crazylove

Busy signal - part two

2011-09-16T09:01:00.000-04:00

5:00 (am the next day) get up and find a quiet place to spend time with the Lord

The best part about the passage in Mark isn't that Jesus was just as busy as I am in my everyday life (as comforting as that is). It's that he provides the example for how to navigate life's busyness: making it a priority to spend time with our heavenly Father.

Nearly every Christian would admit to recognizing the importance of quiet time with the Lord. But so often that alone time with God is view under the premise of obligation and duty. In Mark 1:35 we see Jesus drawing away to spend time with the Father because he desires to be in close communion with God - to anchor his soul to the Almighty so he doesn't get swept away by the hectic, busy, frustrating schedule of daily life: "And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went to a desolate place, and there he prayed." (Mark 1:35)

The word desolate indicates solitary. Jesus withdrew to be alone with the Lord, to talk to God and shore up strength for the day in a private, one-on-one kind of way. When you're faced with life's busyness that Fall so often ushers in, where do you anchor your soul? Consistent, solitary time with the Lord is what Jesus set out as our example to live joyfully and keep a peaceful spirit when it feels as if everyone is looking for us. And it's the only way to find soul rest over the loudness of life. The best part of all of it is that God wants to spend time with us, not because we commit to having consistent devotional time, but just because He loves us.

Busy signal - part one

2011-09-11T22:22:00.001-04:00

7:00 wake up get ready for the day
8:00 get to work and start teaching
2:00 get interrupted for an impromptu, contentious meeting
5:00 leave work and head to a friend's for dinner
6:00 get interuppted at dinner with an urgent work email
7:00 urgent work meeting draws you away from your evening
10:00 get home and finally unwind
11:00 head to bed

Sound familiar? A day packed full of work and life. Lately I seem to always be saying: "God didn't intend us to be this busy." With everything from email to smart phones to Twitter. It's beyond difficult to unplug. And even when I do get away from the bombardment of communication, I want to spend time with friends, go out to dinner, get to church. I often find myself thinking life wasn't always this busy. Was it? Take a second to read Mark 1:21-34. This is one of the earliest days of Jesus' public ministry and he's on the go from sunup to sundown. He's teaching, he's casting out demons, he's having dinner with friends, he's healing people. The word immediately is used four times in this passage. Everything is urgent.

Funny. This sounds exactly like my life - well, minus the healing and casting out demons part, but certainly the running from one thing to the next. This is Jesus, my Savior, God in the flesh, experiencing a really busy day in a very practical way. He might not have had time to eat lunch. He was definitely exhausted. I can only imagine him finally laying down to close his eyes at the end of the day feeling completely drained, craving a few hours of sweet uninterrupted sleep.

Isn't there an unspeakable amount of comfort in realizing my Savior is able to really understand how we feel, in knowing Jesus had busy days, just like me?

daily

2010-12-17T17:33:00.000-05:00

I don't know why it surprises me that I need to be reminded of the truth of the Gospel every day, but it does. And I really do need to be reminded every day. The thing is God knows this (and what's more he's okay with it - which is even harder for me to understand). Take a look at just a few of the verses in the Bible that talk about taking things one day at a time or refer to time in days (FYI the word day is used over 2,000 times in Old and New Testaments so this is just a sample):

"Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears us up; God is our salvation" - Psalm 68:19
"This is the day that the Lord has made" - Psalm 118:24
"Every day I will bless you and praise your name forever and every" - Psalm 145:2
"For he will not remember much the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with Joy in his heart." - Ecclesiastes 5:20
"Give us this day our daily bread" - Matthew 6:11
"Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious about itself. Sufficient for the day is it's own trouble." - Matthew 6:24
"And he said to all, 'If anyone would come after me, let him take up his cross daily and follow me'" Luke 9:26

I tend to be a big picture gal and I like to look situations and people and look forward to how they all fit together and how the future will work out. But our walk with the Lord is a life long process that unfolds on a daily basis, sometimes even on a moment-by-moment basis. I may have surrendered my life to Christ, but if I don't surrender my day to Him, I surrender my day to the enemy.

My life gets messy really fast if I start thinking too much about how things are going to work out or what is going to happen because when I spend that much time forgetting to think about what's right in front of me and what I need to get done today. And I think a lot of what Paul is talking about in Philippians when he says "I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation," (Philippians 4:12), is recognizing the need to take up his cross daily - surrendering each moment to Christ.

shhhh...

2010-12-15T22:26:00.001-05:00

"Let no onedeceive you with empty words, for because of these thingsthe wrath of God comes uponthe sons of disobedience. Thereforedo not become partners with them; forat one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true, andtry to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in theunfruitfulworks of darkness, but insteadexpose them. Forit is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. But whenanything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible" Ephesians 5:8-13

Where is the line between secrets and privacy and transparency and openness in Christian community? Should there even be a line? I'm overwhemingly open about my life, with close friends, even sometimes with close acquaintances or perfect strangers. I just don't have a lot I'm uncomfortable talking about.

And a lot of times I bristle when people say things like "I don't want everyone up in my business." I tend to associate that kind of life mantra with sin, just because when I keep secrets, it's usually about sin. In Ephesians 5, Paul tells us to walk as children of light, keeping all things visible before God and before man. He doesn't command us to walk as a child of light. He commands us to walk as children of light. In other words, he commands us to walk in community. We can't rid ourselves effectively of our own sin. Only the Holy Spirit can. And a lot of times it requires the help of our brothers and sisters in Christ who have been where we are, struggling with a particular sin and want to pull us along.

Secrets seem to be characteristic of darkness, rather than the light that comes from the fruit of the Spirit Paul is imploring us to pursue. When I'm not being 100 percent honest with my close friends, it usually means Satan is finding a foothold somewhere in my life.

I've had to think about this a lot lately as I'm wrestling with being open and over-sharing - especially when my transparency involves other people, which seems to bring in another layer of questions on gossip and respect and trust. When sin involves me and someone else whether it be anger or jealousy or impurity or anything else, and I share it with someone, how do I walk a balance between exposing darkness and gossip?

This morning a friend of mine told me that while being open with others (others meaning believers in my life who's walk with the Lord I trust) isn't inherently bad, if I'm not going to expose the darkness to the Lord first, I'm off target. Sometimes in my transparency I unintentionally hurt people I care about. And the more I think about it, the quieter I want to become. Still not so quiet as to let darkness take root in my own life or in my community. So I guess the question is when do you keep secrets?

to judge or to love?

2010-07-25T16:17:00.000-04:00

Is there a difference between judging someone and disagreeing with what they do? My immediate response is yes, but I don't think it's a simple question. Mostly because I think the answer comes down to having a clear understanding of personal motivation, which is gray and complex and difficult to self-diagnose, let alone really understand in others. Usually I can tell the difference between when I'm judging someone and when I really just don't like what they're doing because I can see how much it's hurting them. But sometimes it's not that simple.

As Christ-followers, God commands us not to judge but to love. Not just because the damage judgment can cause is deep and long lasting, but because more often than not, we have no idea what's really going on in people's minds. God is the only one who fully (and truthfully) knows the human heart: "For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart" (I Samuel 16:7). God alone knows our hearts. And the eternal consequences of judging others are not insignificant. We face harsher judgment in heaven. We face the the removal of God's mercy. We face a life of relationships that are far more difficult than they are intended to be (Luke 6).

So where is there a difference between judging someone and disagreeing with their actions because you know they're hurting themselves by what they're doing? (Disclaimer: this only applies to Christ followers, non-believers are exempt) How much do you keep loving someone when you know what they're doing is wrong? damaging to themselves? I don't know. Usually I err on the side of love. It's safer. And it's so difficult to not set yourself up as a judge, even if you are convicted by God. The thing is, God's love and forgiveness for us never runs out. Ever. The Israelites (entire Old Testament), the prodigal son (Luke 15), the adulteress woman (John 8), the Bible is full of examples like these that demonstrate God's unfathomable, unfailing, forgiving love towards us.

The more my faith matures, the more I'm convinced that life of a true Christ-follower is to model this kind of relentless love. Back to my question on judgment then. How do you lovingly disagree? How do you say to someone you care about "I love you, but you can't do this anymore"? Beyond that, how do you keep loving them when their consistent response to that question is, "I don't care"? Because that's what really matters. Keeping on loving them no matter what, recognizing God doesn't call us to rescue each other. That's his job. He simply commands us to love one another as He first and continually and forever loves us...

"A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another." (John 13:34)

addictive behavior

2010-07-25T15:14:00.001-04:00

A soft push and I'm falling
Into you again
Black hole
Inhaling everything I am

A soft pull and I'm running
Running hard
Straight in to your folded arms

Your my Pandora
I want to escape but I can't
You opened me up
Now I don't fit back in

Undone again and again
You know parts of me
Parts of me no one else does
But just a fraction of who I really am

Your my Pandora
I want to escape but I can't
You opened me up
Now I don't fit back in

Ashamed but addicted all the same
Unchanging actions
But different outcome expected
You push me toward insanity

You opened me up
Now I don't fit back in
You opened me up
Now I don't fit back in
You opened me up

empty my hands

2010-06-22T23:53:00.001-04:00

I've got voices in my head and they are so strong
And I'm getting sick of this, oh Lord, how long
Will I be haunted by the fear that I believe
My hands like locks on cages
Of these dreams I can't set free

But if I let these dreams die
If I lay down all my wounded pride
If I let these dreams die
Will I find that letting go lets me come alive

So empty my hands
Fill up my heart
Capture my mind with You
Oh empty my hands
Fill up my heart
Capture my mind with You
With You, with You Lord

These voices in speak instead and what's right is wrong
And I'm giving into them, please Lord, how long
Will I be held captive by the lies that I believe
My heart's in constant chaos and it keeps me so deceived

But if I let these dreams die
If I could just lay down my dark desire
If I let these dreams die
Will I find you brought me back to life

So empty my hands
Fill up my heart
Capture my mind with You
Oh Lord, empty my hands
Fill up my heart
Capture my mind with You

Cause my mind is like a building burning down
I need Your grace to keep me, keep me from the ground
And my heart is just a prisoner of war
A slave to what it wants and to what I'm fighting for

So won't you empty my hands
Fill up my heart
Capture my mind with You
Oh empty my hands
Fill up my heart
Capture my mind with You

With You, with You
I need You, I need you my Lord
With You, with You
I need you now Lord

-Tenth Avenue North "Empty My Hands"

in between Lesson #1 and Lesson #2

2010-05-11T08:43:00.001-04:00

Just had a few quick thoughts to add about the first part of my testimony. It's amazing how God uses our screw ups in life to keep teaching us about Himself and ourselves over and over again. I don't know why, but I'm continually astounded how God uses these screw ups to continue fashioning me into the woman he wants me to be. Last night I was in a conversation with a friend and realized something about myself related to all of my relationship mis-steps this past year: when I fully rely on the Lord, I forgive easily, but I also want to be forgiven. It loops back to how I view friendship with believers and the fact that I'm naturally trusting of people.

It doesn't take a lot for me to open up to my brothers and sisters in Christ. Maybe it's because I'm hyper-emotional or overly effusive or maybe it's because I really do believe in I Peter 4:8 which commands us to "keep loving one another earnestly." Hopefully a combination of both, but erring to the latter. Now I don't think the desire to be forgiven (really a desire to reconcile with a brother or sister in Christ) is wrong. In fact Christ commands us to lay down our gifts to Him and go and be reconciled to our brothers in Matthew.

And, as my faith matures, reconciliation and forgiveness are two governing forces in my life, primarily because (after over 20 years as a Christ-follower) I have finally begun to internalize that the primary message of Christ is grace. But the more I've analyzed why I want to be forgiven, the more I realize my motivations about it aren't always 100 percent pure. I want to be forgiven because I like to be a person people trust and need and want to tell important life stuff to because at the end of the day I want to feel needed. The problem is that if I don't first and foremost and fundamentally seek that validation in Christ, I'm going to be dissapointed because at the end of the day we're all screw ups (see Lesson #1).

So every day, sometimes every minute, I have to remind myself that I need Christ first. Then my brothers and sisters. Then me. Easier than it sounds but amazingly freeing when you let God lead and get it right. And it allows you to forgive and to love and not expect anything back.

"But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." Matthew 6:33

Lesson #1: I am a sinner, not just a person who sins

2010-05-05T22:01:00.002-04:00

As I sit down to write this four-part testimony, I keep thinking about getting these lessons "right," which is unbelievably ironic given what the first lesson is about--that no matter how hard I try I can't get it right. Mostly, I just want this testimony not to be about me, but to be about what God is doing in my life, because my life isn't about me anymore. It's about the Lord. Onto the first lesson then. This year (or really the past six years) has been a year of me learning about my true character. Basically, I've finally recognized that I'm capable of the worst and if left to my own devices I'll be selfish and mean and horrible and do awful things.

This may not seem like such an "ah-ha" revelation, and I know I'm not going into a lot of detail about what the awful things have been. Suffice it to say I've done things I never imagined I was capable of doing. Most of it's been related to epically screwing up relationships in my life. And as someone who's written an entire blog about love and how much I love the stuffing out of my friends and family and even complete strangers on the street, it's been a tough pill to swallow. For the better part of my life, I've walked around thinking my natural inclination was toward kindness. But my life has become a testimony of that favorite debate topic: is man inherently good or inherently evil? The answer to which God reveals in the very beginning of the Bible after the Fall and before He destroys the Earth with the Flood.

"The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on earth had become, and that every inclinations of the thoughts of his heart was only after evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain." Genesis 6:5-6

No matter how much we want to, or try to, or think we can, our hearts are only after evil. Praise God for this, because if I were inherently good, I wouldn't need the Lord--the Lord who is by very definition good. And wow, I need the Lord so much. Even having been a Christ-follower since I was four years old, I've never understood fully this, and I'm pretty sure I still don't. Thankfully God has been patient enough with me (and loves me enough) to allow me to see how much of a screw up I am when I try to do life on my own. He's taken time to reveal to me that I am a sinner, not just a person who sins, and to begin to show me the full measure of His grace--grace that is the definition of our life in Christ.

amazing grace

2010-04-27T23:45:00.007-04:00

During the sermon on Sunday night, Todd Phillips (our teaching pastor at Frontline) quipped, "Christianity isn't a sin management program." I think I immediately said, "AMEN!" Despite it's simplicity, this statement couldn't be more profound. Christianity isn't about getting things right, because, at the end of the day, we're all screw ups who (apart from God) can't get it right. No, Christianity is about being loved by and falling in love with the Creator of the universe and having a real, vibrant relationship with the living God.

With that in mind, I want to try to tell you why I know (not just in my head, but in my heart) Christianity to be so much more than "getting life right." This testimony has been a lifetime in the making, but I'm going to focus mostly on the past year, a year in which God has fundamentally changed my faith. Honestly, I'm not sure this is something I'm going to be able to verbalize very well, as I've had trouble explaining it even to close friends. And, given my tendency to be overly verbose, I'm going to go with a four point approach.

It all started last spring, when I prayed, "Lord, help me to know that I know that I know." Had I had any clue about the refining fire the Lord would put me through to convert 22 years of head knowledge into real heart knowledge and real faith, I may have prayed a little differently. Thankfully, God loves me beyond measure despite the fact that I'm an irreparable screw up. Without further ado then, the four big things God has taught me in the past year (and in a lot of ways is continuing to teach me)...

Lesson #1. At my core I am a sinner and not just a person who sins

Lesson #2. God's grace and healing surpasses sufficiency (and my understanding)

Lesson #3. God has equipped me with a rare amount of compassion

Lesson #4. God is teaching me how to love people like he does (and I kind of still suck at it)

The summary of all of this aligns pretty well with my favorite Christian songs of the moment by the David Crowder Band, "How He Loves." We have a God that loves us so much and there isn't an adjective to adequately describe how amazing it is. So, I'm going to use the next four blogs to dive into each of these a little more deeply and hope that the excitement and passion God has grown up in me for Himself translates better than I anticipate. In the meantime, I'm praying Paul's words for each of you:

"For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family on heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have the power, together with the saints, to grasp how wide and how long and how high and how deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge--that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." Ephesians 3:14-19

night vision

2010-03-08T23:52:00.001-05:00

Just wanted to direct you to the sermon that Mike Kelsey gave tonight at Frontline. It was out of Psalm 13, and about navigating through tough times in your life. A few points really stuck out to me:

#1. Your ability to come to God in times of trouble is only as big as your perception of God...this is so true. My vision of the Lord directly affects how I approach Him when I struggle with things. In my heart, I know the Lord to be so many things. Still, in moments of struggle, especially when I'm feeling the weight of sin in my life or guilt for not acting as I know I should or making decisions within God's will, my personal tendency is to view the Lord as the perfect and holy judge. It's a view that limits me from embracing the forgiveness, mercy, grace, and love of God's character.

#2. Do not mistake honesty with God (i.e. expressing the struggle and doubts in your heart about current life circumstances) for a lack of faith--unless you let those doubts drive you away from God. I'm constantly humbled by the smallness of my faith, especially in light of the fact of what I believe about God. Last fall I adopted the mantra, "trying to be a mustard seed," and I frequently reference Hebrews 11 and how I wish I had faith like the fathers of our faith. Right now, for example, I'm having a really hard time with singleness. It's something that comes in waves for me, and while I firmly believe if God wanted me to be married, or even dating right now I would be, I still find myself calling out like David: "how long?". If I'm really honest, right now, it's putting a rift between me and the Lord. I find myself pushing Him away and trying to make my own decisions about it, even while I'm honestly expressing my heart's desire. Ironic (and exhausting) seesaw.

#3. It's possible to know something in your head but feel something completely different in your heart...this wasn't really an "ah-hah" revelation to me, but it was incredibly comforting to hear it from the pulpit. Having been a Christ-follower for over 20 years, I have a lot of head knowledge about my faith, a lot of things I know fundamentally to be true about God. At the same time, I'm a complete feeler. I have a huge heart (see every other blog I've written) that can sometimes win out over the logic in my head. This spurs a lot of internal conflict--especially when it comes to relationship struggles, whether dating or friendship or family.

I'll leave you with the text of the Psalm. It's simple and poignant at the same time. There's no easy solution to navigating the dark times in life, but using David's model can certainly help with the night vision...

Psalm 13

¹ How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
²How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

³ Consider and answer me, O LORD my God;
light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
⁴ lest my enemy say, "I have prevailed over him,"
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.

⁵But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
⁶I will sing to the LORD,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.

doing something with what you've got

2010-02-18T23:38:00.000-05:00

So a week away from the snowfall of the century here in DC and I'm still trying to sort my life back out. Someone told me today that the Blizzard revealed everyone's true nature. I sort of hope that isn't the case for me, because I definitely have been slightly (or a lot) insane over the past two weeks. Thankfully, I finally got to go to church on Monday night.

We're in the middle of a sermon series on spiritual disciplines and the past two weeks our pastor has been talking about the importance of Bible study. It's a common mantra at Frontline that what you hear in the 30 minutes Todd Phillips (our teaching pastor) is preaching each week is just enough to make you dangerous, but little else. This week he made a point that's really stuck with me: God may withhold revealing additional truth to us if we've failed to do anything with the truth we're given.

He referenced the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, where a master goes away and entrusts his property to three of his servants. Two of these servants take the master's money and increase it two fold, while the third buries his money in the ground out of fear of his master. After the master returns from his journey he is pleased with the fruitful servants and displeased with the "slothful" servant.

This passage is ripe with application and analogies, but to tie it back to what Todd said, the master was displeased with the servant who hadn't done anything with what he'd been given. I've been spending a lot of time this week thinking about the Biblical truths God has clearly revealed to me, even just over the past nine months. God has entrusted me with far more than I deserve, and revealed parts of His character to me that I previously haven't known. I've learned a lot, but I can't confidently say I've been entirely diligent in applying these truths.

What good is knowing truth if it doesn't change you? I know that my life goes a lot better when I'm applying God's truth in my life, and worse when I don't. So why must I constantly be like Paul in Romans 7, doing what I do not want to do--or worse, wanting to do the things I know I should not want to do, all the while having the audacity to continue to ask the Lord to reveal more of Himself to me. I can't quite imagine what my life would be like if I'd already been faithful in applying the truth He's shown me during the 20 plus years as a Christ-follower.

There is so much I have yet to apply, but there is one big truth in particular that comes to mind that God has revealed to me over and over again the past few years that I have yet to fully embrace and apply in my life. So this month I'm abandoning Facebook and gchat to focus more on this truth and how to make it manifest in my life, and how, when I apply it, it allows me to "share in my master's happiness."

are you afraid of the dark?

2010-02-13T01:23:00.000-05:00

I never thought I had huge issues with fear. I'm not scared of rodents, or things that creep on the ground, or the dark, or getting lost, or people I don't know, or heights, or small tight spaces, or big crowded spaces. What I'm finally realizing though is that while I may not fear all of those tangible things. I definitely fear intangible things. Well one intangible thing. I fear losing people in my life that I care about. Not in a morbid "they just got hit my a bus" sense, but in an "oh they don't like me or need me or want to know me anymore" sense. I was talking about this with one of my friends today and she mentioned that it makes sense that my greatest fear would be tied to my greatest gift--loving on people.

I guess it makes sense. Satan isn't going to waste time attacking me in something that I already suck at or just don't even care about. Instead he's going to sucker punch me by telling me I'm not a good friend, by convincing me I'm selfish, and by making me feel like all of my relationships are either about to fall apart or already failing. It's startlingly easy to get caught up in these irrational, silly traps. And the only way I can defeat this fear is to surrender it to the Lord over and over again, sometimes once a day, sometimes once a minute. The times when I don't surrender my fear of losing people I care about (or maybe a better way to phrase it is being left by the people I care about?), it starts to consume me. For an instant, it even makes me wish I loved the people I love less so that it wouldn't hurt so much when they pull away. It makes me wish for less of one of the greatest gifts God has equipped me with. Kind of astounding. Got me to thinking that must be something akin to what God feels when his children push him away, how much it grieves him when we're disobedient or focused on anything apart from Christ.

Anyway, no huge revelations here. Just a good verse to tie it all together...

"There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love." I John 4:18.

more on love

2010-02-02T00:09:00.003-05:00

So I've done a pretty good job at convincing myself I'm "good" at loving on people. To a certain extent, it's true. I tend to lean towards grace. I tend to be generous. I tend to be self-sacrificing to a fault in my friendships and relationships. In particular, when I'm letting the Lord fill me up, I seriously overflow with love in a way that probably seems manic to people who've never experienced the real and living God. Still, a couple of weeks ago someone pointed out that at its most basic level, the true manifestation of being a self-proclaimed Christ-follower is the process of a lifetime of pouring out and expecting nothing in return. We're all screw ups and no one deserves anyone. That's the beauty of the freedom we have in Christ--a freedom to love beyond measure because we're loved beyond measure, free from being consumed by the guilt of the continual, unavoidable screwing up. I understand the Biblical concept of being poured out like a drink offering and that the source of it all is Christ. At the end of the day though, for the most part, I still want to be loved back by those I choose to love, no matter how much I tell myself it doesn't matter. Does this mean I'm not letting God fill me up enough with His love? Does it mean I'm not loving God enough or trusting Him enough? Can't really wrap my head around an answer to those questions.

a light when all others go out

2010-01-26T11:44:00.003-05:00

The past sixth months have been a spiritual and emotional rollercoaster for me. This October I thought I'd hit rock bottom. Slowly I recovered and regained my ability to rely on myself, only to wake up in January and feel like my passion for life had simply evaporated. It wasn't that I was unhappy or miserable. I was just apathetic--which for me is a worse state than being angry or upset or depressed because I'm typically so full of zest for life. My twenty-plus years of Christian experience provides a simple recipe for escaping apathy: read the Word and pray. For the better part of the last month though, I've really struggled to do this. I've prayed, but opening my Bible has seemed impossible. It was like there was some sort of imaginary clamp on it that I couldn't bring myself to pry off.

Thankfully, the Lord has wisely surrounded me by the strongest community of believers I've ever known in my life. Sunday, a friend encouraged me (or really gently forced me) to just open my Bible and start reading John. And not simply reading, but READING. As in, absorbing, digesting, listening, rather than glossing over. I quipped that I could recite the entire first chapter of John without reading it, but my friend was insistent and for some reason I listened. Funnily, I didn't make it past the first five verses. Particularly verses four and five I kept reading over and over:

"In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it."

When I finally submitted and started reading my Bible the darkness and apathy that has plagued me for the past month evaporated. It sounds crazy right? You don't just come out of something, but the past few days I feel like I've been renewed in a way that I can't fully describe. And I only am hungering to read the Word more and more. This is the strongest evidence possible to the power and truth and immediacy of my faith. The living, breathing Word of God has the ability to pull me out of wherever I'm at and change me instantaneously.

So whatever you're struggling with, big, small, tangible, evasive, get out a Bible and start reading. John is a good place to begin, but the Word of our Lord does not return void, so wherever you end up you will find that living light that shines in the darkness. You will find the Word that became flesh. You will find the Word through which all things were made. And you will be restored. Sound crazy? Absolutely. Ironically, it only functions to affirm what I know in my heart to be true. Every morning this week I've been reading my Bible and I feel alive again for the first time in a long time.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned..." John 3:16-18a

100119

2010-01-19T23:13:00.000-05:00

misperceptions of others' perceptions
leading to extreme misdirection
round and round and round we go
where does this all stop? God only knows
the cruelest part of it all
is thinking rock bottom was months ago
recovered to functionality
now stuck in an inescapable apathy
trying the same thing over and over again
expecting different results all the same
the very definition of insanity
what's happened to me?
not unhappy
lost in an unnavigable ocean
gradually being lulled by the incessant motion of disappointment
heartbreak after heartbreak after heartbreak after heartbreak
too much to take
too insolent to listen
misguided self-reliance
repetition is suffocating
where are You?

when the Lord is quiet

2010-01-14T22:31:00.000-05:00

What do you do when after six months of intense spiritual highs and lows, you suddenly fall flat with God? My fundamental beliefs about my faith haven't changed. I still believe what I have for pretty much my entire life and am convinced of the truths I cling to as the meaning behind why I'm here. Yet, for all my belief, my faith has become routine. I believe it and I live it, but it isn't alive in me. It isn't giving me the vibrancy, the complete joy that God promises to his faithful children.

A few days of thinking about it have only made it more frustrating to me. The root of the problem appears to stem from this: now that the most recent trial of my life has fully past and I feel healed of what I thought would never be healed, my willful independence has returned. It's not that I'm selfish, but rather incredibly self-reliant. Makes it difficult to rely on a God who demands my complete reliance. I know the recipe for getting out of this "rut"

Pray for God to change my heart and ignite my faith
Dig into the Bible

But right now, all of it is just going through the motions. God is quiet.

God isn't a big version of me...

2010-01-10T07:31:00.000-05:00

With 2010 rolling full steam ahead already, I've been thinking a bit this weekend about things I'd like to accomplish this year. It's mostly fun stuff--learn how to bake an amazing cherry pie, go for a hike somewhere new in the Virginia mountains, write more. Really, I'm not a big fan of resolutions. They typically end up as unfinished things you wish you'd continued or things you never even get started on all together. It's so easy to say things and promise to do things. Last weekend at church the New Year's sermon was on changing your perspective, which couldn't have been more timely for me. I don't have a lot of life changes coming up or a lot of big goals, and lately it seems life has turned into my own personal version of Ground Hog day a little bit. But the point of the message was that God wants to do great things in all of our lives this year if we step back and let him. That led me to thinking quite a bit about how I've viewed God lately, more as a perfect version of us instead of as God.Thankfully, this couldn't be further from the truth.

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8-9

So instead of setting 2010 goals, I'm setting a 2010 perspective: to stay focused on God, the God that chose to love me above all else, and remember He is so much more than a perfect version of humanity.

getting a bit personal

2009-12-11T16:33:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I scribble out random poetry. It's nearly always associated with music, lilting and melodic or loud and cacophonous. Not to a tune I know, but to sounds I feel in my soul. And I'm just suddenly driven to start writing things down. Afterwards, a lot of times, I'll open up my Bible and start reading the Psalms, where David bears his soul before our Lord. My poetry is that for me. Bearing my soul. Sometimes it comes out in the form of prayers. Sometimes I leave it raw. Sometimes I go back and revise. Not surprisingly, the theme often has to do with love (a favorite topic of mine). This is the raw version of something I wrote last night:

blurry lines,
where I end, you begin,
we combine.
banking on hope—two is better than one
instead of imprisoning, freeing
lack of definition reconstituting vision,
redefines and elevates
beyond ourselves into something else
complete me
better me
bring out the best in me
pick a line
impossible to define
why we work better together than we do on our own
no longer alone
blurry lines,
where the river ends and the ocean begins
constant ebb and flow
new depths
new highs
butterflies all the time
understanding beyond reason
cherishing beyond measure
realizing the truth—two is better than one
maturing into willing sacrifice
one before the other
where you end, I begin,
we combine.
blurry lines.

Re-reading it today sent me to I John 4. Then I Corinthians 13. Both of which got me thinking of how much more God loves me than I can know or understand or will ever be able to love Him back. Overwhelming and awesome.

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal." I Corinthians 13:1

snowfall

2009-12-05T21:43:00.002-05:00

We were shocked with an early snowfall in DC today. Nothing stuck to the ground, but it was beautiful. Snow always makes me think of how creative our God is, how did He think of this? I love snow because it's the perfect excuse to hibernate. Started digging through some old stuff I'd written and found this...

A game of hide and seek.
Revealing bits and pieces of me.

Made for each other.
Not love at first sight.
Still, a perfect fit.
Everything was right.
And then it wasn't.

Building up layers.
One brick at a time.
Pick me up, put me back on my feet.
Wall off the parts I'd started to let go of.
Time heals everything doesn't it?

A game of hide and seek.

Step and step and step
One second,
One hour,
One day.
Wise me up for next time.
Wise me up.

Another comes along.
Suprisingly willing to go through it all again.
A little slower this time.
Battle scars still around to remind.
Burning out the memories.

A game of hide and seek.
Revealing bits and pieces of me.

who is the holy spirit?

2009-12-03T14:34:00.002-05:00

Over Thanksgiving break I picked up a copy of "Forgotten God," another Francis Chan book. It's about how we as the modern church have forgotten who the Holy Spirit is and have failed to embrace the Spirit the way Christ intended us to in the gospel of John when he said:

"Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you." John 16:7

Jesus himself said it is to our advantage, as believers, that he not be here in physical form, but that the Spirit come and take His place in us. This is so hard for me to understand. Alive with the Spirit. What does that mean? What does that look like? How can it possibly be better for me not to be able to have Jesus physically standing next to me every day and counseling me in how to live? Physical touch is my primary love language. And I often hear myself saying or find myself thinking "If only Jesus were here to hold my hand, all of this all would be so much easier." I long for Jesus to be next to me in the same way I long to be home in heaven.

But again, Christ said it is to my advantage that he leave and send the mighty Counselor in his place. The early church understood the Holy Spirit. If you look at Acts, it's incredible to see what all of the apostles did following Pentacost. I have to wonder what the church would look like today in America if people had even a remote understanding of what it means to be alive with the Spirit. I can't even begin to imagine, but I'm going to spend the rest of December reading this book and studying Acts and appealing to the Spirit to make Himself known to me in a way I have never experienced before. I want to live by the Spirit in a way that it's obvious to every non-believer that steps into my path, in a way that reflects the power of a true and living God unleashed inside of me. I want to move my head knowledge of the Spirit into soul knowledge and I fully expect it to be life changing...

"For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace." Romans 8:5-6

hard-working to a fault

2009-12-01T22:39:00.002-05:00

I'm one of those people who's always worked hard. Even my name, Emilee, means industrious. And I am every bit of that word. I'm not blind to what a gift this is, but tonight I got to thinking about my faith and how it's so contrary to my own nature because I can't work for it. This is what spilled out...

Toil and spin,
Work the day away,
Sleep
Wake up
Go to work
Come home
Sleep
Wake up
Do it all again.
This is life isn't it?
If at first you don't succeed,
try again, right?
But I try,
and try and try and try
To make my way
Do it all on my own
Make it alone.
Inevitable failure.
Fatally flawed.
Ring around the rosy.
We all fall down.
Pick up and try again.
Exhausted with myself.
Exhausted by myself.
Exhausted of myself.
Finally.
Something I don't have to work for.
Wait, what? I can't work for it?
I can't earn it?
I can't do anything for it?
Let me work for it.
It's the only way I know.
I need to feel like I've earned it.
Like I deserve it.
Payback for all that's been done.
But I can't.
A lifetime of being conditioned isn't easily overcome.
Simultaneously done and undone.
You are the only One.
My debt is settled.
Now what?

"But by grace you have been saved, through faith--and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God--not by works, so that no one can boast." Ephesians 2:8-9

real forgiveness

2009-11-29T20:27:00.002-05:00

Sitting in Frontline tonight, I didn't expect to be convicted. It was a communion message on forgiveness. Mike Kelsey (one of the pastors) taught out of Colossians 2:

"And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross."
Colossians 2:13-14

Two powerful verses, but verses I've heard before, and know well and (think I) understand. After driving back to DC from Ohio I was tired and not ready to be engaged in worship or in the sermon. Of course, it's times like these, in moments where we think we know everything, that we are often hit smack in the face with how little we know and understand. For better or worse, I've been a Christ follower nearly my entire life. My faith has gone through valleys and over mountaintops but it's always provided the foundation for my life. The priviledge of growing up in the church isn't something I take lightly, but sometimes I think it's made me overly confident in my understanding of a lot of basic Christian principles.

The older I get the more I realize I have a lot of head knowledge but not as much soul knowledge of Christ. Forgiveness is a prime example and the Lord reminded me tonight of how much more I have to learn about forgiving like He forgives. I think I've even written on this blog how forgiveness comes naturally to me. In some ways this is true. I typically don't hold grudges or stay angry very long, but not "being mad" anymore isn't forgiveness--which is what Mike Kelsey jarred me out of my seat with tonight. It's easy to not be mad at someone anymore, but real forgiveness--Colossians 2:14 forgiveness--is entirely diffrent. It's looking a person in the eye and saying you are no longer indebted to me for whatever sin or crime or hurt you've inflicted on me. It's extending the grace Christ extended us on the cross, by bearing the payment for everything we owed, owe, and will continue to owe God.

When I reconsider forgiveness in this way, I realize I'm not as good at it as I like to think. Sure, it's easy to forgive the small things. But the people who've hurt me beyond the superficial, by what they've said or done or not done to me, those people I don't forgive quite as easily, especially when I feel like that person isn't genuinely sorry for what they did. Time numbs anger, it dulls hate, but time doesn't enable forgiveness. Only our heavenly Father can equip us to forgive unconditionally, in the way He has forgiven us with Christ's sacrifice. Once again, it isn't about me being able to do this or that, it's about me being able to surrender my hurt. It's about Christ filling me up and showing me what real forgiveness means in a practical sense.

Hard to realize that I'm not there yet with a few people...

"Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive" Colossians 3:12-13

you raise me up

2009-11-26T18:35:00.004-05:00

It seems mildly cliche to post on being thankful on Thanksgiving day, but I'm sitting in my family room with my family and browsing through YouTube and Josh Groban's "You Raise Me Up" just popped up. The song makes the hair on my arms stand up within the first couple of notes:

When I am down and, oh my soul, so weary;
When troubles come and my heart burdened be;
Then, I am still and wait here in the silence,
Until you come and sit awhile with me.
You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains;
You raise me up, to walk on stormy seas;
I am strong, when I am on your shoulders;
You raise me up: To more than I can be.

These words are so familiar, but powerful all the same. How often we walk through life feeling soul weary, feeling burdened. Skipping over the waiting in silence and going straight to focusing on the stormy seas comes so naturally. Still, our Heavenly Father is waiting all the while. Waiting to raise us up. Waiting to make us more than we can be on our own. In dark seasons of our lives it's so incredibly easy to miss this beautiful truth. We have a Savior who waits upon us. How paradoxical? After a few months of navigating one of the worst storms of my life, I've finally begun to see how the Lord has been raising me up even amidst the storm. So today I'm thankful for having a God, a God who I worship, a God who created the very world I live in every day, who loves me enough to wait upon me.

"Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him..." Psalm 37:7a

equipped to love differently?

2009-11-23T13:42:00.001-05:00

A while back, I walked through a fairly in-depth study of the book of Genesis. One of the most impactful lessons I learned from that study remains Genesis 2, when God creates man and woman. "It is not good for man to be alone," He proclaims, and then proceeds to form Eve from a rib taken from Adam's side. There are so many things we can learn about God and about men and women from these few verses.

What stands out to me though, and what my life circumstances seem to have been confirming over the past several months, is that God fashioned men and women with different parts of Himself. In many ways we are incredibly similar, but women have been gifted with the servant's spirit of our Savior. And more and more it seems to me that God gave women the ability to love differently than men.

Women's hearts are fascinating. Mysterious. Even to us as women. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why this is lately, and the best thing I can come up with is that as a born again Christian woman, my heart is different from my brothers' in Christ hearts. To fully understand my own heart would be to fully understand God in a way that I can't. This is exciting and frightening. Exciting because I can love without abandon in a way akin to my Savior. Exciting because the more I get to know my Lord the more I come to understand myself. Still, frightening because I also have to be wise and judicious with my love. Two qualities that seem to go directly against unabandoned love, or a least lay down a few good sized hurdles.

So how do I reign in a heart I cannot fully know? How do I guard my heart as the well spring of life as my Lord calls me to in Proverbs 4? Two ways: get in the Word to write it on my heart, and moment-by-moment surrender to allow God to rule my heart instead of trying to rule it myself.

"Watch over your heart with all diligence for from it flow the springs of life." Proverbs 4:23

a Psalm of brokeness

2009-11-22T20:19:00.000-05:00

wrote this during one of the hardest times of my life...

"A Plea to my Father"

Who am I to even open my lips,
or raise my hands in praise to you?
I am nothing.
My heart is always after evil.
My spirit a slave to itself.
I am unworthy to call you friend;
Let alone Father, or Savior.
You have this crazy perfect love for me.
But at the smallest glimpse,
the smallest taste,
the smallest hope of love,
My heart turns from you to another.
Woe am I, a sinner.
Who am I? Undeserving.
Would that You reach down and slay me.
My actions bring nothing but shame to your name.
I no longer deserve this precious gift of life.
I never did.
I cannot reconcile myself.
I cannot explain myself.
I cannot justify myself.
For I know how to think, speak, act;
Yet I do otherwise,
Running after the attention of men,
Instead of pursuing obedience in You.
My spirit is broken by my own weakness.
My mouth speaks words,
So many words,
But what is my heart?
I am at war.
Help me or I will be broken forever.
Rescue me.
Show me mercy,
Help me accept it.
I cannot live apart from You.
And I long to be nothing more than a drink offering.
Poured out constantly for you.
Unconcerned with any part of this present world.
Circumstantial comfrot is wasted upon me.
Break me of myself.
I want to be glad for no one but You.
Submit my soul to Yourself, even amidst these trials.
Take everything from me but Yourself.
Because this--this life, this existence, this world--is not about me.
It never was.
It never will be.
You are my only hope.

loving on people, part II

2009-10-02T16:44:00.000-04:00

If aside from loving God, the ultimate human experience is achieved through loving, healthy relationships with believers, what happens when these relationships don't work out? What happens when you go about them in this twisted, backwards way and leave a lot of damage in your wake, hurting people close to you and being hurt in turn? People can inflict immeasurable amounts of pain on one another (or mash each other up as I like to put it) without ever laying a hand on each other. In fact, I think I'd rather go through the bodily trauma of being shot or run over by a bus rather than the unquantifiable emotional anguish that threatens to overwhelm me when I feel unloved and unwanted. I can deal with physical pain. The mental prison of broken relationships is something else all together. There really isn't an effective analogy for it.

Sometimes I think I have to be more vulnerable to the pain of broken relationships than the rest of the world because it seems every time I turn around my heart is hurting. I'm so willing to open up my heart to people. I'm innately trusting. I'm unequivocally willing to give of my self--especially to my brothers and sisters in Christ. I spent some time this afternoon trying to think about why I'm this way. I like to think it's because I'm a genuine, loving kind person so filled with God's love that it flows out of me. That the real story here is that I just love people. To some extent this is definitely true, but it's also not the only part of the story.

My love isn't always (maybe isn't ever) a completely unselfish love. At the end of the day I want to be loved back. I want people to need me the same way I need them. I can actually be stretched pretty far in relationships before this selfishness kicks in. I do have a forgiving heart and when people don't come for me or when they let me down I'm quick to keep loving them. Yet, when it happens over and over again, and I finally realize someone I've come to rely on for loving me back doesn't, my heart aches in ways I didn't think it was possible to ache and still be alive. As much as I want to blame them, whether they be family, friends, ex's, I can't. It's really not their fault. It's mine. When my love gets disordered and I start needing and loving people more than the Lord the world starts to get topsy turvey very quickly and the wounds I have from it go deeper inside of me than most anything else.

This is why God tells us in Proverbs 4 "to guard our heart for it is the well-spring of life." Heart-guarding seems so contradictory to me in many ways. I don't want to hold myself back from people. And I really buck the model of people not deserving my love, especially when I consider it against the foundation of my faith: that Christ loved us all when we didn't deserve it. How does guarding my heart weigh in against turning the other cheek doctrine? Or how does guarding my heart stack against loving my neighbor as myself? I don't know the answer to either of those questions. It's probably the reason for all of my relationship battle scars. As much as it hurts, I refuse to live my life with my fist clenched tightly around my heart, not letting anyone in. I can't. It's not me. But there has to be some balance between that and the other extreme of giving my heart to everyone who walks into my life.

Ultimately, I think that balance is found in one of God's other directives in Deuteronomy 6:5, "Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your strength." We need to love God first. We need to find our identity in Him and not seek that validation out in anything else. Some of you love your jobs first, some of you love your car, or some of you love your reputation first. For me, I love people first. My relationships in my life validate me. As noble and genuine as that sounds or as I make it up to be in my head, at the end of the day it's still a disordered version of crazy love. It's still me loving God's creation before I love God and it makes my life all kinds of messy.

loving on people, part I

2009-10-01T14:00:00.000-04:00

All of us, at some point or another, stop to wonder why we're here, why we're living life, what's the point of being alive. Sometimes these thoughts are spurred by a pressing life crisis, other times by a spirited discussion with friends over dinner. Some of us are simply a bit more reflective about life by nature. I'm certainly one of those more reflective people, but recent life circumstances have led me to stewing about a version of this question a lot lately: what is the pinnacle of human experience? My faith affords me a fair amount of perspective on this question, and really most of the ideas I would put forward are not particularly revolutionary. Still, I wonder. I wonder why I have a deep soul longing to find that perfect intersection of happiness, joy, contentment. Pick an adjective. None of them exactly articulate the feeling I'm trying to describe. It's more a conglomeration of everything that I understand to be good. Some combination of feeling and knowledge.

Really the "what's the point" question boils down to figuring out how to experience crazy love while I'm here on earth, in absence of the eternal presence of God. After listening to several sermons by people far smarter than myself, I've come to a few conclusions about how to experience crazy love, but two over-arching ideas seem to make the most sense to me at the moment. One fairly obvious, the other less obvious.

First to the obvious way to experience crazy love (which while obvious is certainly by no means simple to achieve): love God. People have a lot of thoughts to offer about this, how to do it, what it looks like to do it. Fortunately, God has already given us clear instructions on how we are to love him:

"For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments" I John 5:3

To love God then, is to obey Him. But in order to obey Him you must know Him and his commandments. So the clear path to loving God is to get to know him through studying His living and breathing words to us in the Bible. Unfortunately for us and our instant gratification tendencies this isn't something that happens overnight. It happens over a lifetime, a lifetime of reading, studying, and knowing God's word. It's also not something that can happen by force. You have to choose to love God, but not because of what you might get or lose if you don't, rather because he deserves it and you recognize that in the deepest part of your soul. You want to love him because of who he is: good, loving, perfect, righteous (there are a lot of names and reasons to choose from). I'm at the beginning of this road in my own life, which after for being a Christian for over 20 years is somewhat discouraging. Thankfully is also incredibly exciting, in a way you can only really know if you open yourself up to studying the Bible and knowing God.

The other major way I think we can experience crazy love on earth is through healthy, loving relationships with believers. These can be friendships or dating relationships or marriages. And arguably the last of those three is the most fulfilling (but that's for another blog that I'm not fully qualified to write yet). God is by definition a community: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Before He created us he co-existed in a loving relationship between three beings. Love has always existed. Love is. It is beyond time, and this makes sense because as John says, "God is love."

This revelation really helped me to understand why I crave authentic Christian community so much. It's because when I'm loving on my brothers and sisters in Christ and being loved on by them I'm experiencing God. I'm experiencing existence the way God intended me to when he created me. I'd argue you can really only live a joyful, complete life by pursuing a community of loving relationships. In fact, I believe it so fully that I make loving on the people I care about the most important thing in my life. Here's the catch though, you can really only do this loving community thing if you really love God:

"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God"
I John 4:7

Who or what are you loving in your life right now? If it's not God and the people you care about, it's probably pretty unsatisfying.

a trial

2009-09-04T09:02:00.000-04:00

There's a familiar hymn that I sung a lot growing up: "I need thee every hour." Sometimes I think they should have changed the words to that song to be something more along the lines of "I need thee every moment." It's a funny thing about life. Just when you think you have it all together, all your ducks laid neatly in a row, you're head screwed on straight, a giant trial creeps up and knocks you over. At the beginning of this summer, I remember praying to God, "Give me a trial, I'm ready." The thing about asking God to put you through a trial is that He usually does. Not out of malice or a desire to cause us harm, but in order to give us a chance to show Him how much we love him back.

Despite my confident prayer, I wasn't as ready as I thought for the trial He put before me. One of my biggest flaws is resting on my head knowledge of the Bible and of my faith to get me through. I know a lot of scripture, I know the right answers to the Sunday school questions, I know the right thing to do and most of the time I want to do the right thing. But as Paul says in Romans 7: "I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing."

When we stumble sometimes it's just a scrape other times it's a deep gash. The consequences of sin can be long-lasting and painful as God shines a light on the parts of us we didn't even know we hadn't given over to him. The really incredible part of this summer isn't that I failed. It's that even though I failed, God keeps loving me, which really doesn't make any sense to me at all. And He not only keeps loving me, but he loves me enough to want to change me in a way only our heavenly Father can. Think of it at sort of the same thing as when your parents would tell you "I'm only doing this because I love you," when they grounded you or when they wouldn't let you go to that one place you just knew you had to be or your life was over. I keep coming back to Hebrews 12, which reminds me that even though the refining process is sort of like going through detox, ultimately, it's going to heal me:

"It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed."

No matter which way you spin it and no matter the magnitude, trials are painful--especially when I have played the biggest part in bring this trial upon myself. Still, even when I'm running hard towards everything but God, He loves me with a crazy love I'm still only beginning to understand. He loves me enough to strengthen my weak knees and lift my drooping hands. He loves me enough to heal me. Can I let go of myself and let him?

an epiphany (or trying to understand grace and mercy, part two)

2009-08-06T14:00:00.000-04:00

So why is it so difficult for me to accept grace and mercy in my own life? I've spent a lot of time thinking about this over the past month. After two weeks on the mission field I still didn't understand it. I don't understand why it took me coming home from my missions trip and away from so much spiritual warfare for God to grow me this way, but this week, He allowed me to put my feet, my heart and my soul into a refining fire and to get my first glimpse of why I've never fully understood grace in a tangible, personal way.

My entire adult life, or really since I've moved to DC and actively begun to seek out what my faith means to me, I've been trying to accomplish something. I've been trying to find my way, make friends, plan my future. I've been trying to live life the way I thought God wanted me to live it. I've been trying to do this or that or the other thing. Are you seeing the common theme here yet? It's easier probably for you to see than it has been for me. That these sentences are loaded down with two things: the word 'I' and the idea that by some measure of my own effort I can become the new creation Christ demands me to be in 2 Corinthians. Never before has it struck me how imbedded this striving, self-reliant nature is in me, nor have I realized how crippling it has been to my faith.

This astonishing, sudden awareness that I can do NOTHING to earn grace is the most basic tenant of being a Christ-follower, but it's a concept that my type-A, I need to make-something-out-of-myself personality has prevented me from embracing for 20 years. It's something I've had an incredible amount of head knowledge about, but very little soul knowledge about.

It's only by God's grace that he's finally revealed to me the measure of his forgiveness and the extent of his grace towards me. I have been trying (and failing miserably) to understand grace for a long time. What I didn't realize before that God has made so evident to me the past few days, is that only by the power of the Holy Spirit living inside of me can I actually understand grace. That's such a freeing idea. So freeing that as I walk through the midst of brokenness and heartache I am strangely able to rejoice. I am able to rejoice as I suffer. I am able to rejoice because I suffer. I COULD NOT DO THIS ON MY OWN. I can't. I've tried and I've failed many many times over, which is what convinces me all the more of the authenticity and reality of my faith. Because contrary to every human and worldly notion, I am joyful today when I should be anything but joyful. Because by any way I try to spin it rationally, I can't. It's crazy. The only explanation for this is God's grace.

Grace is something I've known for a long time in my head but never fully experienced in my heart. What about you? Do you have soul knowledge of grace? Real soul knowledge? Knowledge that only comes by the power of the Holy Spirit? If not, get on your knees and start praying expectantly for God to reveal it to you. He's waiting for you to ask. He'll answer.

"But he said to me 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore I will boast all the more glady of my weakness so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong." 2 Corinthians 12:9-10

trying to understand mercy and grace, part one

2009-07-08T22:26:00.000-04:00

Mercy: not getting something you do deserve.

Grace: getting something you don't deserve.

These are text book definitions for most Sunday schoolers. But, how often do you encounter these two qualities in people? How often do you express them towards people you love? How often do you express them towards people you don't love? Either in part or in combination. These qualities--two qualities that are not only imperative to a complete knowledge of crazy love, but also crucial to the foundation of my faith--are tremendously challenging to me. For whatever reason, the mantra of an "eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth" is far more easily ingrained in my mind and I can't figure out why. The more confusing thing is that I don't have a hard time extending grace and mercy towards other people. It's not that I'm perfect. Far from it. I just have an easily forgiving heart. I don't hold grudges. I tend to take the blame and bear the burdens of everyone else in addition to my own. Try as I might, though, I can't self-diagnose why I operate this way towards myself.

Maybe a good place to start is to try to explain why it's relatively easy for me to give grace and mercy to others. Simply, I have a heart for people that can only be explained through God. By any wordly standard, the fact that I am not only willing but able to experience discomfort or pain or to sacrifice my own desires to ensure another's needs are met above and before my own makes absolutely no sense at all. But the Lord calls us to it in so many passages in the Bible I could devote an entire series of blogs to writing about how we are called to be gracious and merciful towards one another. For the sake of brevity, however, I'll use two of my favorite passages:

"So speak and so act as ones who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgement is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgement." James 2:12-13

"Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Each of you should use whatever gift he has to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms." I Peter 4:9-10

Each of these models of human behavior run hard against the grain of conventional ways of thinking. However, the directives could not be more clear: mercy and grace towards others. Paul takes Mercy a step further. Calling us to extend it above judgement. The more I've thought about this, the more I've recognized that the times in my life or the moments when I want to pass judgement on someone about anything (whether it be the shirt they have on or how they choose to live their life) it's usually less to do with them and more to do with me. Me being either defensive or jealous or selfish. Judgement is a fantastic mechanism for shifting the focus (and often blame) away from ourselves and on to other things. But mercy is victorious above judgement in every situation--whether it be work, or play, or love. Mercy is a wonderfully freeing attitude, perhaps this is why Paul ties it to the law of liberty. As good as the "just desserts" approach can feel sometimes, I rarely find any lasting pleasure in dealing someone what I think they deserve if they mistreat me in some way or another. Yet, as often as I am able to rise above and extend mercy, my mind and heart are at ease.

Interestingly, in the second passage, Peter qualifies the grace. It's not human grace or your grace or any grace stemming out of your own ability or willpower. It's God's grace in it's many forms. What is God's grace? This is something I can tell you, but even after twenty years of being a Christian can't understand. God's grace is loving us more than we deserve. God's grace is giving us access to Himself--a perfect, holy, righteous being. God's grace is promising us eternal crowns of life should we choose to love him and walk in His ways. God's grace is doing what's best for us despite our failed attempts to do what we think is best for ourselves. The terms gracious and graceful are tossed around lightly, but what does it mean to be truly grace-filled I wonder. I think about this a lot when I walk by the same homeless men that stand near my office every morning. There is no limit to God's grace, how does this translate into my own life? It's easy to be grace-filled towards those people you love, but what about those people that you don't? What about towards people you don't even know? This is what we are called to as believers. Ongoing, constant, limitless grace not just towards our friends, but towards enemies and strangers.

Oddly enough, this tandem of mercy and grace, once you embrace it, offers a more complete and knowable joy than living life in the other direction, focused on revenge and selfishness. Letting go of judgement, letting go of anger, and hatred frees you from living life in a self-focused prison. Crazy love kind of ideas to anyone who hasn't experienced both of these qualities in full measure from the Lord through his son Jesus Christ. So this is where I'll run in the second part of this post. Experiencing mercy and grace in my own life, because, frankly, I'm not very good at it. But if I claim to be good at showing mercy and grace to others, I must first realize and understand both of these illogical, irrational, crazy love gifts from God in my own life...

defining love, part two

2009-07-01T20:13:00.000-04:00

In the first part of this post on love, I went straight to 1 John 4 to say that God is love, and pointed out that, because God is the very definition of love, it's impossible to fully understand love. I believe that. However, in the Bible God offers three very clear explanations of God as love and, by extension, a model of love, even if we can't fully understand it or express it.

The first and most well-known example of God as love and as a model of love is John 3:16:

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life."

This verse probably deserves a post of its own. I don't have children yet, but I can't imagine giving up my only child, my child who I love more than I can explain in words, to save people other people I love, let alone people who don't know me or love me back. But that's exactly what God did for all of us. He sacrificed that we might not die.

The second part of God as love and as a model of how we are to love is service. One of the most poignant examples of service found in the Bible is when Jesus washes his disciples' feet...

"Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with towel that was wrapped around him...'Do you understand what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to was one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you." John 13:3-5, 12-15

It's hard to explain or understand the significance of this event given the fact that the majority of people I come into contact with every day wear shoes. Think about spending a week walking around in a cornfield bearfoot and then going to the White House for dinner and having the President of the United States wash your feet for you as you sit at his table, and you can beging to have some idea of what was going on here. What is more important than the act of service, however, is the attitude of service. Jesus is humble. He is serving not out of any motivation for self-promotion. He is serving as a demonstration of his love.

The third part of God as love and as our model of love is obedience. As with service, this isn't obedience out of compulsion. It's obedience out of genuine and complete devotion to another. There are several parables on obedience in the New Testament and several examples of obedience and the consequences of disobedience in the Old Testament, but the simplest and most powerful example of obedience in the Bible is Christ:

"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, how, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." Philippians 2:5-8

Christ, God in human form, was obedient to the Father. Not obedient to the point of giving away an old piece of clothing or buying your friend lunch or cleaning up the kitchen after the dinner because your mom asked you to. Obedient to the point of death. Obedient in humility. Obedient not to be exalted, but because he loved all of us enough to sacrifice himself for us.

Taken together, these three examples of love leave us with a sort of incomprehensible, non-sensical picture of an idea that gets thrown around so carelessly and easily in everyday life. Love isn't that electricity that runs up and down the back of your neck when you meet someone you think you want to know forever. Love isn't some sort of fuzzy, make your head spin, make your heart race kind of emotion. Rather love is an active and ongoing choice. Love is sacrificing yourself and your desires no matter how much it hurts you because you know it helps the one you love. Love is serving in humility. Love is obedience as the perfect expression of your devotion. Love is totally and completely unselfish. How does this connect back to crazy love? It's crazy to try to think about how much God loves us. It's crazy to think that God is this perfect expression of obedience, sacrifice, and service, because this combination of sacrifice, service, and obedience runs against the grain of most definitions of love.

Ultimately, we can't experience or express this kind of love apart from Christ. Because this love isn't within human capacity, it's out of God's enabling. Merely thinking through my day today, who and what I was obedient to, what I sacrificed for, who I served, I have a long way to go in knowing and understanding this kind of love. But I still want to. I want to give and receive this choosing, self-sacrificing, perfect, holy kind of love in every kind of relationship I have. Because, to go back to something I said in part one of this blog, without this kind of love, this divine love, I am nothing.

defining love, part one

2009-06-25T22:22:00.000-04:00

What is love? If you had to define it right this second, what are the first things that come to your mind? I asked a few of my friends to define love in 50 words or less, with the caveat that they had to write down whatever immediately came to mind. Here are some of the responses I got:

"All the best emotions. Rolled into one."

"Love is being willing to sacrifice one's will for another. Love is always wanting the best for the other person. Love is letting go even when it hurts. Love is setting an example to others. Love is a beautiful feeling that surpasses common sense thinking."

"Love is consuming. Love is wonderful. Love is painful. Love can't be explained rationally."

"Love, it's a safe, non-judgmental commitment in which you give selflessly and unconditionally, and are challenged to grow into the best person you can be."

Love. Four letters. Enough meaning to keep you thinking for a lifetime. The variety in these responses didn't really surprise me. But a common thread weaves through all of them. Love is good. Love is something you want. Love not only can be painful, it often is. Novelists, and poets, and musicians, and philosophers have spent centuries writing, and singing, and talking about love. And yet, it's a question people keep coming back to: what is love? In some form or other, all of our souls seem to long for love and most of us spend our lives hoping for love or disappointed by love or both. Is love what makes us human then? Can we live without love? Can we live with love, even when it hurts so much?

One of the most often quoted passages from the Bible is on love. In Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, you'll find a chapter that is read at the vast majority of Christian weddings, and even many non-Christian weddings, with verses that have wound their way into our common understanding of what love is:

"Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things." 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

Reading that passage, it's easy to understand why it's hard to define love. Believing all things and hoping all things and enduring all things aren't things that come easily to many people. The inherent self-sacrificing nature of love is perhaps the most difficult and the most poignant part of love, but also the part no one seems to question. Love and self-sacrifice are intertwined in a way that only makes sense when you're in the midst of love.

I like to think love comes easily to me. I'm constantly telling people that I really don't care about anything but loving on people. The only real evidence I have that this is truly how I live my life is that my heart constantly seems to be getting broken in one way or another--whether by friends or family or enemies or people I don't even know all that well. And yet, without fail, despite the ongoing heartache, I endure, I believe, I hope. I can't explain why, except to point to an earlier part of Paul's chapter on love:

"And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." 1 Corinthians 13:2

You can have everything in the world, you can know everything in the world, you can do everything in the world, you can even have the power to lift a mountain up out of the ground and move it wherever you want at will, but without love you are nothing. Without love I am nothing. Nothing. The lack or absence of anything at all. I think this is how, in my own mind, I justify living life with my heart held out in my hand for anyone and everyone I meet to grab a hold of, even if just for a moment. By any rationale standard, this isn't the safest way to go. It involves an incredible amount of risk and repeated instances of heartbreak. But, after 25 years of holding my heart out to the world, I've realized I'd rather spend my life enduring and believing and hoping than spend my life as nothing. I'd rather spend my life living through constant heartache--even if sometimes I feel like I might die from the weight of it all--than spend my life having everything else but never having what I need.

So what is love? I don't think love is something I fully understand. Not yet. Maybe I never will. In fact, I'm convinced I never will because of 1 John 4:8, which simply states, "God is love." To fully understand love is to fully understand God, and I'm convinced that's something I will never be able to do. What I do know is that I want the kind of love Paul talks about in his letter to the Corinthians. I want this kind of love because, "If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us," (1 John 4:12).

This, then, is how I choose to live my life: loving as much as I can, loving as hard as I can, loving as easily as I can, loving as often as I can, and loving as quickly as I can, no matter how terrifying it is, and not matter how much heartbreak it means. Because in the end, the more I know about love and feel love and give love, the more I know God and that makes all the heartbreak, both imaginable and unimaginable worth it...

I'll connect this back to crazy love in "defining love, part two".

go step outside

2009-06-22T13:01:00.000-04:00

Have you ever stepped outside and been awed by nature? How about humbled by your own smallness against the backdrop of the seven billion other people that live on this planet? Stop and think for a minute. Right now. You, me, and everyone else are standing (or sitting or sleeping or running or working or playing or any other number of things) on top of a giant sphere that is spinning around in the universe. Weird? Unexplainable? Unbelievable? All of the above? Take a second to look at this video by Francis Chan, a pastor in Simi Valley, California and the author of Crazy Love, the book that inspired this blog...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ya12I036lg

Overwhelmed at your own insignificance yet? It's hard to think about the universe--the vast majority of which we cannot see--and not feel small. It's even harder to look at the world around us, the world we can see every day, and not be overwhelmed by life's complexity. I was a biology major in college, and have always loved science and had a genuine curiosity for figuring out why and how things work. Yet, the more I've gotten to know science, the more I've become convinced of God. The intricacies of the human eye or the number of muscles it takes to speak (at least 70) are enough to convince me. But even simpler than all of the complexity, just stepping outside and observing the world moves me in a way I can't really explain.

This weekend, I went hiking in Shenandoah Valley. We made camp on top of a 3,000 foot tall mountain. It was breathtaking. Two verses kept running through my mind over and over again...

"For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made." Romans 1:20

...and...

"The wind blows where it wishes and you hear it's sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the spirit." John 3:8

Apparently, it's really windy on the top of mountains, and as we stood on the edge of this rock wall staring out over the mountain valley, I was blown away (literally and figuratively) feeling close to God. It was God visible in a way you can really only understand while you're experiencing it. I'd challenge you to go outside and just sit quietly and listen. Find a place where there isn't a lot of noise, a place where you can be alone, a place where you can simply "be still and know" (Psalm 46:10). Just sit there and be quiet and listen to God. Rather than talking to Him or asking for things or doing anything, try to hear what He has to say to you. It's hard to do, but if you can quiet your soul and your mind even for a few moments, your knowledge of God, and by extension your faith, will start to grow.

How does all of this connect to crazy love? For me, it's the inexplicable, incomprehensible thought that the same powerful God who created nature in all of its splendor, who raised mountains out of the ground, and at the same time dressed the lilies of the field, wants to take the time to not only know me, but to love me more than humanly possible. Even after standing on the edge of a mountain, I still can't understand it, but I want to know that kind of love. I need that kind of love. My soul craves it everyday, sometimes so much that my breath catches and I wonder what I'll do if I can't feel it. Thankfully, I don't have to not feel it. God is offering it freely to all of us, and nature is a good place to start to understand it.

"So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you." Psalm 63:2-3

an introduction to crazy love...

2009-05-31T22:14:00.000-04:00

Sunday night I witnessed a glimpse of heaven, a vision of the complete joy that awaits those who call Christ their Lord and Savior. Sunday night I travelled farther down this journey, this humbling road towards knowing God. To the lukewarm or the unbelieving Sunday night cannot be accurately explained nor can it be fully felt. It's like watching a foreign film you don't know the language of without any subtitles. It can be interesting or intriguing but, ultimately, the message is lost.

Sunday night I watched my sister in Christ--a woman I have loved and prayed for and suffered alongside and laughed with for the past two years--boldly proclaim her commitment to the Lord with palable conviction and humility in baptism. The anticipation I had going into the night and the joy I experienced because of it would seem insensible to anyone who hadn't walked this road with her. It probably seems nonsensical to some of those that have. What I do know is that the entire night I was teetering on the edge of my chair, wanting to jump up and down and shout, my arms covered in goosebumps, bursting with an inexplicable kind of crazy love.

Over the past seven months my life has been revolutionized by a love affair, and that is what this adventure into the blogging world is going to be about. Communicating a seemingly incommunicable message. Attempting to put words to paper (or computer screen) to describe the greatest love of my life. Because I cannot be quiet about it any longer. I want everyone I love and everyone who doesn't love me back and everyone I don't even know to be able to experience this crazy love.

It goes against science, against intellect, to the very inside of my self. It goes to the thread that links all humanity together. It goes to the hope, the prayer, that there is something more, something better, something that will make this present life worth it all in the end. As Paul says in his letter to the Church at Corinth, "If I have all prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing"--admittedly an absurd claim to someone who doesn't know love. What can possibly be worth more than all of the power and all of the knowlege in the world?

Simply: that someone who has all of these things freely and willingly laid them down for you and for me and for everyone else because He loves us so much. Crazy isn't it? Stay tuned for my real life glimpses of this crazy love. Maybe start looking around and see if you notice it for yourself. But be forewarned, if you do start looking for it, it's likely to catch hold and start changing your life.