So I got a friend request, which I quickly realized was a fake, the latest victim in the Facebook imposter scam. It happened to be right as I was finishing up a time in prayer, and my inclination was to see if bringing Jesus into the equation via prayer might have any affect.
Here's what happened...
At 1:30a on Tue., April 18th, 2017, my grandmother, Helen Marie Derfler, took her last breath.
What a tragedy--because our original design is not to die, not to be separated in this way, and when a person is here in the flesh one day, and gone forever the next, it is always a shocking reality.
What a blessing--because my grandmother, I called her Nanny, was for years ready to leave this world. She would tell you as much! She missed her husband, John, who passed away more than 20 years prior as a result of a heart attack he had while they were dancing.
Anyway, let me tell you a bit about my Nanny in a way that both honors her life and also gives you a flavor of who she was:
First, I think it's telling that since I met Whitney, my wife, in 2010, she's heard pretty much every year since then that Nanny wasn't doing so hot and it might be her last year. I don't know how many ambulance rides Nanny took to Pottsville General Hospital, let's just say it was enough to become a little humorous in our family. Maybe also it was because the hospital was only a few blocks from her house, and also because for the most part, whenever we saw Nanny, she seemed pretty strong for her age. I don't think it would have surprised us if she lived to be 90 or even 100. Needless to say, it's kind of like when you think something might happen for awhile, and it doesn't, but then it does, it's almost even a little more surprising.
My memories of Nanny go back to my earliest memories, here are some of the highlights:
Crawling around her house as a kid as young as 4 or 5, I remember the turntable, wanting to touch the records and the needle, it was this big cabinet. I remember hiding under her big dining room table, it was my fort!
Getting back scratches! Nanny had long finger nails and she loved to just scratch my back, she'd do it for longer than anyone else too! Just that physical affection stuck out to me from the time I was a little guy to adulthood!
Nanny's love language had to be gifts, because she loved to give them too. I remember getting these little pencils from her that were printed: "You are loved by Helen M. Derfler."
Nanny in her salon.
There's a part of Nanny that was all feminine and beauty and glamour. She was a beautician for years after all! She liked jewelry and sitting around talking with the ladies! I always asked her how she was doing and she'd talk about her girlfriends.
One of my best memories of Nanny was shopping--she loved shopping. And as a kid, that's what we did best. We walked the mall like a pack of high rollers, and snapped up shoes, clothes, games, toys. And this was when Michael Jordan started putting out shoes, so I was an early adopter of the $120 basketball sneaker. After visiting Nanny, I went back to school walking on clouds.
A hobby when visiting Nanny was looking through the Speigel catalogue, and circling the things I wanted, and Nanny would proceed to order those things. A Sega Genesis with games, clothes, you name it. One time we went to the Pottsville Hadestys Electronics store and Nanny bought three of their newest TV's, one for each grandkid. While Nanny had money, she threw caution to the wind and she spent it, and I remember those days with her, and we sure had fun with it!
But when the money thinned out and she was no longer buying shoes for me, she'd send me cards just to say, "I love you." It was never unclear to me, Nanny loved me. She said it so many times.
She'd also call me to leave messages like this one:
Nanny with Boden in 2014
When Whitney and I had Boden we lived in California, and there was a stretch where I wasn't sure Nanny would get to see her great grandson, the next line of Derflers. When she did though, it was such a special moment for me, and for her too. So much that she really couldn't say anything, she just had this big big smile.
My Nanny, in her 88 years of life, gazing upon her great grandson, just 1 year of new life, there's something so striking and rich and sobering about that.
Nanny loved being a great grandmother, in fact, when I spoke with her, we'd mostly talk about the kids. She loved to hear about what they were doing, and she would just make these happy sounds and say things like, "they're so precious," and "he's such a doll!"
Nanny and Lukas in 2016
She loved to hear about her great grandkids, it brought her such joy. So, one year for Christmas Whitney and I knew just what to get her, a photo book full of the latest pictures. She told me she looked at it all the time, and showed all of her friends when they visited.
Nanny also left me encouraging messages like this one:
When someone dies, I think it's natural (or at least prudent) to wonder where they've gone. And we probably all look for some answer that is going to bring us peace, we cling to the good things, we memorialize them. But being a Christian, as I am, there's also this realization that none of us "measures up," none of us are worthy of the glory of eternity in the presence of God. And yet, we have this gift to be able to have that, if in our heart we just accept that, and when someone does, their life should look different, certainly to God, and probably to men too. So let me tell you what I know about my Nanny's faith in Jesus...
I know that we talked a lot about prayer, and she told me that she prayed often, many times in a day.
Nanny certainly had a lot of the trappings of a Catholic faith, the rosaries, the prayer cards, the candles, the Bible's, and things of that nature laying around.
I know that she had a good discernment about situations. When my sister was killed and in the years since, we would sometimes have really honest conversations about how people were doing, how they were handling that death, especially my parents, and it occurred to me that Nanny had wisdom and discernment about that.
While to many Nanny could appear to have a sort of simple, unaffected, even comical exterior, one that would act as if nothing bothered her and things were no big deal with a wave of the hand, there was another side to her, a much more serious and introspective side. In the last five or so years, I started to talk to Nanny about Jesus, prayer, and death, and I saw that side.
In closing, as I'm sitting here writing this after a solid day of thinking about Nanny and praying for her soul to be received mercifully by the Lord just now, I said to God...
"Dear God, I cannot understand your ways and I do not know how to encapsulate the life of my dear Nanny, I don't know what to say about the most important thing, her soul, her eternity. I don't know how to bring it to a conclusion. And this is the case for me with every person, for who knows a soul but you God alone?! You made her, and in your image, so Father, in this moment, God, tell me something, some whisper about these deep matters that we now ponder over facing her death."
..and just then the lyrics from a song playing in the background ring out at me, and I am warmed over listening to them, especially in light of what I've written here, and I thank God for my Nanny, for her life, and for her eternity. Listen to this song...
Below is a picture of Nanny with her sons (Left of Center, in yellow polo, Jack [my dad], and behind him in the blue polo, is Tom [my uncle]), and extended family.
Over the past few months I've sat and talked with a few billionaires and centi-millionaires. And, I was surprised to hear more than once that such wealth is a curse. And so recently, coming out of one such meeting, I posted this on Facebook:
The comments on this post went back and forth with some identifying with the great challenge of wealth, and others saying that, in fact, wealth itself cannot be a curse with some suggesting ways to handle it.
Without trying to make a case one way or the other here, I'm going to give more details about where these people were coming from, which will hopefully be of some use to us all.
1. First, keep in mind I was speaking to them about their philanthropy, and each of these folks gives away massive amounts of their wealth, some up to 50% per year. So, by any standard, they are extremely generous, far more than the average person, which is not typical of the extremely wealthy.
2. The principal wealth holder's I met weren't necessarily concerned with their own handling of their wealth, but rather how their family would handle it. In fact, one billionaire said to me that massive wealth almost automatically changes their kids and how they approach work, and not for the better. Statistics show that 70% of wealth is lost by the second generation, 90% by the third, which seems to support this concern.
3. Even if the principal wealth holder believes that he can handle the wealth, there's a sense that it's not always easy to discern if one is doing so. And, the Bible speaks quite a bit about the heart being able to be deceived with regards to wealth. Does one's resources start to provide a sense of security, provision, and joy in place of where God ought to be? With the onset of massive wealth, this becomes difficult to discern. One pastor, Francis Chan, upon learning that his book would net him millions, set up a trust to ensure he couldn't use it for his personal lifestyle for this very reason (read the story here).
4. People of extreme wealth are very concerned about their values, and primarily about their values not being upheld by their successors or those they give money to. I've heard this many times, and people have pointed to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton as examples of wealthy families leaving money to educate students with certain values, which are now mostly lost.
5. The nature of relationships automatically change, where most conversations seem to have a hidden agenda and/or lead to a financial transaction. This dynamic can quickly lead to guilt, family infighting, and abandonment by friends and family who become upset when requests aren't met, and ultimately, a lack of trust and deep loneliness.
6. Everyone seems to have an opinion about how one could or should handle the wealth. Even in the Facebook post I put up, people, complete strangers, right away started providing solutions about how they would handle it, and how they most certainly would not be cursed by such wealth. When one is extremely wealthy, it's almost an invitation for open criticism, whether they give it away or not, just by virtue of them being wealthy.
7. Giving the money away doesn't always feel all that helpful to the recipient. Some folks I'm talking to literally can't give the money away fast enough, and wrestle with the issues that come with giving it away. Individuals and organizations receiving funds sometimes seem worse off than before they got the funding. These kinds of unintended negative consequences are commonplace, and it soon becomes clear that giving money away is, in fact, difficult to do well.
8. In the USA, we are in a society that values and has more wealth than any society before it. Even within the church, it's often the financially successful who are put on stage. We've witnessed the rise of the "prosperity Gospel" and yet, while the Bible uses the word "blessed" 112 times in the New Testament, it never once refers to material wealth. So, with great wealth in the US comes a certain fame and favoritism that would certainly pull away from, not towards, the key tenants of Scripture.
9. Keep in mind that, most people who will read this post are actually very wealthy. In fact, if there were 100 people in a line representing the world's population, everyone reading this post would be in the top 5 wealthiest people in that line. Don't believe me, check the stats here at Global Rich List. For example, I'm in the top .08% of all humans! So while it's easy to point to "that millionaire or billionaire," for statistical purposes and from a global perspective, you might as well point to yourself.
Is there a way to have wealth and still walk closely with God? Yes.
Would such a walk be difficult and require one to hold onto that wealth very loosely. I think we can agree that, yes, this is true.
Given that I am primarily interested in building up the Church and providing solutions, do I have ideas about how to do this? Indeed, and if you're interested, you should sign up for my email list to be sure you don't miss out on the principles, tools, and resources that are coming very soon.
I met this morning with a guy who, despite only sitting in-person with him 2 or 3 times, he is very dear to me, or as we Christians say, he's my brother in Christ (Matthew 12:48-50). And the cool thing about the body of Christ is that God gives spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12), and this particular brother, he has the gift of prophecy. This means that He get's "words" from God, and here's what he said to me this morning, as we chatted at Harvard Business School...
It went like this, after chatting for 45 minutes, I asked him if he had anything I should write down, meaning, is God giving you anything for me?
He said that he was given a picture of the meaning of my ring as symbolic of the bond that Whitney and I have together, which is very strong, and has God at the center. He asked me if that had any resonance with the wedding ring that I wear.
I told him that, yes, I had selected this design for a very strong exterior (tungsten) with a beautiful interior (rose gold).
But even further, I told him, shortly after I met Whitney, while we were still dating, I had a piece of jewelry designed to represent our union. The charm melted down a lot of my old jewelry, representing a new beginning, and the gold was formed into the letter "W" for Whitney and "R" for Ryan interwoven, with a diamond at the center, representing Jesus.
And finally, I added, over just the past week, I've been thinking "in the back of my thoughts," really in my soul, about what it would be like to love Whitney more fully. To hear her, love her for who she is, devote myself more fully just to her and to knowing her. Nobody knew about this conversation, and here was this brother with this word from God encouraging me forward in the strength of this union.
This was a fun start to my day in Boston, and another example of how fellowship with believers brings about a "different world" that is encouraging as it shapes in truth and molds one into the image of Christ.
Galatians Chapter 5
13 You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. 14 For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 15 If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.
16 So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. 18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.
19 The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery;20 idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions 21 and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.24 Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. 26 Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.
Lots of times people reach out to me wanting advice or help getting to their next opportunity, usually for work. I then ask them to respond to the following:
1. If you are a Christian, what is God telling you? How is that being confirmed in prayer and in your Scripture reading?
2. What are your advisers / wise counsel / your spouse / the people you trust / saying to you?
3. Have you enlisted a few people close to you to pray for this transition? When I've gone through these transitions, I have cried out as the Psalmist:
“Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands!”
4. What are the top 3 companies you'd like to work for?
I'm a big fan of aiming for what you want vs what's available. In my experience, what's listed publicly and what's available are often different, and smart companies do what they can to get the right people on the bus.
5. Do you have any restrictions around where you're willing to move, or what seniority level you're after?
6. Is there anyone in my network in particular where an introduction would help? If so, I'll consider how well I know them and if an intro is appropriate.
These details will help me help you! So if you want my help, please let me know your response to these as the best step forward.
And many blessings in your search, may God grow your faith through it.
Ryan
A good friend of mine was a refugee.
Whitney and I intentionally made friends with our neighbors in San Jose that were Iranian refugees.
My church is right now discussing how to adopt a refugee family.
All of that being said, I'm not so sure most people talking about refugees right now know much about receiving a refugee in this country, here's why...
Came to realize, as I have been instructing my two sons (age 3 and 19 months) that spiritually I'm a toddler.
I documented this humbling lesson in sanctification online here:
As I've reflected on the truths in this lesson, and the way forward, I realized how rich it is, and found myself thanking God for my children, and recognizing some ways he might be calling me to grow up.
A few that came up quickly as I discussed this with my wife include:
-I need to not be so grumpy when I'm tired, this is self-discipline
-I need to be more careful with my words
-I need to listen to what God is telling me to do, and just do it! For example, God told me BEFORE Boden was born, 3 years ago, to learn songs to sing to him, and I still know only songs like "Jesus Loves Me." Again, toddler status.
-I need to wake up and not just start running around, but need to spend time before God.
-I need to know God's rules and mandates and meditate on them to have any hope of obeying them.
This is a work in progress, more to come, hopefully graduating to a pre-schooler in the next months and years!
So the other day my wife shows me a post she put on Instagram, and as I looked through her posts, I realize that she's putting all these wonderful little nuggets of her faith online too.
I mean, I know that these things happen in her life all the time, but to see how she documents it, life through her eyes, well, let's just say I'm one proud husband.
And the best part, look who get's the glory!
Got this email from my former colleague and still dear brother in Christ (and mentor, though he doesn't know it) Harry Brown.
Anyway, when I received this I forwarded it on to a list of guys that love to pray with a great response and so I felt like this was too good not to share with the wider audience.
Be blessed in your binding and drawing!
On a recent business trip, I reached out to a friend on a whim. I don't always visit him when I'm in his town, but I had a sense that on this particular trip, I needed to do so, but didn't know why.
Anyway, he was available and so we met up and had a really rich conversation. I ended up feeling like I had some really specific things to share with him. Neither of us expected to have the kind of conversation that we had, but we both left feeling really uplifted by it. I was glad I followed "my gut" to reach out to him.
A few months went by and I didn't think about our time together, and then I got this email from him...
Bro -
Unbeknownst to you, one of the things I took from our last conversation while together was that I need to be praying with my wife like you are doing with Whit.
Since the morning after our meeting I’ve been waking up early and praying with her every morning and it has made a huge difference in our relationship….I mean huge.
Throughout this time, two guys in my men’s breakfast group expressed issues and I told them about what you did for me through this suggestion. They both have begun to do this and report significant improvements in their marriages.
You’ve had an impact on three families and thought you should know.
Hope you’re well.
Now, to be clear, this is nothing special about me at all, it's God, and here's what I mean:
1. That sense I had to visit my friend, God puts those ideas in people's minds, it happens to me numerous times each week, both on the giving and receiving end. It's a normal part of walking with Jesus and having his Holy Spirit active in your life.
2. The things I said to my friend were very simply from my experience praying and applying Scripture to my own life. So in a sense, I just shared Scripture with him that had come to life in the world in a way that resonated with him and drove him to action.
3. If you knew the backstory on how I met this friend, and the details of our relationship, it is so clearly wild that we even know each other. There is simply no other reason that God has connected us for exactly these kinds of exchanges.
“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”
Got a call last night from a dear brother in Christ, he's a pastor in Connecticut, among other things. Anyway, I listened to his voicemail this morning, it was him praying for me and for my family for three minutes and it changed my whole day, maybe more.
As I listened to it, my spirit leaped--what he was saying was not him just saying stuff, it wasn't a normal prayer, it stirred something inside me deeply, it changed my day.
And this particular brother has a habit of doing this. I literally have received so many calls from him (and humorously 9 out of 10 go to voicemail) that it quickly ate up all my voicemail space. These voicemails are such a treasure that I opened a Dropbox storage account just to save them.
By the way, often his voicemails go beyond the three minute limit per message for 2, 3, even 10 messages in a row. He's someone who is praying in the Holy Spirit, he's sharing real truth, and that's why these gems are so valuable to me that I save them and go back and listen to them.
I have dozens of messages like this, not just from this one brother, but others too. Am I sharing this because I'm special and want to rub it in your face? Not at all.
I'm sharing this because I believe this is supposed to be the common experience for the Christian living in fellowship of the church body. And just going to church doesn't guarantee you this experience. In fact, I'm just coming off a year when Whitney and I were searching for a church where, in some ways, these kinds of calls from brothers was a big part of what church meant to me.
The reality is that these calls, the timing, the words that are spoken, knowing that God is putting you on the mind of someone else at just the right time, they become deeply touching evidence about how real and good God really is.
So what do you do if this isn't happening for you? Here's what I propose:
1. Hang around other people who want to pray. Maybe the're at your church, a Bible study, it could be anywhere. Listen for clues that they might be praying and offer to join them. You'll find that many churches have prayer as part of their regular routine.
2. Don't be discouraged if/when you don't start getting calls from people praying for you. The sad reality is that most people are overcommitted and don't actually pray for themselves, let alone other people.
3. Start to pray for other people that are around you. And pray that God would put people in your life to pray for you.
4. Keep your eyes and ears open. Sometimes God sends us people but they don't look like what we'd expect and we miss it. Look for opportunities to connect with people who want to give and receive prayer.
5. Ask for prayer. Humble yourself enough to share details about what's going on in your life, be vulnerable and ask for prayer.
As you put yourself out there, and forge new and deeper relationships, undoubtedly over time, God is going to start putting people around you that are praying for you, and God is going to use those people to show you how incredible he is, and its going to change your life.
“Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.”
“Praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints.”
