get to places in our lives that we just want to skip. For instance in the show Ted often wants to skip the 'looking for someone amazing' part and just get to the 'found someone amazing' part. As a romantic, I often identify with Ted. But that's not how it works. We have to experience the scars and the waiting in order to truly appreciate the 'someone amazing' when they come around. This rings true for everything in life I think. I used to have thoughts about what it will be like when I finally get to move to New Orleans but if I just skipped to that part of my life I would miss out on the amazing college experience I am getting now at UNW. We can't spend our time wanting to skip parts of our lives because you never know what you may be missing. So rather then spending your time waiting, engage in your life now. You may find it to be the best time of your life simply because you changed your attitude towards it. So many people need to hear this and so I think HIMYM really does well to talk about it.

"The future is scary but you can’t just run back to the past because it’s familiar."  - Robin Scherbatsky, Season 6: Episode 24
Looking towards the unknown can be frightening. The past is familiar. That's why we turn to it. But that is often not good for us. No matter how hard it is we have to keep moving forward and not look back towards the past simply because it is comfortable. You never know what beautiful thing could be waiting for you in your future. How I Met Your Mother reminds us to keep looking towards the future and to lean in to the unknown.

"If you’re not scared, you’re not taking a chance. And if you’re not taking a chance, then what the hell are you doing?" - Ted Mosby, Season 5: Episode 1
Life involves risk. A lot of people are scared of risk because they cling to the times when they took a risk and things didn't work out but the best things in life often come out of us taking a risk. Asking that girl / boy out, applying for that job, going to that college, going on that trip, etc. Everything worth having is worth taking a risk for. It may not always work out but at least you tried. Sirius Black once said "what is life without a little risk?" How I Met Your Mother tells us it is okay to be scared and that we must take chances.

"Whatever you do in this life, it's not legendary, unless your friends are there to see it."  - Barney Stinson, Season 9: Episode 17
Friends make life complicated but they also make it more meaningful. You can be successful in the world's eyes but if you don't have people who you care about you there when you do something amazing then it isn't worth much. HIMYM showed the value of friendship throughout the series and what we learn in the series can be summed up pretty well in this one sentence.

Additional Quotes
"So really the biggest mistake would be not to make that mistake, because then you’ll go your whole life not knowing if something was a mistake or not."  - Lily Aldrin, Season 1: Episode 21

"We gotta wait for the real thing, no matter how tough it gets" -  Ted Mosby, Season 7: Episode 11

"The great moments of your life won’t necessarily be the things you do; they’ll also be the things that happen to you." -  Ted Mosby, Season 4: Episode 22

"We spend so much effort trying to keep parts of our lives hidden, even from our closest friends, that in those rare times when we do open up, it's amazing how minor those secrets all end up being." -  Ted Mosby, Season 1: Episode 15

Why Your Children Should Read Harry Potter: The Valuable Lessons Of An Incredible Series

First things first *SPOILERS * SPOILERS *SPOILERS

Now that that is taken care of it's time to get to the post...

It is surprising to me the number of parents who still disapprove of the Harry Potter series. I understand that they don't want to promote witchcraft and sorcery and the like but Harry Potter isn't made to promote it and I have never met a person yet who got into sorcery because they read Harry Potter. What I have seen though is people who fell in love with reading and learned valuable lessons because of it. The Harry Potter series made me personally fall back in love with reading. While I could discuss that point more, I won't because that isn't part of my purpose today. My purpose today is to convince you of this: the Harry Potter series has infinite value. Here is why...

Judging Others: Harry was wrong
about every one of these

Teamwork
Harry, Hermione, Ron, Fred, and George were just a few of the many characters who showed us true teamwork. In my mind, Fred and George are the ultimate team. They work together on everything and they show us that two can be a whole lot better than one. Also in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the famous trio (Harry, Hermione, and Ron) need the strengths and expertise of each of them to keep going. They have to cooperate and work together to stay alive. They have to trust each person to lead them in the right direction and to keep them safe. In the final book there is a battle at Hogwarts and it takes everyone working together to defeat Voldemort and the Death Eaters. The "good guys" work together and come out victorious while the Death Eaters don't because while they are working for one cause they don't cooperate very well. They are constantly struggling for power and when it comes down to it they are not at all willing to make sacrifices for one another. So not only does the series show us the qualities of a good team but it shows us what will make a team fail in the end. For a large part of my life I have been one to always try to do everything on my own, but Harry Potter and his friends taught me that you cannot master everything and sometimes you need someone with a different skill than you to do something. For more about HP and teamwork, read this.

Judging Others
When I think about the series and the topic of judgement I jump right to Harry and Snape. Harry made judgments about Snape throughout the entire series and yet in the end we learn that all we thought about Snape was completely false. Snape was a hero in many ways but we don't understand this until he is dying. Snape is not really how we viewed him for most of the series. I think many of us can learn from this because I think all of us do what Harry did. We make judgments about someone and later learn something about them that completely changes how we view them. This one truth will stick with me forever mainly because of Harry Potter: things are not always as they seem. This is clearly illustrated by the photo on the left. Harry was ridiculously wrong on all of those assumptions yet he still kept making them. We look at Harry and say 'get it together'. Then we often go and make our own wrong assumptions about others.

Lightness and Goodness
In many books and movies we are told or shown who is "good" and who is "bad". I think the Harry Potter series does an excellent job at showing us that people are very complex and cannot be accurately described as good or bad. Sirius Black once told Harry, "the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters. We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are." In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Dumbledore says that we must choose between what is right and what is easy. I think that this ties into choosing what side of us we will act on. What is easy is often not what is good. It is often much harder to do the right thing, which is why we make so many mistakes in life. Another wise quote from Dumbledore relates to the topic of lightness and darkness is this one: "Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, when one only remembers to turn on the light." The series teaches us to act on what is good and right.

Friendship and Loyalty
Those who know me know I am not really a crier. I don't tend to cry at movies or songs or even books. It's rare for me. But nothing makes me want to cry more than Dobby's final words. "What a beautiful place to be with friends. Dobby is happy to be with his friend...Harry Potter." Dobby is probably the most loyal friend one could ever have. He shows us what a true friend is and in the end, he dies saving his friends. Dobby is not the only character that shows us the true value of friendship and loyalty. Hermione put a lot of emphasis on doing well in school but she always showed us that friendship comes first. In the very first book Hermione said this: "Books! And cleverness! There are more important things -- friendship and bravery." The Harry Potter series made me (and probably many others) want to have friends like Harry, Ron, and Hermione so in many ways the series encourages to make new friends and keep them central in our lives.

Love
Harry Potter proves that love is the closest thing we have to magic. Nothing can stop it. Lily's love protected Harry even after she died. Hermione, Ron, and Harry took risks for one another out of love. Dobby risked his life for the trio out of love. Snape protected Harry out of love for Lily. Love is shown by so many characters throughout the series it would be impossible to list them all. Many characters show love for others to their deaths. The series does make this clear though: the ones that love us never really leave us. The series helps us cope. It shows us how to move on but it also shows us to treasure the love we are shown and also, to show love back.

Life

Life can be incredibly hard. The HP series does not shy away from conflict or death. It embraces them head on. There are over 20 major deaths in the series. Harry grows up as an orphan living with his unloving and uncaring relatives. Snape loses the love of his life to the man who bullied him in school. Tonks and Remus died just when their lives together were beginning and Teddy grew up an orphan. Arthur and Molly Weasley lose a son. Hogwarts loses Dumbledore. Harry loses Sirius, the one family member not lost to him already. Neville's parents lose their sanity. There is so much reality in this series about a fictional world. The Harry Potter series teaches us that life isn't fair, people we love will die, and things will never be happily ever after. But that doesn't mean life isn't a wonderful thing.

Other Good Lessons

A. Our words have power - “Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it.”
B. Live in the present - “It does not do to dwell on dreams, Harry, and forget to live.”
C. We are the same in many ways - "Though we may come from different countries and speak in different tongues, our hearts beat as one"
D. Watch how someone treats their inferiors - "If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals."
E. Living without love is more pitiful than death - “Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.”

The Harry Potter series is seen by many as simply a series about witchcraft and wizardry but it is not just that. It is a series that promotes teamwork, shows the importance of not judging others, tells us that there is no such thing as good people and bad people, gives us a picture of true friendship and loyalty, demonstrates the importance of love, and gives us a realistic perspective on life. If you haven't read the series, then do yourself a favor and read it. You won't regret it.

Why "Grease" Should Not Be Our Favorite Love Story

Grease is the highest grossing musical to date, was selected by Empire as one of the 500 greatest movies of all time, and won the People's Choice Award for favorite overall motion picture in 1979. It is a popular musical, movie, and soundtrack. Most people can't help but at least tap their foot (if not break into song and dance completely) when they hear "You're The One That I Want".

But what does Grease really teach us? Well, just look at the first song after the credits: "Summer Nights". The first thing Danny mentions about Sandy is that she was crazy for him (note: he doesn't mention being crazy for her) and the first thing Sandy tells all her friends about Danny is that he is cute. Danny's friends then ask about the "important stuff". They ask him about how far he got and Sandy's friends focus on "important things" too. They make sure Danny had a great car (because of course the measure of a guy is by how great his car is, right?). Thankfully Sandy's friends do later get back to the real questions ("was it love at first sight?") but Danny's friends never seem to care much about love (their next question is "did she put up a fight?"). They both say it is a fling that "don't mean a thing" right in the song. Yet at the end they also say they made a "true love vow". What was it: a fling or true love? They don't seem to focus too much on actually being in love with one another and neither do their friends.

Still, the part of the movie I want to draw the most attention to is the end. Sandy changes herself completely for Danny. She starts smoking, she dresses in leather and dark clothes, and she changes her attitude. And Danny eats it up. He loves this new fake version of Sandy, not the real and true Sandy. Then they sing "You're The One That I Want" as a duet. I might buy that Sandy wants Danny but I don't buy that Danny really wants Sandy, not as she really is. Look, love is sacrifice but it is not changing who you are for someone. And that is exactly what she did. 

What kind of message does this send to people, especially young teens? Change yourself for a man. Pick up some leather pants, start smoking, and play hard-to-get and then he will throw himself at your feet. We shouldn't strive to be like Sandy and Danny. Enjoy the movie for its music but make sure you don't ever let yourself take the "love story" or terrible life lessons to heart. It may have catchy tunes but movies like Grease shouldn't be our favorite love stories.