It’s hard to believe Fightin’ Poseidon launched in January 2024 and now this ship has been sailing for almost 2 years. This voyage is a passion project and I don’t take it lightly that any one of you reading would care enough to stick around through the routes I’ve taken us through.

I’ve spoken many times to friends in person about how the mark of a good relationship is knowing and being known. Some of you have taken that to heart and reached out to me about how a particular issue I’ve dispatched had found you at just the right moment. That kind of thing encourages me to go on.

What I really hope these writings do for you is to give you courage to face whatever you’re facing, no matter how grim or dark, light or hopeful, and live in a way with those around you to be known to them and maybe give them the freedom and trust to make themselves known to you. In a way, Fightin’ Poseidon is my small effort to make an impact in this world, to raise a defiant fist at the darkness and be a portend of the day when the Light dispels every final shadow.

It’s no surprise to say I see the world through a highly conceptual and metaphorical lens. In a way that lens is experientially kaleidoscopic, but not in the drug-induced machine elf way. It’s like I see connections and hyperlinks of meaning everywhere. There are symbols in every nook and cranny and glance and conversation, which has sometimes worked against me in instances where I took something to heart I probably shouldn’t have.

For whatever reason, I’ve found the metaphor of salty seafaring and nautical myth helpful in making sense of life and the journey through it. There’s only so many days I’ve been allotted in this world, and one day there will be an empty space where I once stood. The masses of the world will glance warily at that vacuum as they try to ignore its impending doom. However, I see it as impending hope. One day, the sighings and sorrows brought on by the night will disperse in the light of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. He is not a metaphor. He is, as Lewis and Tolkien discussed, is the one true myth.

Which brings me to the Clash of Tides, because as hopeful as the Lord’s people should be, encouragement isn’t always how they live outwardly or with one another.

For whatever reason, Christians seem to love infighting and quarrels between their different denominations and heck, let’s just call it for what it is, tribes. One persons always doing something heinous and heretical and wrong. There ARE blatant heretical positions, doctrines, ideas and practices, not to mention serious moral failures, that are outside of orthodoxy. We know what’s definitely outside the lines of historic Christianity. We might call those matters of first importance. If someone does not believe that Jesus is the Son of God, incarnate in the flesh, who lived the life we could not live to take on the debt of our sins when he died on the cross so we could be forgiven of them, and then his sacrifice was validated by his resurrection which give us hope for the defeat of our own deaths, then that is a person outside the lines and ought not be considered a Christian.

Harsh? We know the color red is red by determining that red is not blue. A math instructor recently informed me how one of the core principles in mathematics and how it relates to life is subtraction. Why? In order to determine what something is, you must start by determining what it is not. Truth is not relative, and there will always be claims of absolutes. But I digress.

Where things get ugly is when we start fighting about secondary matters. Baptism, communion (or the Lords supper or the Eucharist, depending on where you’re coming from), gifts of the Holy Spirit, jeans on Sunday, alcohol abstinence or temperance, or the all time favorite of the end times and millennium where we love to fight about the timeline of 1,000 years of peace.

Practically where it really falls apart within our own houses and churches is we are constantly telling each other where we’re wrong or where we need to change. I’m not saying we don’t need to change. Good grief, I know I do. However, I don’t believe that change is ever going to be lasting and effective if we only focus on the behavior we must put off. We must focus on the behavior we ought to be putting on, but that is difficult. C.S. Lewis nailed this dynamic in one of my all time favorite quotes of his.

Being good and getting better is tough. You’re swimming against the current of who you are. How do we get there? One of the leadership styles I’ve been studying and being coached in is strengths finding. We all have gifts and none of us are the same. We each bring something unique to the table. This is a biblical principle we find in 1 Corinthians 12. The value I see in this is that by focusing on the gifts and talents God gives us, and lifting those up in others through honest appreciation and admiration when we see them, our encouragement can be the good growth that chokes out the weeds of behavior in us we wish would just die already.

We used to look at Paul’s example of the church in Corinth and call it finding evidences of grace. It’s kind of like catching someone in the act of doing a good job. That’s all fine but I think it stops too short. When Christ rescues us and redeems us, the Bible says we’re made a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). The Bible also says when we are in Christ we are adopted as sons. Don’t get too hung up on the noun being sons if you’re a woman reading this. While it is true that we become sons and daughters of God as part of His family, the biblical sense of being named as a son also carries with it the connotation of having an inheritance, which even in times and stories as recent as Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen knew that daughters were not entitled to what sons were. Son. Daughter. You have an inheritance in Christ. This is who we are now. Slowly, the Holy Spirit is making us into who we already are. That’s a fancy word called sanctification, and it’s far too slow of a process if you ask me. It’s a good thing I’m not God.

Still, it’s the Lord who is at work in us. It’s the Lord who protects us from colossal failures and keeps drawing us back to Him when we wander yet again. In many ways, when we’re failing in our assignments as Christians, the only thing we can look to as evidence of our salvation is the many times the Lord has pursued us and once again, brought us back.

When we wander though, isn’t part of that temptation brought out of wanting to have more intimate knowledge of what’s been forbidden to us? Knowledge that may not be bad in and of itself, but only bad in that it’s not knowledge we were meant to have. An easy application of this is premarital sex or adultery or fantasizing. It’s all knowledge that isn’t meant for us, and when we try to hold that precious flame in our hands, we get burned.

What if we changed our sight to look at what one another are doing right? What if we changed our outlook to celebrate one another’s wins and blessings instead of focusing so much on our failures and losses? We should still confess our sins to one another and continue to know and be known, but if all we ever focus on is what we ourselves and other people are doing wrong, what are we going to build? We’re going to have an empire of rubble to scrape our wounds with and wonder why the kingdom of God hasn’t been brought to bear.

Can’t we dare to hope and believe that God is at work in one another? Must we doubt? Are we so afraid that acknowledging good things in one another is going to give false assurance? It doesn’t have to be endless affirmation that devolves into celebration of sin but it’s not going to hurt to believe in somebody.

The people who have believed in me have allowed me to step into actions and tasks and roles I would have never thought possible. Those people believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. Or, to put it in a better way, that God could work through someone like me. When someone believed in me, and the power of God at work in me, that made me dare to disbelieve old identities. I could step into newness of life as an adopted son of the Lord who no longer had anything to fear. Even if I blew my assignment, which I still frequently do. No matter. I don’t stop loving any of my daughters or sons when they do something wrong. They never stop being my son or daughter. I believe in them that they can be more than they’re currently living out, and I can trust that God will do the work in them to bring them to that point.

Let me get to the point because I’m certainly taking the long way. The question then becomes how can I uniquely speak into their life to give them the courage to face the battles of tomorrow? How can I help them to be brave when they have to fight Poseidon on their own?

How can we fill someone’s bones with fire and spines with courage to live to fight another day? To be better than they believe themselves to be and how they acted yesterday?

Believe in them and the work of the Holy Spirit in them.

Let them know you’re praying for them, and how you’re praying for them.

Point them to the fact that, even in their disappointments and failures, the fact that they’re still hanging on shows God hasn’t let them go.

Tell them what you appreciate about them, what areas they’re strong and gifted in.

Love them when they’ve let you down.

Don’t hold a record of wrongs against them.

Hug them tightly and tell them you love them no matter what.

A few years ago I was having a REALLY hard time after a colossal anger and self-control failure and the tidal wave of accompanying shame. I isolated myself for two days. It was ugly. There were plenty of voices who let me know what I was doing wrong, which only compounded what I already knew. It wasn’t until my oldest daughter left me a note that said she loved me and missed me being a part that I found the courage to overcome my shame and not believe what I felt. I believed her and that brought me out of my downward spiral.

The good news of Jesus does not just forgive us of our sin. He gives us new life. If we can use the power of our words and love to bring about new life in others, isn’t that feeding a river that no amount of guilt could ever reproduce?

Live as free men and women, ye sons and daughters of the King.

If you didn’t notice, where we really fall off the rails and go sideways is when we start believing things that aren’t true or are twisted distortions of the truth.

The enemy would love to see anyone become ineffective.

It’s easy to believe lies. It’s easy to believe flattery.

It’s easy to seek knowledge off limits to you.

It is hard to resist. It’s hard to live in light of who you already are if you are that son or daughter of the King.

So, with encouragement and with caution, the girding up today focuses on our heart and mind.

John Piper wrote a book called Battling Unbelief. One of the main ideas there was to fight sin with superior pleasure. Much of that was in the vertical relationship between the reader and God. What I’m trying to get at with this fire of encouragement idea is working to fight sin with superior pleasure in a horizontal way, where we help one another do it. It’s not just positive thinking where we only see the good. Our hearts do love to make idols out of anything, from the smallest trinket to the smallest offense, and that has to be brought up. However, if the main thrust of our words to each other is “you need to do better in this” instead of “look what God has done in you!” then we’re never going to grow into who He’s destined for us to be.

I know this went long today and I appreciate you being here with me. If you’re reading Fightin’ Poseidon, you give me the courage to write one more. You give me the long vision to keep writing, keep pondering, keep peering through that kaleidoscopic spyglass into the next storm ahead.

Fill someone’s spine with fire today.

Give them genuine appreciation.

If it’s appropriate, communicate that with some kind of physical contact and embrace them.

You do not know what difference you could make in someone’s life with such a small gesture.

You might actually speak light into their life and dispel the darkness they’re fighting in silence.

Stay Anchored and keep fighting the good fight,

~ J.P. Simons ⚓️

It’s remarkable that after I wrote this newsletter, I thought I would dip back into The Screwtape Letters for the first Deep Dive of the year instead of tapping into another section of Precious Remedies. Little did I know how much the next letter from Screwtape would align so much with the content of this issue.

Not only does it talk about sanctification, but almost the entirety of the letter is on what keeps us from encouragement: the little offenses that stack up and now, after spending years with someone, how a mere lifting of an eyebrow or a certain look or tone can send one flying off the handle.

Make no mistake. When you make the decision to encourage someone and press into the relationship and connect with them instead of taking offense at someone and distancing yourself from the relationship and disconnecting with them, you are in a massive battle of spiritual warfare.

It’s late, and I have to send an apology text, even though it’s in the middle of the night.

We cannot let darkness win. The light will overcome.

Choose in this moment who you will serve.