The Big Dream Podcast by Meadow Heights Church

To have emotionally healthy relationships, listen with empathy to the words and nonverbal communication of others.

To have emotionally healthy relationships, honestly examine your emotions and motivations so that you know yourself and can love people and God better.

To have emotionally healthy relationships, stop mind-reading and clarify expectations by talking to people in person instead of in your head.

Jesus gives us hope for the future that changes our present.

Jesus came to show us how much we are loved.

We don’t have to fear life’s uncertainty because Jesus is King.

Through Jesus we can now experience peace.

I don’t receive from Jesus a private invitation to eternal life after death. Rather, Jesus offers me life in his kingdom, more and better life than I ever imagined, to be shared with him and with others both now and forever.

As God’s much-loved children, we have full access to all the blessings of life in his kingdom. Because everything that’s his is now ours, we get to join him in extending those blessings to others where we live, work, learn, and play.

Because we have already died with Christ and been made alive in him forever, we are free from the frantic fear of death. We can live each moment in peace and purpose while still pursuing a meaningful destiny.

Our God raises the dead to life. In this new life we’ve been given, we don’t have to chase meritocracy or settle for mediocrity. Instead, we are invited to embrace our new life as a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, created for a unique purpose in God’s kingdom of love.

Because the good news sets me free from doing more, getting more and being more, I get to speak good news to others. Not just a blanket good news to everyone but a specific and personal good news to someone.

Jesus doesn’t walk a tightrope between grace and truth, he fully embodies both. This is real love and Jesus invites us to live in and through this love. As we embody both grace and truth in our relationships they will grow deeper and stronger than they ever could from trying to walk a tightrope between nice and tough.

You are free from the tyranny of getting more, doing more and being more. You are free to receive what God has already given you in Christ. You can freely love others because you have all the love you were looking for.

God’s LOVE is the catalyst for transformation in ourselves and in our world, so we are free to stop our striving and SURRENDER to his love. As we become AWARE of this good news and ALIGN our hearts and minds with its truth, we’re invited to respond with faithful ACTION.

Following Jesus doesn’t bind you to a list of rules, walls, and borders. Following Jesus can free you to engage in a relationship with him that transforms all of you through his love. You get to choose what you want more.

Because heaven is crashing into earth, we are invited to wake up to God’s presence in our everyday, ordinary lives. Seeing what God is doing is our first step to doing it, too. God always meets us in the PRESENT moment.

Together...Becoming the Change

Do you reach out and show hospitality to only your friends and those who you are comfortable around? Or, do you reach out to the excluded and the marginalized? In order to take The Great Commandment seriously, we must love those who God has placed around us. It’s not always going to be pretty, but it is going to be significant.

Do we live at a pace that allows us to be available to those who live around us? What would it take to change the pace of our lives in order to be more available? In order to take The Great Commandment seriously, we must create space in our lives to build relationships with those who live near us.

When we try to love everyone, we often end up loving no one. Perhaps we need to take the Great Commandment literally. We can only do a few things really well—let’s make sure that one of them is the thing that Jesus said matters most: The Great Commandment.

Am I using my gifts, talents and resources to serve the poor in such a way that they are invited to serve, too?

Do I only have relationships with people who are like me? If so, how might my relationships better reflect the coming kingdom of heaven?

Do we sometimes help the poor to help ourselves? Might we be hurting them instead? What if the answer is for all of us to be “poor in spirit?”

To deepen and strengthen my relationships, I need to practice the art of letting go.