The Jesus Disruption: Shaking Up the Status Quo to Set You Free

By Dan Grandstaff

"The Jesus Disruption" helps Christians discover the truth of their identity as a child of God. This is a
page-turning journey to discover the heart of God and the new heart he's given to his children. There is
a thicket of religious to-do lists that will not work. Save yourself years of frustration and distraction. Find
the hidden treasure now.

Dan Grandstaff exposes the absurdity of "trying to become who you already are." If you find religion and
the Christian life confusing, this is the book for you. It is an aide in the search for the life you've been
looking for all along.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098315818

Book preview

Chapter 1

Mistaken

… pre-conceptions… shape present behavior.

Adam Nicholson

Seize The Fire

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

French Novelist

In 2006, tennis pro Andre Agassi announced he would be retiring at the conclusion of the year’s fourth and final major tournament, the U.S. Open. Tennis was about to lose one of its most exciting and flamboyant players. Although I’m not a big tennis fan, I’m terrifically nostalgic and decided I would do my best to not miss seeing the last match of one of the game’s all-time greats.

The U.S. Open is a two-week long tournament held in Flushing Meadows, New York. Since the other three majors are played in other countries in different time zones, it makes watching them inconvenient for me. But the U.S. open is primetime, and this is where my story begins.

One evening during the tournament, I got home late from a long day at the office and needed to get my grass cut. That meant skipping dinner, changing my clothes and jumping straight on the lawnmower. Finishing up just after dark, I hit the shower, threw on my pajamas and ran downstairs to raid the kitchen. Being an experienced nocturnal hunter-gatherer, I quickly filled my plate with delicious, unhealthy man-food and headed back upstairs to our master bedroom. With a sitting area at one end with a television and a couple of big cushy chairs, it was where my wife Tracey and I would typically spend the last bit of the evening to unwind.

By the time I plopped down, it was nearly ten o’clock, Tracey was tired and decided she would go on to bed. After saying good night and crawling under the covers, she raised her head just enough to peek over the top and said;

Please don’t be loud.

I told her I was only planning to watch for a little bit, and confidently assured she wouldn’t even know I was in the room. Immediately I flipped the channel to the U.S. Open where the headline match was already well underway, and take a guess at who was playing. That’s right; it was Agassi.

His opponent was James Blake and things weren’t going well for my guy. Blake was up two sets to love (zero) and was whipping Agassi badly in the third. I thought to myself; This is terrible. A true tennis icon is about to end his career by getting beaten in straight sets. I hated the thought of it but there was at least a thin silver lining to that dark cloud. I had to get up early the next morning for work. Losing in straight sets would let me see Agassi play his last match and I could still get to bed at a descent time.

That was my thinking, but as they continued to play, the winds of change began to blow. Like watching the early stages of a tropical depression in the Caribbean, a storm was brewing that would eventually grow into a Category-5 hurricane.

Somewhere in this third set, as if by magic, a different Agassi seemed to appear from out of nowhere. The scrappy fighter everyone had come to know over the years. And from the edge of defeat he was somehow able to stave off Blake’s furious attack to win the third set.

It made me feel a bit better for Agassi. Winning one set would at least allow him to save-face by not getting skunked. But as it turned out, it was just a gust of wind from one of the outer bands of the hurricane. Little did we know the eye wall of the storm was on its way and about to hit.

Everything about the match began to change and you could feel the anticipation growing. Agassi had a new spring in his step, and Blake had a new look of concern in his eyes. The attitude of the crowd shifted as well. After mentally writing this one off as a done deal, they all seemed to sense something big was about to go down right in front of them. And they were right.

As play continued, the match rose to a whole other level of intensity and so did my reaction to it. The volleys became long and furious, with both players hitting shots that were amazing. I couldn’t contain myself. The back and forth tug-of-war, and Andre slowly closing the gap was too much for me to handle. It sent me into a frenzy. I protested every Blake point and celebrated each of Agassi’s. I came out of my chair to fist pump the TV so often and with such fury, my heart rate hit a cardio pace and I was covered in sweat.

I tried yelling in my whisper voice, but all it did was prove I don’t have a whisper voice. And in my crazed state, I not only woke Tracey repeatedly, but my daughter who was all the way at the other end of the hall with the door closed. Each time I would apologize and follow it up with the un-keep-able promise that it wouldn’t happen again.

Both players fought so hard for every point that each game went down to the wire and seemed to take forever to be decided. So much for me getting to bed on time as midnight came and went with the end still nowhere in sight. What began as a lopsided sprint had turned into a two-man marathon that was running neck and neck. It was like watching some long, drawn out tennis version of a cage-match. I really needed to go to bed, but couldn’t make myself. This might be Agassi’s last hurrah and witnessing it was far more important to me than sleep.

Scoring in the final set was stretched as far as regular play can go, a six-six tie, which extended the match into a tiebreaker. After an all-out war, it had finally come down to this; who could score seven points, with at least a two point-margin. As you might expect by now, the tiebreaker went the distance as well, all the way to another six-six tie, forcing them to play on until someone managed to gain the two-point advantage.

This thing was taking so long I was beginning to think the match might not end before the sun came up. But the next point produced a ray of hope. Agassi scored to go ahead seven-six. If he could somehow manage to take the next point, the match would be over, his story would continue and I could finally go to bed.

With sweat running down my face and on the edge of my seat, I watched as Blake started into his serve. Here it comes. And in pure Agassi form, he crushed the return with a massive fore-hand that never gave Blake a chance to volley.

Hurrah! It’s over! My guy won and it’s finally over!

It was nearly two o’clock in the morning. I was beat and my clothes were soaked through with sweat. But I felt it was worth it all. On the biggest stage and in magnificent fashion, one of tennis’s greatest champions had won in an absolute dogfight.

With a complete sense of satisfaction, I collapsed back into the arms of my big cushy chair, exhausted in victory and proud of myself for hanging in there to see it. I was just about to turn off the TV and go take my post-game, second shower of the night, when the program switched to a rather strange looking scene. It was a lonely looking shot of a lamppost. I thought to myself, that looks odd. We just finished watching one of the greatest tennis matches of all time. Why would they be showing us that silly lamppost?

Shrouded in darkness, a soft halo of light cascaded onto the sidewalk and street corner below, giving it the serene look of an old Norman Rockwell painting. But wait a minute. There’s just enough light to see something moving. Coming up out of my chair, I leaned into the TV to get a closer look. What is that? Is that rain? I think I see rain. I think I see a lot of rain!

Then I heard the most awful thing. One of the sportscasters did a voiceover and said something like this.

We expect the rain to end sometime tonight and for play to resume at its regularly scheduled time tomorrow.

Are you kidding me?!!!

On a night when I needed to get to bed early, I had forced myself to stay awake until nearly two in the morning, kept my family from sleeping, agonized over every shot of every point and every game of every set, with no idea I had been watching an encore presentation of a match that had taken place the year before. Although I’m certain they must have made an announcement at the beginning of the broadcast to let everyone know exactly what was going on, it did nothing for those of us who got a late start because we had to mow the lawn.

Once again, for reasons altogether different, I collapsed into the arms of my big cushy chair. Stunned and unable to move, I just laid there like a pile of sweaty laundry. Although my body was motionless, on the inside my mind went into overdrive, firing off questions, accusations and regrets, one after the other, as fast as it could. You might think anger was the strongest emotion I felt in that moment, but it wasn’t. By far the greatest feeling that came over me was a sense of complete foolishness. I could have been in bed hours ago, but I’d been had. Tricked by a missing fifteen second sound bite and a shot of that lamppost. Without them, my mind was at the mercy of its own devices, left to do the risky business of making and living on assumptions.

I kept asking myself over and over, why wasn’t the program interrupted at some point during the past three and a half hours to let me know. A little bit of truth would have saved me, not to mention the rest of my family. But none of that mattered now.

I was mistaken, the damage was done, and nothing was going to turn back the clock.

Sadly, there have been many times in my life, situations with much greater consequences than this, when I’ve caught myself saying; I wish I had known then what I know now. As if standing graveside delivering a eulogy, they are the words of regret I speak over some part of life I’ve gotten wrong, some mistake I wish I could bury and forget ever happened.

Oddly enough, I typically arrive at moments like these in a relative state of shock. After all, the thought process I use to create my blunders always seems sound. I merely do what I think is right. Nevertheless, there I stand, surveying the damage while the smoke clears, wondering what went wrong and how I got there.

This is why the messes I get myself into are seldom the result of some in the moment impulsive urge or overreaction. Quite the opposite. Most of my mistakes and nearly all the biggest ones, are nothing new, they’re the things I get wrong repeatedly and for long periods of time. Like a pit master, my relationships and circumstances turn on the spit of my mind where they slow cook over the low heat of all my beliefs, opinions, impressions and expectations. Many of which are wrong, but I can’t see it. And when they’re done to perfection and falling off the bone, some part of life blows up in my face and dies on me. If only someone or some-thing had been able to give me truth and change my mind, perhaps things would have turned out differently and I wouldn’t have to attend so many of these memorial services.

Without truth, we are forced to grapple with life under our own power and rely on what we know, what we think we know and make our best guesses at everything else. It’s a dangerous mix that makes the broad road leading to death, look surprisingly like the narrow road that leads to life (Matthew 7:13-14). And we can’t tell the difference, because a wrong idea, once established in our minds, is every bit as powerful as one that is correct.

Desiderius Erasmus (1466 – 1536) once said; In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Likewise, in the land of the mind, when there is an absence of truth, error makes a similar rise to power. It ascends to the throne, not because it deserves to, but because we are leaderless and unable to thwart its efforts to seize control. And once it takes up that position, it rules us. And error never rules well. It is always a tyrant.

I didn’t know it at the time, but when I sat down in front of the television that night, I was walking into a trap. After all, everything made perfect sense. The U.S. Open was taking place at the time, it was supposed to be on TV that night and Agassi was indeed, in the tournament. My mind gathered up all those bits of information and followed them like breadcrumbs. A trail that led me to stay up for nothing. And in the end, all I could do was think to myself; I wish I had known.

Such is life. All day long, every day, our minds are busy trying to figure out what’s really going on here. And that’s not easy to do because life is fragmented and confusing. It can be great at times, tragic at others, with a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs in between. We naturally gather up the pieces from here and there and try to make sense of them. But let’s be honest, if those pieces were patients and we the doctor, most of them would die due to misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment.

We are in desperate need of truth from God.

In the Bible, our proclivity to misinterpret life, along with the inadequacy of the solutions we come up with to try to fix it, are on display from the very beginning of our story. In Genesis chapter three, Adam and Eve didn’t just eat from the forbidden tree. They were choosing a life of self-reliance over a life of relying on God. And in the moment of time it took them to make that decision, the relationship with him was broken. The inner life he had given them was snuffed out. And instantly they knew it. Feeling the effects of the fall, they were overwhelmed by fear and ran. And frantically searching for an answer, the best they could come up with was to hide from God and sew fig leaves into clothes. Our jeans don’t last all that long, which makes the idea of leaves being up to the task, laughable.

But before we laugh too loud, we need to realize that we’ve all been running, and even the most sophisticated and seemingly logical fig leaves we hide behind will prove every bit as insufficient as theirs did. But strangely enough, when they do, rather than have an aha kind of moment where we recognize their inadequacies and give up on them, we are far more likely to believe the problem will correct itself if we try harder and do more of what already isn’t working.

Throughout our lives, this world has taught each of us some way to try to get by. Over time, these ideas become so deep-seated, they morph into auto responses that move us, even when we don’t realize it. Feeling little or no need to stop and think, these silent assumptions drive us in the same direction as they did our original parents. Into self-determination.

Created to live in intimacy with God and to depend on him, these ways of the world draw us into its counterculture. They convince us that, if we are to survive, we must do it through our own power and cleverness. But as the book of Proverbs tells us, it never works.

There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death (14:12, NASB)

Fortunately, Jesus can see the end while we’re busy struggling in the middle, and steps in to disrupt our lives in the hope of rescuing us from the doom that’s headed our way. But there’s a problem. When disruption shows up, even when it is meant for good, we try to push it away. We don’t like anything to get in between us and what we want. This may be the great paradox of Christianity, that we are either unwilling or unable to accept the idea that Jesus must rescue us from ourselves.

Because change and not getting our way do not come easy to us, like Jonah, we must all spend some time in the belly of the fish. It separates us from our go-to options by pushing us beyond the reach of our resources. In the midst of the chaos of being pushed to the edge, the things we’ve been relying don’t work anymore. And in their absence, our hearts are more likely to hear the voice of God explaining that the life and wholeness we have been looking for can only be found in