Courtesy Mike Donehey of 10th Ave. North band, some short thoughts on an unforgettable truth:
Freedom Through Serving – defending the orphans & widows, setting the captives free March 20, 2012
My good friends George and Kathy have been quietly being the change that others speak so loudly of and most rarely put action behind.
They are truly doing an incredible work, being “salt and light” to the world.
Listen to what these messengers of Love are doing with their passion:
Are Damaged Goods Ever “Good Enough”? March 17, 2012
c. Salem News.com 2012
Transparency has been a relational goal for my personal life, but I feel that I never am quite as candid as I could be; I always keep some part of my story hidden, some important experiential detail veiled that will keep others from getting “too close” of a reading of me. This openness that I strive for, transparency that draws and fosters real relationship, somehow always seems to just slip around the corner when I’m about to reach it.
I met a young lady this week who, for lack of a better word, startled me with her transparency, so much so that I felt I needed to share, as she is openly doing through her ministry (no breach of confidence here), a little of her inspiring story.
Jordan, we will call her, is the picture of confidence: tall, well dressed, trim, well spoken, and brimming with warmth, intelligent inquiries and insight. At times in our conversation, she just “oozed” love and genuine care for others. She has a successful job in a good company and is able to make a profound impact on the lives of her clients through the practical services and personal relationship she builds with them.
Who We Are Not
Not ten minutes into our conversation, Jordan grabbed my arm and said, “I think I need to tell you, you’re not damaged goods.” Excuse me?
“You’re not. I don’t know why, but I think I need to tell you, or maybe it’s for someone you know, just because life and people have disappointed you and wounded you, it’s not going to define you.”
She had my attention.
Jordan was raised in a “good” home, all the right scriptures were taught, all the right church services were attended and all the right kinds of friends in “healthy activities” were made for her. She was a “good, Christian girl”. And she was happy that way.
But then her world was rocked – her “good Christian home” was split in half; affair and scandal with public repercussions.
She threw herself into work, school, activities, anything to keep her mind off of what had happened, the spiritual covenants and coverings that were ripping apart that she couldn’t wrap her mind around, and mostly, the pain of losing trust and love in one of the most foundational relationships in her life.
She went on to college, finished a degree, got a “good” job, stayed active in Church. But then, she said it:
“I felt completely and utterly abandoned.
I still felt like I couldn’t trust anyone with who I really was, because if I did, and they saw the hurt and distrust and anger I still felt, they would never be able to love me. I could not believe that anyone was really who they said they were, nor could I let myself be completely genuine and fully love others because I just knew that they would let me down, and I was afraid that I would let them down – if my own trusted family did, what made me think I was any different?”
Too Scared to Try
She went on about her struggle to begin friendships, with guys or girls, fearing that the male companion and spouse she prayed for would break her heart and that the women friends she desired would find her needy and weak and desert her (or, she smiled sheepishly, that they would steal the man I was interested in – which did happen once. Bad choices on my part).
Every time she found herself at the point of entering a potential relationship with a godly man, she found herself pulling back, building walls, hiding herself as quickly as she could because she felt that he was just spending time with her until someone better, prettier or smarter came along;
She was the “safe friend” anyone could turn to and no one really knew.
Jordan said at this time, even surrounded by the provisions and blessings of God, she felt utterly alone and broken.
Sopping up my maschera, I had to refill my coffee and my courage to ask the
next question, so, how did that change for you?
Looking me straight in the eye, with boldness and an utterly bare expression that made me feel like I was looking into her soul, she said:
“My Father in Heaven did not walk out on me. My Lord and Lover, Jesus, was unrelenting and did not stop pursuing me. My Intercessor, the Holy Spirit, never stopped crying out to my Father, interceding for me in my brokenness and covering me with understanding of the Father’s love for me.
He had to teach me what it is to be loved and accepted, and to remind me daily – hourly and by the second – that He is Sovereign, that His promise is for good things for me, that sorrow and suffering are only for a time, and that nothing I’ve gone through is without purpose.
“That is what entered my soul and filled my mind with hope – that my life has purpose, and nothing in it has caught God unaware – and that pushed me to fight for my mind, my dreams, my hope and love in others as well as myself. I saturated myself in the Word of God and a life of prayer and worship, clinging to the promises of restoration and joy”.
By fixing her thoughts and heart’s desires on the Lord, digging into her life with Him, Jordan was moved from a place of “clinging” to God out of a heart full of loss and fear and brokenness, to a place of peaceful understanding and confidence in the woman that God made her.
“It’s not a formula, or a ritual, it’s a relationship with the One whose answer is always rooted in love, and Who desires the best for me – even when I can’t even imagine what “best” looks like beyond my garbage. He had to teach me to accept His best for my life, and to accept it with joy.
“He is not going to give me something “good” and then just yank it away. Humans make mistakes, but God designs beauty and fullness for our lives and He is capable of maintaining it if we are willing to wait on Him to bring it and keep our focus on Him. ‘Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all other things will be added to your life’ isn’t a formula, but a life of passionate surrender to the Lord and intimate relationship with Him. Make Him your first love and devotion and He will take care of the rest.”
Jordan now works with battered women and families in crisis. She is a minister, counselor, wife and mother of two handsome boys. She glows when she talks about her family (husband in particular) and shares her encounter with God’s grace and love with all she meets.
“Life is too short not to love others with the kind of love God has, to see them with His eyes, and to serve them with His devotion. We are here on purpose, His purpose, and the “stuff and mess” that tries to come between us and that purpose is just the devil’s jealousy of our intimate purpose with and in God; even the devil is God’s devil, and God is sovereign and in control of our lives, our blessings, our joy, and our purpose. Our junk is just peripheral, we have to teat it that way.”
Our brokenness is for a purpose, driving us to intimacy with God and dependence on Him that we’ve never known before.
We are healed with imperfections – into a position that God can use to reach others with His love and grace that we, on our own, would have never been able to.
Brokenness is painful – but the healing process crafts us into His precision instrument for His glory and our fulfillment in Christ and His life through and in us here on this earth full of wounded people, just like us.
~~~
If you haven’t heard it today, or in a while, you should know:
I don’t know you, but I love you and am praying for you.
With all the love and joy and peace that Christ has given to me in His grace and mercy,
I love you.
~~~
Jeremiah 29:11-13
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord,
“plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart.”
A Father's Fire March 12, 2012
A son came up to his father and asked, “How can marriage be between two whole people, not two halves? Do you have a story to explain this to me?”
His father told his son, “Gather me some wood and build a fire in the open, in a deep pit, and in our family fire pit.”
The son did as he was told.
Too deep not to share! Great thoughts on love.
when i can’t… March 9, 2012
Can we trust God to use us, in all of our faults and failures, to create the beautiful life and work that He has designed? Even the very things that we saw as our undoing, the moments that we felt completely and utterly worthless, can we trust Him to use those things to mold us and the healing process to shape us into the lives that He can use to touch others like we never dreamed possible?
Can we take ourselves out of the driver’s seat, peel our hands off of the steering wheel, and free-fall into His sovereign will, trusting that the consequences of His choices for us will be far greater than the highest triumphs we could ever contrive by our best efforts?
Lord, let me trust You to meet me in my lack, and capture my ineffective and weak striving and turn it into Your beautiful work of grace and mercy.
God in my brokenness March 7, 2012
I can’t get away from this: omnipresent, incredible, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal God pursues me, and comes to find me in the middle of my mess.
Done Dating the Fridge (Modern Women of Faith) March 4, 2012
Dear Ladies of the 21st Century,
I’m not an especially candid person on this blog; it is easier to write/think/work on others’ injustices, problems, and fears – we do it all the time, right? Of course right! We do it every day, all day, and long into the night. Focusing on “fixing” other’s issues and improving their life-quality is easier than looking honestly at our own irregularities.
So, I need to take a moment and say what’s really going on in my brain. Forgive me if I have all the gentleness of a hammer, but this has been chewing on me for some time.
Gentlemen are not refrigerators.
(I can hear it now, the collective: What? Hold onto that to-do list.)
As a single lady, I do NOT want to be a sad-sap for “the” relationship, pining and wining and burying my sorrows in the numerous tasty treats and carb-o-licious items over the latest romance-flick.
Neither do I want to spend my days in “power-heels and suits” and my dinners alone save for my monthly reports, facts and figures.
I am afraid that, in some ways, we have backed ourselves into a corner by pushing so hard for independence and recognition as equals in relationships with the opposite sex, we have missed the very heart of that God-given relationship.
We are created and loved equally in God’s eyes, but we can’t expect to treat the men in our lives like the refrigerators in our kitchens: attractive, functional items that match our décor, store only our preferred brands of nourishment, and remain a strong, silent, yet immobile entity in our lives.
Ladies, that’s a utensil, not a man, and certainly not a man of God.
I would like to urge women, particularly young, single, Christian women on various career paths:
Do not overlook, or undervalue, the good men in your lives, or the roles that God created them to fill.
Ladies, this man you’ve hoped and prayed for, this Warrior Poet*, is not someone who comes pre-programmed with only the wonderful and perfect things to say and do for you. He is human, and someone who God has and is bringing on a journey of refinement just as He is developing you. He is full of faults, flaws, short tempers, and less-than-your-ideal-responses to your every idea and issue.
But…
Those things that would seem different, frustrating even, are most likely to be the things that God desires to use to shape and teach us about who He is and how He wants us, and our relationship, to reflect Him.
Am I suggesting that we accept any opinion, or reaction that we encounter in our relationships as gospel and that we yield to every confrontation as some manifestation of God’s will? NO! I am not advocating abuse or codependence.
Neither am I advocating that we should expect him to accept every mood, craving, and/or viewpoint that we throw at him.
I am suggesting that we can be whole, holy, and courageous women of faith and that we let the men of God be men of God in our lives, equally valued, equally called, equally loved. We shouldn’t be afraid that we will somehow become devalued when God brings strong men into our lives. We need them to challenge us, to push back and help us press into that precious Refiner, the Holy Spirit, and seek the Lord’s wisdom and guidance instead of relying solely on our gifts and talents instead of on Him. And, I might add, they need us for the same reason; we are to be united as one.
“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the Church,…” in this ultimate, self-sacrificing, ever pressing beyond human limits and into the Divine resources of grace and mercy and love, so we must take up the challenge to sacrifice, fight for, pray for, receive from, and participate with these men in passionate resolve and commitment. From the minute chores to the life-altering choices of calling, we need to engage each other in experiencing life on God’s terms, in His great adventure with us. There is no such thing as “the winning side of an argument” in a relationship; you are both on the same team.
So, you want to be a Modern Woman of Faith, “equally yoked” with a strong man of faith? Good.
Accept the challenges that come with the man that God brings into your life; he is an ambassador of Christ, full of the Holy Spirit and the wisdom of God’s heart, His convicting and empowering Word. He is not an appliance.
“Then, Jesus said to him (Peter), ‘Do you love me?’” ~ John 21:17
*John Eldridge, “Wild at Heart”.
Treasures In the Dust Bin February 6, 2012
I was cleaning out my office desk this week, getting ready for a “lateral move”, when I came across a treasure I had forgotten about.
A faded and wrinkled business card that was given to me by a gentleman I met through my work, wedged in a dusty corner behind a filing cabinet where it had fallen, who knows how long ago.
I know what you’re thinking: Why in the world would anyone get sentimental about an ordinary business card? You must have hundreds of them around the office. It’s just a plain, ordinary, even cheap tool of business. What’s the big deal?
Well, in reality, it’s not really all that stunning. The font is plain, the message simple, and the contact numbers are most likely outdated.
But as I turned the card over and saw the faded blue thought in rough workman’s writing, I started to cry.
You see, this gentleman is on a long journey toward rebuilding his life from a difficult struggle with addiction, and these smeared sentiments were from a heart worn with failure, defeat, anger, and pain. The fact that he had been through all that he had, and was still reaching out to others, in his own simple way, shouted volumes.
I was shaken by this 2″x1″ declaration of the power of God’s forgiveness and unending grace. In just 12 words, I was flooded by the realization that this LIFE, much like this simple little card, though ragged, torn, stepped on, and all but forgotten beneath a mountain of pain and failure was just as precious as the day it was made. This LIFE is still capable of being completely restored, and affecting change in the lives of OTHERS.
So, after crying my eyes out over this wrinkled little business card (thankful that no one was in the office this weekend to witness my boohoo-ing), I was so thankful to have known and shared in the life behind the blue ink.
I was left with one thing that I had to say to you, dear one, today:
If you are feeling like you have been stepped on, pulled apart, stained, wrinkled, broken, left-over or left for dead and have nothing left to give or no hope to even roll back the covers to put your feet on the floor today – don’t quit!
You are more than you feel right now. You are, as the song says, more than the sum of your past mistakes. There is hope. You can make it through this struggle. You can be and feel whole again. Just don’t quit. You have more to do. Keep going. Reach out to others. Reach out to God. He is right here, now.
And in case you haven’t heard it, I love you, dear reader. With all the love and compassion and power of God’s love – the very love that sent His own Son to the cross to pay for my sin and your’s – I love you.
Christmas: Fighting Obedience December 30, 2011
Well, I have to admit, it has been a minute since I have engaged in the blogging sphere, and to be honest, I couldn’t have written 2 coherent sentences.
To be honest, I was burned out. Not just with writing – although 22 papers and 3 research projects could have had something to do with it – but with the whole ‘Christian Thought Process’.
Do I sound like a complete and total wimp? A washed up warrior? A traitor and quitter? Probably. But I had just had it with doing the right thing, thinking the right thoughts and staying on the straight and narrow. (Have I bored you with enough cliché’s yet?)
Honestly, if I heard one more Christian radio host say “just pray though” or saw another stupid “fish” or “God is my Pilot” bumper sticker I would have screamed and kicked the accelerator right up their Ictus.
It all felt so fake.
Did I hate God? No. Was I rebelling against Him and denying my beliefs? No.
But I was just sick and tired of praying and working at living the “Christian life” and not seeing any difference around me. People were still hurting in the community, believers were still falling like flies to temptations, families were still torn apart by grief and loss. To tell the people around me that there was hope seemed more like a tantalizing lie than the truth that I knew in my heart.
I was working at listening and sharing love and encouragement, my own hope seemed to be slipping away. I was asking for things that I felt God had put in my heart to work toward and aspire to, but I kept hitting dead ends. So, of course, being the good Christian that I am, I felt guilt over praying for myself, frustration over not getting the things I “had faith to receive”, and then guilt for asking for those things in the face of all the suffering and loss that I saw around me.
And it was Christmas, for crying out loud! The very time of year when we are supposed to be thinking about others and reflecting on the goodness and mercy and incredible sacrifice of God for His people. And all I could think about was how much pain I saw around me, and how disappointed I was in my own little dreams.
Just call me Scrooge already!
Ever been there?
So, 3 days after the Day of tainted celebration of international fairytales and bloated Church itineraries and dinner tables, I found myself shying away from Luke 2, and instead wandering back to my favorite place of contemplation and crying, Psalm 119.
Of all the books of the Bible, I connect with Psalms on a gravel and mud level.
The cries are so plaintive of my own at times, of confusion, abandonment, and sorrow. The times of rejoicing are so pure and human; I just like reading the “journal” of a flawed individual who yearns for the heart of God in himself and in his people.
The words soothe and convict like a hot cider and an Airborne tablet,
Your promise revives me; it comforts me in all my troubles. 50
I reflect at night on Who You are, o Lord;
Therefore, I obey Your instructions. 55
My suffering was good for me,
For it taught me to pay attention to Your decrees…71
Of course, just as God does, I was drawn back to the knowledge that He is good. He is not caught unaware by anything on this earth or in my life. I could almost feel my soul exhale reading,
I will quietly keep my mind on Your laws 95
You are my refuge and my shield;
Your word is my source of hope. 114
In the quiet of His perfect correction and direction, I was reminded of Jesus’ prayer while in the garden of Gethsemane, not just for the believers standing there with Him, but for the future believers who would never see Him this side of Heaven.
I’m not asking You to take them out of the world, but to keep them safe form the evil one. They do not belong to this world any more than I do. Make them holy by Your truth; teach them Your word, which is truth. 17:15-17
And it hit me, just as it has many times before: I don’t get to opt out just because it’s not Utopia for me.
I’ve been waiving the banner of Isaiah 6, the mantra of “Here I am Lord, send me!” and have forgotten, yet again, the purpose of His “sending”. The very next verses in Isaiah slam the budding prophet with the task of telling the people of Israel that they will be wiped out until and unless they turn to God. Not real fun for the first day on the job.
Just because I say “yes” to following God’s divine purpose for my life doesn’t mean that I will like every task or season assigned. The words given to Isaiah were hard, unyielding, and to his own people.
But He said he would follow and obey.
Suffering is real, but God is faithful and merciful in His way, not mine. My job is to obey, and trust that He will heal and restore His people.
Lord, sustain me as You promised, that I may live!
Do not let my hope be crushed.
Sustain me, and I will be rescued;
Then I will meditate continually on Your decrees. Ps. 119:116-117
I have too much to learn in the coming seasons. I cannot afford the distractions of another, greener pasture, toy, relationship, or whatever the “better things” are that I want to “pray in faith” for. All of those things I think I “need” or “have been preparing to receive” are circumstantial, irrelevant, and peripheral to what God is doing and preparing.
I must stop confusing my own hopeful ponderings with His perfect correction and direction. I must pray for a humble heart to receive His instructions and wisdom.
I must stop running away from the answers I’ve been asking for; just because I don’t like what the answer is, doesn’t mean it’s not God’s best for me.
Your word is a lamp to guide my feet
And a light for my path. Ps 119:105
