Mark Marshall

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8 Things Open Minded is NOT

I have had a lot experiences and thoughts about open mindedness. I am fully aware of the fear people have concerning those of us who have ventured out in uncharted waters of thought and process.  Open mindedness is not something you usually equate to religious people.  But certainly Spiritual people have learned to embrace new things, thoughts, and realities. I am pretty sure I could write books on this subject, but I will give you the cliff note version.

When we used to travel all over I remember one of my biggest challenges was the Leadership.  I have always never been satisfied with the status quo.  I have always sought new ways of doing things, thinking things, system updates etc. So coming into churches and leadership training I would always bring new ideas to the table.  I quickly learned that it wasn’t difficult to get the people to think new things, but my number one challenge was the thought processes of the leadership and people.  Someone asked me during a radio interview about what is one of the things that are my biggest challenges in working with churches. I told them, ‘The hardest thing to change is the MIND’.

And lets face it, we all have experienced change in our lives. We will go through that process of change either via the way of Love and choice, or suffering the reality of fighting the will and choice.  The most important thing in our lives is our thoughts. It is the key to life, freedom, and spirituality. It is the only channel for change of any kind.

Romans 12:2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.

So here are the 8 Characteristics of Open Mindedness:

1. An open mind is NOT merely a gullible mind.

2. An open mind is NOT necessarily a skeptic against the norm or against the established realm.

3. An open mind is NOT: not open to Change: All change and new perspective come from a space of open mindedness.

4. An open mind is NOT merely being relative or siding with current culture.

5. An open mind is NOT wishy washy; and or lacks a backbone.

6. An open mind is NOT having a (non opinion).

7. An open mind is NOT: not believing in (non Essential Truths, or the Concreteness of them)

8. An open mind is NOT a non spiritual reality.

How I became Open Minded…

As God has blessed me, I have lived a humble but fruitful life. I have had the  opportunity to be a part of many notable miracles, served under some mighty men and women of God. Have had great success in the Business world, but my greatest of all achievements is definitely my family and who they have become as people.

I remember the night that the new Texas Stadium opened up, I think that they hosted an OU vs BYU football game, I’m not sure.  At halftime they asked Jerry Jones the Guru and owner of all of that monstrosity; “Jerry is this your crowning achievement?” His reply was no, my greatest crowning achievement of my life is not this Billion dollar stadium, but the 7th grade season in football I got to coach my son, THAT Jerry says, was my crowning achievement.”

That rang true for me. We moved to Michigan in the summer of 2000, in a strange land, with no family, support, or friends. We went on faith and hope. I can say it was totally a God thing the whole way, I made friends for life.  One thing I was blessed with as an independent business owner, is being in control of my schedule.  The boys were in the 4th grade when we moved there. I always played and still love all sports. My boys were so awesome at it. I began volunteering on the fourth grade team in football. After football then came baseball, I volunteered. Then after that came summer basketball, I became a coach as well. You see I was blessed to not only attend, every single sporting event for my boys, from 4th grade to college, I was blessed the opportunity to coach them as well.  I was able to move from little league, to Jr High, to High School, which I count as a huge blessing. If I died today I would be a fulfilled and happy man believe me, I have been given so many blessings and opportunities that most will never see in a lifetime.

My greatest blessing to date is knowing all of my sons, and wife are all humanitarians, full of love for all mankind. They have no judgement in their hearts, and are not prejudice in any way. This I am the proudest of in all my life. This brings me to reality that brought us to this path. Since the fall and winter of 1999 I was  invited by force, to become a mystic with an open mind.  My wife and 3 young sons had lost all of our income through ministry. We were betrayed and rejected by prominent ministry friends.  At the time for a few months after we lost all of our house and cars, we were living in a two bedroom apartment on the campus at Stillwater OSU.  We had no car, my wife took a taxi to work to cook at a sorority house, and I caught rides to work part time remodeling a kitchen for an awesome friend. We were paying 25.00 a month for rent, because of the graciousness of an amazing woman who still thought I was a man of God in spite of what others thought. I mean I have no way to convey to you the history, the magnitude of being lied about on a daily basis, etc…but all the while maintaining an amazing walk with God that honestly I havent seen the like since.

I believe open mindedness is truly achieved through a series of events that force no other course of action. As long as your ducks or in a row ( or appear to be to all those around you) Im sure you think Im nuts; honestly you are supposed to, move on and we will see you later on. If you think I’m crazy, or a loose cannon it’s all good, you are just not ready.  But to those who have been through some things that don’t fit any of your models of training, not understanding of what has happened, then you are at the right place and the right time. Let me tell you the magnitude of events that may cause you to ‘Open your eyes NEO’, from the Matrix movie. We had a prominant minister friend steal my data base of all of the contacts I had, they had spread damning lies about me and my ministry team. Consequently all of the meetings I had booked for two years straight for every weekend was cancelled. Every single pastor cancelled, without the exception of two, which are still great friends of mine for life. Not one single person called to see how we were doing, or etc.

Believe this………..EVERYONE LOVES you when you are winning…….. NO ONE wants to be associated with a shady loser….You will find your friends when you have nothing to offer them by way of fame or recognition, or pay….believe me, and if there is a great call on your life you may walk the same shoes.

The beauty of the whole story is; it created an open spirit and mind within my heart! I began to question everything and every one that I believed in. My criteria for love, and truth and for what was important changed dramatically. I began the journey of the open mind / open heart.

In My Shoes

In my shoes, just to see what it’s like to be me
I’ll be you, let’s trade shoes
Just to see what it’d be like to feel your pain
You feel mine, go inside each other’s minds
Just to see what we find
Look at life through each other’s eyes
But don’t let em say you ain’t beautiful
They can all get lost, just stay true to you
Don’t let em say you ain’t beautiful

They can all get lost, just stay true to you

Eminem

The process of love goes in stages I believe. Its a total process. You have to go from ‘Having Love, to Showing Love, to Being love!’

Each one is a step, and its a practice that many have gone before us and have conquered. Having love is the first step of the process. It usually happens when you have been amazingly touched by Love in your being.  So the beginning process is that you respond by just having love and grace for others around you! This first phase if you will is more of a response.  No one can have love that hasn’t first experienced it. It is like the ripple effect or wave after the initial splash in a pool of water. So those that ‘Have’ love towards others have experienced love! You can not share and give what you do not have or experienced.  If you do it will not possess the true content of substance.  Your having love towards others will be nothing more than another concept, not substance.

Showing love is nothing more than a choice to align myself to the power of love that was shown unto me.  Love on this level is a choice, a daily, minute by minute decision to choose to remember the power of the love that abides in you!  Choices like these chip away at the core of your self life.  In every situation in your life, weigh it in light of  I Corinthians chapter 13.  If you read that chapter, there is pretty much not anything else to say.

Being love is a total surrender! When you choose you still are in control, because you might still choose not to show love.  When you surrender then you  have given up the right to choose. This is the ultimate level, then God Himself can BE Himself through you. You surrender your choice to love or not love, and eventually you become Love.

Practicing this process in real life goes like this. For the record in the old concept of God’s grace or man’s will, I say God’s grace abounds and definitely came before mans ability to choose. When I think about this journey and process of becoming Love, I think it goes in these ascetic practices.

1. Empathy: the learned ability to to feel FOR someone and their struggles.  This is a conscience choice to feel for the suffering of others. This is what I call Having love. The ability to share in a commonality with others in their sufferings. My belief is that this only comes about by those who have been touched by Love Himself in some fashion or form.  Love on this level is the beginning, but it is a supernatural characteristic. When I feel empathy towards another I am striking a chord in my own life of my own suffering in the past or present. But it rarely moves anyone to real action that requires me to get involved.  It’s like I want to eliminate the suffering of others but I don’t know how to do it without conflicting with my own personal life.

2. Sympathy: the inability to no longer sit by as a bystander and watch others suffer. In this stage we possess the mindset to feel WITH you.  So now our motivation is to get up close and personal and be one with you. In this level of the process you actually suffer when others suffer, and rejoice when others are honored.

3. Compassion: is the surrendered path of life that live to feel AS you…..and seek to eliminate the suffering and injustice of others.

So don’t be discouraged, but rather keep cooperating with the process…

In the words of Eminem,

In my shoes, just to see what it’s like to be me
I’ll be you, let’s trade shoes
Just to see what it’d be like to feel your pain
You feel mine, go inside each other’s minds
Just to see what we find
Look at life through each other’s eyes
But don’t let em say you ain’t beautiful
They can all get lost, just stay true to you
Don’t let em say you ain’t beautiful

They can all get lost, just stay true to you

Eminem

Hearts that BURN!

There is an amazing description of how spiritual events take place in our lives. In Luke 24 the resurrected Christ is walking veiled to the disciples, and they did not even know HIM!

They said to each other, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us as he talked with us on the road and explained the Scriptures to us?” Luke 24:32

I wonder how many times we have stood in the presence of such greatness, and not really recognize the significance until later on.

I can tell you my story of a man that I heard of.  When I came to hear him speak. It totally changed my life forever.  As I heard him speak it made so much sense to my heart, but my mind and understanding could not connect the dots. These sayings of his created so much peace in my heart and chaos in my mind, to the point as to which I had never been before.  You have to understand, I am not a jump on the bandwagon guy.  But if I have experience in and belief, I’m going to annoy you with my bandwagoness… I don’t jump easily to something that is NEW just because it’s new. But I saw the effects in my own heart and those around me who heard.  These words offended my self righteous religiosity, but liberated the inside of me to no end. Very hard experience to describe to you.  It’s like me trying to tell you what water taste like!  Good luck with that one.

Hearing him over and over made so much sense to me. I was crushed by the fact that I had spent almost 20 years in the religious realm,  totally devoted to the God Realm and serving 110%! And I couldn’t believe that I had never heard any of this kind of truth!  And to hear him made me feel so blessed, like I can’t believe I’m hearing this! I saw the miracles and peoples’ response.

I remember eating dinner with him many times.  Every time without fail the wait staff were totally drawn to him. It was almost embarrassing, I mean every where we went, people just talked and talked and wanted to badly to be around him. It was so common, it was totally expected every where we went. We would have to peel him away from people. I remember him having a  2000.00 pair of shoes from some place in Italy, have no idea the name, but still ‘Hanging with the little people’. His heart was with the people, but his mission was to challenge the church leaders of the day. For that is the only way to create change overall.

As our relationship grew I would meet him on trips just to ‘hang out’ and serve in any way I could to make life easier on him. I learned through him not only the protocol of the church, and the Christianize, but also the deeper purpose of the mission.  I have never seen a place that wasn’t drawn to him. But I have to tell you, in the gathering of the elect there was a special presence. When you gather the spiritual, and those with perception of the anointing there was a very special Draw on the Presence.

And every single time this man opened his mouth whether in the pulpit, or at the dinner table, or in private; I was never ceased to amazed. I can say with full assurance that he changed my life forever. My mind, my spirit, my theology is all the better and more solid than ever before.

I can remember the bliss that filled me thinking about the great movement I was a part of.  Not in any prideful way but a sincere love and devotion to the path that was laid out before us by God. I mean it seemed so great and perfectly fit! Overwhelmingly blessed beyond measure.  But we slowly became a threat to the status quo and system of the day.  The gazing eyes of the lack of respect was stinging. Not realizing that we were not the enemy!  Many times we would have to leave abruptly after meetings because people did not ‘agree’ with him as he laid out the spiritual plan.  Many of those ‘spiritual leaders’ would have him come and hold meetings only to use his gift and difference to add monetary blessings to their own work. You see I have seen him so many times be tolerated and not celebrated.  I know most people don’t know this but many of those with gifts of the spirit can easily get prostituted for that gift!  I know many don’t want to think of this, but said leaders have many times brought people into their congregations to do one of several things:

1. Bring a stirring and commitment beyond the normal realm of commitment. (revival spirit)
2. To confirm, affirm, the current leaderships path
3. To create buzz about the mission of the church, and fund projects

You can see where this man clearly would and could not be a good candidate for some of these.

He is the simple man and woman’s guide; and every religious leaders nightmare.  You see when he speaks I could see the simple people freed into the presence, and the religious blinded.  Even by the same teachings, it would sear the heart of the religious and harden, and free and feed the hungry and called at the very same time!

Often imitated,
many times hated
never celebrated….

Mar Enoch Ashe
Beloved

3 Gifts of Spiritual Guides

(From Bishop Kalistos Ware)

Three gifts in particular distinguish the spiritual guide.

1. The first is insight and discernment (diakrisis), the ability to perceive intuitively the secrets of another’s heart, to understand the hidden depths of which the other does not speak and is usually unaware. The spiritual father or mother penetrates beneath the conventional gestures and subterfuges whereby we conceal our true personality from others and from ourselves;

Yet, for a word to possess power, it is necessary that there should be not only one who speaks with the genuine authority of personal experience, but also one who listens with attention and eagerness.

The elder’s gift of insight is exercised primarily through the practice known as the “disclosure of thoughts” (logismoi). In early Eastern monasticism the young monk used to go daily to his spiritual father and lay before him all the thoughts which had come to him during the day. This disclosure of thoughts includes far more than a confession of sins, since the novice also speaks of those ideas and impulses which may seem innocent to him, but in which the spiritual father may discern secret dangers or significant signs. Confession is retrospective, dealing with sins that have already occurred; the disclosure of thoughts, on the other hand, is prophylactic, for it lays bare our logismoi before they have led to sin and so deprives them of their power to harm. The purpose of the disclosure is not juridical, to secure absolution from guilt, but its aim is self-knowledge, that we may see ourselves as we truly are.

The principle underlying the disclosure of thoughts is clearly summed up in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers: “If unclean thoughts trouble you, do not hide them but tell them at once to your spiritual father and condemn them. The more we conceal our thoughts, the more they multiply and gain strength… [But] once an evil thought is revealed, it is immediately dissipated… Whoever discloses his thoughts is quickly healed.”[3]

If we cannot or will not bring out into the open a logismos, a secret fantasy or fear or temptation, then it possesses power over us. But if with God’s help and with the assistance of our spiritual guide, we bring the thought out from the darkness into the light, its influence begins to wither away. Having exposed the logismos, we are then in a position to deal with it, and the process of healing can begin. The method proposed here by the early monks has interesting similarities with the techniques of modern psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. But the early monks had worked out this method fifteen centuries before Freud and Jung! There is, of course, an important difference: the early monks did not employ the notion of the unconscious in the way that modern psychology does, even though they recognized that with our conscious understanding we are usually aware of only a small part of ourselves.

2. The second gift of the spiritual father or mother is the ability to love others and to make others’ sufferings their own. Of one elder mentioned in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, it is briefly and simply recorded: “He possessed love, and many came to him.”[6] He possessed love — this is indispensable in all spiritual motherhood and fatherhood. Insight into the secrets of people’s hearts, if devoid of loving compassion, would not be creative but destructive; if we cannot love others, we will have little power to heal them.

Loving others involves suffering with and for them; such is the literal sense of the word “compassion.” “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal 6:2): the spiritual father or mother is the one par excellence who bears the burdens of others.

Yet the relation between the spiritual father and his children is not one-sided. Though he takes the burden of their guilt upon himself and answers for them before God, he cannot do this effectively unless they themselves are struggling wholeheartedly on their own behalf. Once a brother came to St Antony of Egypt and said: “Pray for me.” But the old man replied: “Neither will I take pity on you nor will God, unless you make some effort of your own.”[11]

3. A third gift of the spiritual father and mother is the power to transform the human environment, both the material and the non-material. The gift of healing, possessed by so many of the startsi, is one aspect of this power. More generally, the starets helps his disciples to perceive the world as God created it and as God desires it once more to be. The true elder is one who discerns the universal presence of the Creator throughout creation, and assists others to discern it likewise. He brings to pass,

The lack of spiritual fathering and mothering is eroding our culture…