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Kamis, 29 September 2016
Reduced to Christ
He Is Enough
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Be Filled With My Love
Be Filled With My Love
A cup has no use when it is empty, but only when it is filled. A cup that is filled can be used to bring something to drink to a thirsty person. So it is with you, my child.If you are full, of the world, of yourself, or of your works or needs, you have nothing good to offer a thirsty and dying people. But if you would choose to let yourself be emptied, if you choose to let go of everything that is not of Me, you give me the opportunity to fill you to overflowing of my goodness, my power, my love and my anointing.
Then, as you are overflowing with Me, you will be that drink that can be poured out, and can be used to heal and bring comfort to the world around you.
So, let yourself be emptied, and be filled with my love. Be filled with my grace and every fruit of the spirit. Be filled with Me, and watch as I use you to touch and share who I am to each and every person that comes into contact with you.
No Argument Necessary
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No Compromise
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Grab a Face, Encourage a Heart
Grab a Face, Encourage a Heart
One of the best things we can do for our friendships, whether fledging or lifelong, is to become cheerleaders for other women.
Don't we all crave a cheerleader friend? Absolutely! We don't want cotton-candy flattery or even the niceties about our appearance or choice of couch pillows, nor do we want silent cheerleaders who think but don't speak words of encouragement. We want a friend of the super athletic cheerleader variety, who exerts enthusiasm and energy in exhorting us on, even as they do their own faith-thing at our side. These kind of friends are rare, and we can't guarantee we'll have a friend like that. But we certainly can be that kind of friend to others.
I tell you what: being a cheerleader for other women can be awkward. I know because I am the queen of awkwardness and, frankly, I don't care. I see too many women standing on the sidelines of life feeling like a failure when, in fact, they are walking by faith and adorning themselves with the glorious beauty of good works. They need to know that God's fingerprints are all over them!
But I'm kind of not sorry. We need to be the type of women who grab faces. In other words, however awkward it is, we need to be intentional to encourage, celebrate, champion, exhort, and push other women forward as they seek to live by faith and use their gifts for God. Especially in our friendships, because that's where we have access to the inner struggle women go through with fear and insecurity.
Being cheerleaders for other women can not only be awkward, but it can also be difficult. Seeing how God is using another woman, sometimes visibly and powerfully, can challenge our own inadequacies and feelings of invisibility. Our self-centered hearts don't always want to celebrate another's successes. In addition, sometimes when we see how another woman lives her life differently from how we live ours, we're prone to think her choices are the exact prescription she would give us. We see her through the filter of our mom guilt or our frustrations with our own life or the unmet desires we have. These filters, in my opinion, are the greatest hindrances to our friendships, because we erroneously believe that she--fill in the blank with who your "she" is--couldn't possibly understand, relate, or have compassion toward us. We compete with one another and make assumptions rather than locking arms with one another.
These are subtle schemes of the enemy, because God's grace allows for our differences in gifts and choices. God says love--love Him and love people--and there are a million and one right and good ways to obey those commands. If we are Christians, every single one of us is called to walk by faith. Some women among us are trying to walk by faith well in their singleness, some in a difficult marriage, some in parenting special needs kids, some in vocational ministry, some in a job, some in painful and unwanted circumstances. We can be a distinctly Christian friend by seeking, in word and deed, to spur one another on toward faith, love, and good deeds.
Who in your life needs a good face-grab today? Who needs a biblical rah-rah-sis-boom-bah? Kill your fleshly drive toward comparison and competition and go be their cheerleader today. The kingdom of God (and your heart) will be better for it.
Take a Step Back
Take a Step Back
If you are standing with your forehead against the trunk of a tree, how can you see clearly to the top? How can you see the entire tree when you are so focused and zeroed in on the bark of the tree?If you want to see the entire tree, will you not have to step back and look from a distance that encompasses the entire tree? You will need to change your perspective. This is exactly what you need to do in your life.
I want to show you the bigger picture of what I have for you. I want you to see a perspective that you have yet to see. However, in order to do this, you are going to have to step back. Do not look so closely at what is right in front of you that you forget the bigger purpose of why you are walking this road.
Today, take a step back, my child, and remember why I called you. Lay down all the distractions, voices, fears, guilt, and obligation that is trying to confuse you. It is time to see more clearly and run this race with a greater vision, says the Lord.
Constantly Satisfied
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Community Requires Vulnerability
Community Requires Vulnerability
For
the first 8 years of our ministry at an established church, I didn’t
have a friend to my name. In those same years, I birthed and stayed home
with three children, and I remember willing myself not to get sick
because I didn’t know who I would call for help if I did. Community was
something I created for other people, not something I enjoyed myself. At
least that’s how I felt.
When
we prepared to plant out of that church, my husband gathered
prospective core team members in our living room and asked, “When you
dream of what church could be, what is it that you think of?” For me,
the answer was simple, and I timidly spoke out loud what I’d held inside
for so long: “I don’t want to feel as if I’m standing outside of
community, helping it happen but not enjoying it myself. I want our
church to be the kind where I get to enjoy the inside. I want to have
friends.”
What
I didn’t yet realize is that community isn’t something that comes to
us; it’s something that we go toward. We make choices that either
invites community or hinders the very thing we so long for. The reasons
I’d struggled in friendship were many--my lack of initiation, the very
specific parameters I’d placed around what type of friend I wanted and
how they would related to me, time constraints that I used as an
excuse--but primary among them is that I chose not to take the risk of
vulnerability with other women.
God
gave me a do-over with church planting, because the difficult nature of
the work made it nearly impossible to hide behind carefully maintained
facades or self-sufficiency. My spiritual, physical, and emotional
neediness pointed like arrows toward asking wise and faithful women for
help. And so I did.
Vulnerability
is the spark for us to enjoy and help cultivate true community. Only
through vulnerability can we fulfill the “one anothers” of
Scripture--pray for one another, confess to one another, forgive one
another, bear one another’s burdens--because only then do we know the
burdens of others and only then do they know ours.
Vulnerability
is risky and must be done wisely. I have learned to move slowly toward
vulnerability with others, praying all the way for God to give me wisdom
and discernment not only in who I am vulnerable with but in what I
share. Who are wise women around me? Who holds confidences well? Who
speaks truth with grace to others around them? Who values me as a child
of God and not just as the pastor’s wife?
In
discerning what I share, it’s important to note that there are just
some things that we won’t be able to talk about with anyone in our
church community, but I can generally always share about myself. I can
share how God is working in my life, how God is convicting me, and how I
need prayer. I can even share how I am struggling with church-related
things without giving details that are inappropriate to share. Simply
put, vulnerability has been key for me in developing community that is
not just one-sided but mutual and life-giving.
I
look back at those first 8 years of ministry, and I see that I did in
fact have fledgling friendships. All those prayers I’d prayed to God for
a friend? He’d actually answered it with Kelly, Jamee, Ashley, and
Niki, but I’d never taken the risk of vulnerability with them. I’d been
more concerned with impressing them than knowing them or letting them
know me. As a result, the friendships had faltered before they’d even
truly started. I had been my own worst enemy all along.
Dear
one, don’t be your own worst enemy. Resist making excuses or thinking
of yourself as “other” because of your role within the church. Yes, be
wise, but don’t let fear and severe self-protection hinder the very
thing that you long for. Take that risk of vulnerability.
The Conversation Is Open, But Will You Have It?
The Conversation Is Open, But Will You Have It?
I grew up in a town stamped and molded by racial issues that were never discussed. On a few occasions, perspectives on race were danced around, touched on with incendiary language that, as a child, made me turn hot and fidgety, or visited with short and fiery bursts of opinion by people I loved and respected. In high school, a student's confederate flag shirt set off a race riot, complete with classroom walk-outs and news media stationed around the boundaries of campus, but I couldn't tell you the details, because I didn't pay much attention. I didn't have to.
In our little town, racial divide was everywhere around but stubbornly ignored at the same time. It seems we believed that if we didn't talk about it, racial division and discrimination wouldn't actually exist. I certainly never acknowledged to my diverse friends in marching band what was happening around us, nor did they to me, and somewhere along the way I picked up the idea that to talk about race was too shameful, too fraught with danger.
My senior year in college, I took a class called Civil Rights Rhetoric. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I sat with my mouth agape, intently listening to the details of the Freedom Summer, the integration of Little Rock High School, voter registration, and nonviolent protests. We watched grainy footage of speeches and read Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I couldn't believe all of this had happened just 30 years prior and that no one had ever told me about it. I was a 21-year-old adult learning for the first time that there had even been a Civil Rights push in the 1960's.
When I spoke with adults that I'd known all my life and heard them talk about integration, it was strange. I'd never heard anyone talk so openly about it, but all along a question pounded in my head: How has this not been important to talk about? Why have I not heard these stories before?
I knew the answer. Because in their minds it was "done," done like something we're embarrassed of and want to shove deep in the closet, done like a closed book that we never intend to open again, done like it never happened or is buried so deeply in history that it seemingly has little bearing on the present.
After that class, I quit talking about race again, because my finished coursework seemed to take away my permission to speak and ask freely. Instead, I've quietly read up on it, my interest insatiably piqued by what I learned in college.
However, in the past few years, I've begun having conversations again. They started when a black family visited our church, whom we invited them over for dinner. After we finished our meal, the conversation turned toward their church decision. The wife asked, "Is it OK if we join your church?" She wasn't asking for permission. She was referring to the color of their skin. In other words, "Will we be accepted? Will our children be valued and loved?" I was literally speechless, immediately racking my brain for something done or said that would have given them the impression they were unwelcome. And so began a conversation on race, church, and the experiences they've had in their professions, in churches, and with their children. Their openness and honesty gave us permission to ask anything, but even more so, their answers challenged my perspectives and perceptions about race in America.
They joined our church and have since become friends. Conversations with them over the years have taught me how much I still don't know, and they've taught me to forever be a learner.
But primarily they've taught me that race is not only okay to talk about, but that we need to talk about it.
It only took me decades, but it struck me for the first time recently that, as much as we (rightly) love our country, it was founded--FOUNDED--upon institutional sin. The basis of our country's economic success was slavery. We (we, meaning white folks) don't like to think about that. We don't like to look at our country's sin so directly. We don't like to think there could be generational consequences for it.
As a Christian, however, I believe that we can and should take a good look at our sin, because Christ has made a way to cleanse us from sin. We don't have to be afraid to acknowledge slavery, lynching, Jim Crow laws, and the existence of racial injustice. To do so isn't to denigrate law enforcement officers--people doing a tireless, thankless job who deserve our respect--or to choose sides according to skin color. As a human race, we are a people who mistrust others different from ourselves, and we must acknowledge at the very least our apathy and indifference to the experience of others. If we desire unity and harmony in our nation, the way it starts is not to wait for the "other side" to agree with our perspectives and ideas but through our own confession and repentance before Jesus. We must acknowledge our nation's sin, weep over it, grieve over what it has done, and confess it before God and one another. Jesus' gospel teaches us that confession and repentance lead to forgiveness and reconciliation first between God and man and then between men.
What is happening in our country isn't about police officers vs. the black community, as if we have to choose sides. What is happening is what happened for me during that Civil Rights class and the dinner with our friends: these events are opening a conversation that we too often resist or don't know we need to have. There is an opportunity springing out of the blood and tears of our neighbors. The question for each of us, especially for Christians who have been given the ministry of reconciliation by Jesus Himself, is simply this: will we have them? Are we willing to engage the conversations with people who are different than us? Are we willing to ask questions of real people and listen to them? Are we willing to love our neighbor by first seeking to understand them? Are we willing to love our neighbor by reaching out first?
It seems the wound we hoped had healed never actually did. The black community has been trying to say this for a very long time. Perhaps everyone is now ready to listen. So now what? We must do what the wounded do: examine it, clean out the impurities, and address it in a way that brings true healing. The only way toward the unity we desire is through the powerful love of Jesus, made tangible as we seek to serve one another, not kill and blame one another.
If you want to read more to gain understanding about the racial divide in our nation, I suggest these resources:
- The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
- United: Captured by God's Vision for Diversity by Trillia Newbell
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years by Taylor Branch
A Prisoner of Love
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How Friendship and Longing Go Hand-in-Hand
How Friendship and Longing Go Hand-in-Hand
In the past year, several of my friends have left our church. A few have moved away, as have many before them left this transient town we call home. One friend, who was more like a mentor, died from cancer, a devastating blow to all who knew her. One friend left by choice, and although all is well between us, it has a hardness of its very own.None of these are not my friends anymore, even the one I will not see again in this life. They are all gifts, just not gifts I get to enjoy as much as I'd like.
I am not good with change, and I'm not good with the impermanence of life. I want my friendships to feel perfect: perfectly given, perfectly received, and perfectly enjoyed all the live-long time. I work hard at friendship, so I want to keep them just how they are. I don’t want anything to change. I fear disappointment or being the disappointer. I don’t like when a friendship changes, when people relocate or make decisions that are wise but also affect the time we can spend together. I don’t like feeling distance or being separated from a friend. I don’t like knowing that the demands on my time and personal responsibilities keep me from being able to be a perfect friend. I’m also quite discontent giving new friendships time, space, and grace to develop.
Last year, I hosted a going away party for my friend Kate, who relocated with her family to a different state. We had a time of blessing and commissioning for them, but I honestly was in a fog of denial throughout the party. I knew it was happening—they were moving a little over a week after the party—but if I didn’t think about it maybe then everything would magically stay the same. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt.
I asked Kate about her own feelings. She said she felt a lot of fear about moving, because her friendships would be severed in a way that’s not her choice. It’s a hurt she couldn’t control. The losses felt really deep, because she knew how hard it was to maintain friendships with people right in front of her, but it would be even harder when they were thousands of miles away. She said she really wasn't looking forward to moving, because there weren’t any easy answers, and she’d have to let go of where she’s been in order to invest where she was going.
I didn’t want her to go, because I was afraid that our relationship would change. And you know what? It did. I can't meet her for coffee or have her and her family over for dinner. I can’t watch her kids grow up, the kind of watching that’s mostly unaware because you see them every week. Instead, I’ve watched them grow up in giant spurts in pictures.
I hate change. I hate that Kate moved away; she’s one less good friend I have in my daily life when good friends are already so hard to come by. And then I think about who else has moved away and wonder who’s going to be next and then close my heart a little.
I know, though, that I’m afraid of the actual longing, because I know too well what it’s like to live with longing. I remember those years-long stretches when I willed myself to not get sick because I had no one I could call to take care of my babies if I did. I remember walking through difficult and dark days and not knowing to whom I could turn. I know what it’s like to be lonely and to grieve what once was. I know what it’s like to wonder if you’ll ever have a friend again. I simply do not like in-my-face reminders that tell me longing doesn’t go away, that I’m intended to live with longing. I’d like to ignore the part about friendship that never will be perfect and stationary, the part about friendship that necessitates living with longing.
We all know that feeling, because part of friendship is living with longing, and I don’t mean just longing for a friend when you aren’t sure you have any. A right and biblical perspective on life leaves us in an in-between place where all is made right and fulfilled because of Christ and all is waiting for that ultimate fulfillment to become tangible and visible. Friendship is included in that in-between, because, although we are reconciled and united by Christ, we continue to relate to one another through the fog of flesh, sin, separation, and death.
There is an inevitable hint of sadness to friendship, because try as we may to perfect and keep them, we simply can’t. This should lead us to an important question: Is our longing wrong? Should we not long for perfect community, intimacy, connection, and permanent reconciliation? I’ve asked myself that question, even as I’ve tried to keep all my friendships just so.
Longing is wrong if it leads to idolatry of others, which leads further to control, manipulation, anger, or isolation. Longing is wrong when we corral it in the shapes of unrealistic wish-dreams and demand God’s submission to our desires.
But longing that seeks its end in the final redemption? This is a beautiful and freeing kind of longing, a longing to be embraced, because it turns our eyes pleadingly toward Christ’s return. At the final redemption, our friendships with other believers will actually become what we’ve always hoped they’d be: unmarred by spiritual blindness and selfish ambition, intimate and unchanging. Perfect.
It seems, then, that God Himself has implanted our longing, that our sense of incomplete friendship is a catalyst that leads us to anticipate a world beyond what we can now see and experience and friendships beyond what we can now see and experience. This right longing also underlies our ability to receive friendship—and this is so very important—because then we’re able to embrace present imperfections as gifts.
If we want something other than this in our present lives, something other than imperfect, we don’t want friendship as God is giving it.
I love how Dietrich Bonhoeffer approaches our longing:
“Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this. Whether it be a brief, single encounter or the daily fellowship of years, Christian community is only this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ…The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity. That dismisses once and for all every clamorous desire for something more. One who wants more than what Christ has established does not want Christian brotherhood. He is looking for some extraordinary social experience which has has not found elsewhere; he is bringing muddled and impure desires into Christian brotherhood. Just at this point Christian brotherhood is threatened most often at the very start by the greatest danger of all, the danger of being poisoned at its root, the danger of confusing Christian brotherhood with some wishful idea of religious fellowship, of confounding the natural desire of the devout heart for community with the spiritual reality of Christian brotherhood." (Life Together, pages 21, 26)
And so, opening ourselves up to receive friendship involves living with longing, embracing the imperfectness of our relationships here, but also knowing and rejoicing in the fact that they are a taste of what is to come. That longing is not a feeling to avoid or mute; it must be an arrow that points us to something greater and to a time to come when we will enjoy perfect friendships.
We’re reminded again, because we’re prone to forget, that the Lord must remain firmly in the center of our friendships. He is not the filler until He gives us the friends we want. He is it—the end of all our longings. He is gracious to give us gifts beyond Himself, perhaps no greater gifts than the friends He’s given who enrich our lives.
Are you like me? Do you want to gather (and hoard) friends because you fear your underlying longing, that sense of incompleteness that’s never quite gone away? Have you believed that something is wrong with you because you just can’t seem to get this friendship thing down? Have you been wounded by the separation and distance brought on by the passage of time? Are you exasperated by your imperfect friendships? Perhaps our wish-dreams are making their appearance again. The difference between our wish-dreams and right longing is simply timing—now versus later.
Stop berating yourself that you can’t command life to get lined up perfectly. Embrace the longing by looking at it full in the face and letting it tilt your head toward what is to come. Embrace all that you have and all that you don’t as a gift from a good Father who knows what you need.
Learn to live with the longing, all the while rejoicing that one day all of our longing will be completely fulfilled.
Giving in Secret
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