Your Sense of Belonging
It’s Super Bowl week in the States and a little romp about football turns into a wider discussion about God’s intervention in sport and recreation and why people get so connected to athletic teams that they go through days of depression if their favorite one loses. Could it be a result of God wiring us for himself and our seeking it in all the wrong places? Is that why people identify with athletic teams, celebrities, and even religious gatherings that offer a false sense of belonging by connecting it to something human? A false sense of belonging will always separate us from others, but if we find our belonging in God we may still enjoy sports and other groupings of people, but they won’t own us in the same way and they won’t give us an excuse to look down on others who like things other than we do. Finding our worth in God’s love for us will open doors to a richer kind of community and freedom to live in the world.
Podcast Links:
Wayne’s Blog on Tattoos on the Heart
Order A Man Like No Other from one of these three websites: Murry’s website, Windblown Media, or Lifestream
Brad’s been listen to the relationships versus religion raps on YouTube and Wayne’s been reading 
Charlie shares a wonderful story about how this podcast has opened some doors at his work. Then Brad and Wayne interact with other emails about creating community that offers a safe environment by putting relationships first, as a family does. Too many times a genuine move of God gets curtailed by those who seek to “steward” it, but only end up in a misguided attempt to control it. In the end what might have begun as God’s gift ends up possessing them just like the ring of power in the 
Wayne and Brad revisit the 
For the last podcast of the year Brad and Wayne spend some time in the old mailbag to let their listeners add their input. The conversation eventually settles on how truth does set us free, but not before it messes with us and our illusions. The process of opening our eyes to God’s reality often involves the unraveling of lies that we’ve used to navigate through life. As they implode we can be overwhelmed with anger or frustration. But of those signal the very end of a process that allows the light and love of God to win our hearts into his reality. It is a marvelous, if sometimes painful process, but if we can appreciate it we can relax easier when it happens to us, and cheer others on when its happening to them. 
What begins with Wayne’s disillusionment about sports success and its hidden costs, ends up in a conversation about the hurt and anger that often comes from people who start to see through the religious lies they were taught. What allows us to live freely in the moment, even when things aren’t turning out the way we want or hope? Brad and Wayne find peace in the simple reality that God is always with them in whatever mess they are in, whether or not it comes out the way they desired. Without certainty that God always remains faithful, even if we are unfaithful, we are left to live by our own performance, which will never be enough. 
This one begins with sexual orientation politics in California and the ongoing debate in Christianity over the reality of hell, but soon Brad and Wayne settle into a conversation about how easily our insecurities can be manipulated by religion. Instead of inviting us into a transforming relationship with Jesus it provokes our guilt and sense of responsibility to drive us into a variety of activities that weigh us down and undermine what God really has in mind. People driven by religion are usually obnoxious in human relationships instead of being as endearing as Jesus was to the people around him. Only by finding our security in God’s love for us, can we find the freedom to truly be his light in the world simply by the way we live and love. 
