An Echo of Memory

Enveloped

Surrounded

That’s how I want to be

That’s how I want to live

That’s how I want to stay

Full

Complete

Saturated in wonder, adventure, and mystery

I can’t explain the depth or the movement. I can’t describe the scene.

I can’t capture the image or the feeling.

I can’t take it in.

But I was there. I have been there.

I want to go back again.

And never leave.

This is the place I was made to be.

This is the fullness

The mystery

The longing I have.

It doesn’t make sense

It isn’t quite clear

But I know it so well

Like an echo of memory

Can I remember a place that I have never been?

Can I call that place my home?

I am a vagabond waiting

To be the place I belong.

Patience in Imperfection

“We all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord” 2 Corinthians 3:18

Last night I undertook the task of sorting through baby clothes and toys to determine what to sell, what to save, and what to give away. My house was an absolute wreck. I spent the entire morning this morning not only organizing closets to put things away, but scrubbing and cleaning so that now I can drink my coffee and write with my surroundings “in order.”

I am very impatient with myself when it comes to processes. I have very little tolerance for waiting for something to be completed when it is in my power to complete it. When I have moved from one house to another, I stayed up late, got up early, and did not stop working until boxes were unpacked, broken down, and thrown away. I like things to be settled. I like things to be neat, tidy, and completed as quickly as possible.

Our faith doesn’t work that way though. I often I wish that it did, but it doesn’t. I wish I was perfect, polished, and made fully into the image of Christ as of yesterday, but I’m still a mess. Don’t get me wrong: I know that I am fully forgiven by the power of Christ’s death and resurrection. I know that I belong 100% to God the father as a result of my faith in Him. However, the sanctification process and renewal of my mind can feel so daunting sometimes. I see so many weak areas of my life---selfishness, control, and pride are all deep-rooted weeds in the garden of my heart. I am so thankful that the Master Gardener cares about me enough to not leave those weeds in place!

Becoming a parent has so greatly affected my perception of God and myself. Parenthood is an amazing earthly shadow of what God’s love for us really is like. I mean can you imagine if I expected my three-year-old son to act and reason as an adult? Okay, Okay, Okay, so there’s another area of imperfection in me: sometimes I DO expect him to act like an adult! However, does it make sense to do so? No! He is a "grown-up-in-progress." I'm okay with that. I'm ok that he is not an adult yet because he's not! He's still new to this life, and it is my job to teach and train him to be a mature, responsible adult.  This is a LONG process with a lot of repetition, a lot of discipline, and a lot of humor required. While he is not perfect, or grow up yet, he is 100% my son. He has access to me, my home, where I am. I provide for him. I love him unconditionally. 

In the same way, as believers we are fully accepted into the Lord’s home as His children once we have authentically placed our faith in Christ. However, His word tells us that we are now His ambassadors. We represent Him to a lost, broken world, to desperately invest in the mission to invite all people into His kingdom as sons and daughters through the Gospel. So, He equips us. He changes us. He reaches deep into the pit of our heart and starts to root out weeds that choke out His spirit from within us so that our work may be increasingly fruitful and abundant.

 Immediately on the outset of our faith journey, God invites us to work alongside of Him as a father would invite his child to help him. In my house, “help” is usually a big mess when my son is involved. But we adore the intimacy built with him when we share labor. Can my husband and I do the work without him? Absolutely, and usually better and faster.  But we love him, and we want him to be an active participant in our family---to identify with my husband and I that he is a part of “us.” As he grows up, his impact in this work develops more and more. God has invited and commanded us to work alongside of Him in His power as His children because He wants us to identify with His heart, and His kingdom. What a privilege, and what a joy that we do not have to have “arrived” to be co-laborers with Him!

Miles J. Stanford has a fantastic book about Spiritual growth called The Green Letters. In it, Stanford states that, “many [believers] feel they are not making progress unless they are swiftly and constantly forging ahead.” He goes on to quote A.H. Strong: “When God wants to make an oak, He takes an hundred years, but when He wants to make a squash, He takes six months” (Stanford, 6-7) [1]. Maturation, growth, and spiritual depth take time. This is no excuse for choosing to sin or oppose God’s word. Rather, it is an opportunity to be set free from the self-expectation of immediate perfection. God is working, shaping, deepening, strengthening, pruning, and creating healthy, fruitful followers. Let us continue to accept His invitation to work alongside of Him, to hear His words, to accept His loving discipline as our Great Father.

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[1] Stanford, Miles J. The Complete Green Letters. Grand Rapids: Zondervan,      1975. Print.

Crushed and Created

This week has left me speechless. It has seemed that everywhere I look there is sickness, pain, death, war, and trauma. The effects of sin are seemingly endless. I find myself whispering in my heart, “Jesus, come quickly.” Hearing of a dear friend's recent cancer diagnosis, reading news stories of war, suicide, and more I am reminded that none of us are immune from pain. None of us can say we have never hurt deeply. We are all very, very broken, and we all need a Savior.

I have a three-year-old son that I adore. He is so funny, creative, smart, and imaginative. Like most three-year-olds, he has days that make me want to pull my hair out. Some days I fight him tooth-and-nail to listen and obey, and to understand that I love him and want good things for him, but he needs to trust me and obey. Some days I just want to cry from sheer frustration when his strong will and mine collide.

If my son wakes up in the middle of the night crying because he is scared, I go to him. It doesn’t matter how bad of a day we had. It doesn’t matter how angry he made me. I love him fiercely, and I don’t want him to be scared. I want him to trust that I will be there when he needs me. I want him to know he is safe, loved, and that I am with him. 

I have to believe that God feels even stronger about us. We are pitiful, sinful

beings that refuse to listen and obey the God that loves us and wants good things for us. We buck against His authority, in spite of how good He is. And yet He loves us with an everlasting love. In spite of the sin, the shame, the guilt, he came to us in the middle of our nightmare and rescued us. We are not alone in the darkness; our God is with us. It doesn’t take away the darkness, but the morning will come. Until then, we are not alone.

I look back on certain parts of my life with sadness. I had a tumultuous upbringing that left me shattered, insecure, and utterly broken for many years. People that should have protected me and taken care of me either left, or watched on while abuse and neglect occurred. Even when I was placed in a stable home, internally I was a wreck and I didn’t know how to reconcile all that had happened with the Gospel that I heard in church on Sundays. When I committed my life to following Jesus at the age of 17, I was changed from the inside out. I started on a journey of healing from wounds I lived with, and learned to forgive those that had hurt me the deepest. Don’t misunderstand---the situations didn’t change, in fact they got worse for a time. But I was changed. I saw things differently.

           

During my first year of college, I entered into one of the darkest years of my entire life. But that year is the year that God broke me, and showed me His faithfulness like never before. In the thick of depression, I found myself literally hiding under a desk sobbing over the word of God. My Bible still has tear-stained pages from hours spent asking God to meet me in the middle of the pain. I studied the book of Hosea, and the Lord showed up in my heart. I was never the same when I studied what the Lord spoke to Israel through the prophet: 

14 “Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness
 and speak tenderly to her.15 There I will give her back her vineyards,
and will make the Valley of Achor[b] a door of hope.
 There she will respond[c] as in the days of her youth,
 as in the day she came up out of Egypt. 16 “In that day,” declares the Lord,
“You will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master.[d]’ (Hosea 2:14-16)

The Lord led Israel into difficult, trying times not to show himself as a God that will beat his subjects into submission, but rather to show the intimate nature of His love and compassion towards His people in spite of themselves. It is so easy and tempting in tumultuous times to believe the lie that God no longer cares, that He has forsaken us, that He doesn’t love us. It is easy to believe that we are simply being punished. In that season of my life, I believed I would never be better, and I would be left to rot in the wilderness. But that season is now one of the fondest of my spiritual life because I look back and see God’s goodness, tenderness, and kindness to me in the midst of my doubts, fears, and brokenness.

God does love us madly. He is with us in the desert to show us His heart, to show us that when all is lost, He is constant. Maybe you are suffering tremendously. Look to Him. He has come for us like a Father goes to his child. He loves us with a radical love that changes us. He is able to take the Valley of Achor (the valley of trouble) and make it a doorway of hope.

How have you seen God move through tragedy and pain in your own life? 

If you are like me, you enjoy a good song that speaks into the heart of an issue. Here are a few I encourage you to check out:

“The Cure for Pain” by Jon Foreman

“After All (Not for a Moment)” by Meredith Andrews

“Crushed and Created” by Caitlyn Smith

“If You Want Me To” by Ginny Owens

The Mess of Relationships

I have control issues. I love to bake because I not only have a crazy sweet-tooth, but because I also enjoy knowing that if I mix the right measure of each ingredient, mix it properly, and bake it at the right temperature for the right amount of time, I can expect to receive just what I was working on.

Life doesn’t work that way.  Relationships don’t work that way. We want them too. We want relationships to fit in nicely tied packages that fit “just so” in our lives. The truth is that relationships are messy, often inconvenient, and sometimes flat-out hard. We can’t add “the right ingredients” and follow our “recipe” and be guaranteed that it will produce exactly what we intended. But the other truth is that relationships are worth it. And sometimes the results are even better than our recipe could have produced to begin with. As people, we crave intimacy and connection with other people. We were designed for it.

This last year I realized something so ugly within myself that I didn’t want to face it. Have you ever had a moment like that? When you want to just throw your personal “junk” into the proverbial closet and pretend it isn’t there? I like to think that I’m a people person. I thrive on people. People energize me. On Sunday mornings I have the privilege of serving alongside of children’s ministry volunteers at the church I call home. I often feel so excited to be around these people that I feel like the hyper squirrel from the movie Ice Age.  People excite me. People possibilities make me dream big.

But the truth is that people also terrify me. People are wild cards: unpredictable, and having the capacity to cause great destruction both physically and emotionally. The “thing” that I love also scares me to my core. This last year, one of the biggest reasons that I stepped away from writing was to deal with this exact thing.  The Lord allowed me to reach a point of collapse nearly a year ago in which I found myself living in fear. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t enjoy things. I could only contemplate the harm that people can do, and it was scary.

I believe that our enemy threw me into a pit intended to destroy my hope in the Lord. Admittedly, there were many days that I questioned if I would make it through that season. But our God is gracious, patient, and is able to turn such pits into beautiful years of work and accomplishment in our hearts, even if it is painful and trying. The Lord didn’t leave me in my fear, but met me in it. He challenged me to really come face to face with my deepest fears, most of which revolve around the loss of my son or the forced separation of me from him, and to deal with them on me knees. I will spare you all of the details of the last year, but through days, weeks, and months of asking God hard questions, seeking truth, and seeking counsel the Lord has shown me repeatedly that even if the worst occurs, the story is not over. He is God. He is good. His grace is big enough to carry us through our deepest fears.

I share all of that because this last year was tempting for me to hide away and forget about people. To shut down and say, “Relationships are too hard, too messy, and I don’t want any piece of that.” The truth, however, is that God loves people, and I love God. God’s spirit in me beckons me to share His love for people that cost Him everything. The Gospel shows us that Jesus disregarded the mess that we as people are, and met us right in the thick of it. He came into the cold water with us, so to speak, and rescued us. He endured ridicule, shame, lies about Himself, excruciating death, and the wrath and separation from God the father all for the sake of…us.

All of this has left me broken. God has wrecked shop on my heart, and I find myself slowly taking more risks to let people “in.” I tend to hold people at arms length. The world tells me that it’s because of abandonment issues and the tumultuous childhood and adolescent years I had. But God says it doesn’t have to be that way, and He is completely revamping my heart to pursue people in spite of the mess. I want to be willing to be inconvenienced for the sake of relationship. Acts 2 shows us that disciples grew in number because the Church was the church, living in authentic community and relationship with one another. There is great power in relationships.

How can we intentionally invest in people? How can we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to others? How can we let go of our control issues to get into the mess of “people?”