So brokenness.

I’m not at all creative today, so apologies for being too direct and unimaginative.

Usually when we think of blessings we think of things that make us happy and put us in a good mood, but rather we should think of things that make our life better. Because they are not always the same. And I’ve been really blessed lately, but not at all in the way that makes me happy or in a good mood. Because conviction is truly a blessing, but it definitely hurts.

WARNING: If you ask for Jesus to break you, he will.

And it sucks. But it’s awesome. And it’s painful, but I love it. And this is why:

• “…being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” -Philippians 1:6
• “Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” -Romans 8:17
• “When Jesus had finished saying all these things, he said to his disciples,” -Matthew 26:1

I love that last verse, because it shows that Jesus never stops talking. He never stops putting things in your life. He never stops working with you. He’ll complete the work he’s begun with you. And there will be glory at the end.

I like it, but I don’t…?

We moved from our small, two bed, 1.5 bath, restricted kitchen, and decent living room apartment into a bigger, three bed, two bath, enormous kitchen, and roomy living room house these last few days.  It’s been a bit of work, of which has probably been unbalanced—I’m lazier than I like to admit, and am unfortunately good at coming up with semi-legitimate things to do instead of cleaning and packing—but we’re about 98% done.  Just random small bits and pieces of things left to throw in a box and move to the house, and then the cleaning of the empty apartment.  And I’m not at all excited about that.

It was extremely exciting to move the couches and beds and tables, and to figure out where we wanted all the stuff to go, and to hang up posters and paintings and so on.  When it’s big, noticeable stuff, it’s enjoyable, even if it requires heavy lifting.  But when you get to the little trinkets and stuff you don’t really want but don’t really want to throw away, it’s not at all fun, because it seems like a waste of time and it’s completely under the radar.  And don’t even get me started on cleaning the place that we’re about to leave forever.

And my spiritual life is like this too.  I love it when God makes big changes in my life.  I love getting completely messed up and transformed, even if it’s tough for me to do, because it’s noticeable, it’s something completely new, and it’s exciting.  But when God asks me to do the small stuff—cleaning up little, under-the-radar convictions, picking up after myself, making sure that I leave a good impression when I leave some place or something behind—I get frustrated and I don’t want to do it.  It’s not fun anymore.  And I have no idea what convinced me that my spiritual life is about me having fun, and not about me laying my life down—even the tiny annoying parts—and submitting to the will of Jesus, lover of my soul.

(And so it turns out that the little things are a big thing too.)

Moving isn’t always an enjoyable process, whether it’s from apartment to house, or from old sinful self to new regenerate self.  But if we ignore the small stuff, the move is never completed.  We never can settle into the new, because there’s still small parts of us in the old.  And while I don’t like cleaning up and taking care of the seemingly insignificant things, I do— because beneath my surface frustration, my heart loves completion.

• What little things are keeping you from completing the big changes in your life?
• Are you seeking partial transformation in order to fulfill your own desires, or are you seeking complete transformation to God’s will for you—even if it’s hard?

Et Cetera and Similar Endeavors

Going to the zoo today, the water park on Friday, Warped Tour on Monday, and The Dark Knight comes out the 18th. Not to mention last week I got to blow stuff up. July is turning out to be quite an exciting month.

I’ve been listening to a ton of new music—Search The City, Burden of a Day, and A Skylit Drive have all been playing a lot on my iTunes lately.

I am currently feeling like an overinflated balloon, flying higher and higher, and am hoping that God gives me an outlet for all the love and vision he’s shooting me up with or I will soon explode—I sometimes feel like there is too much God for me to handle, this is of course true in the sense that He is infinite and I am certainly not, but it blows my mind that it is possible to wake up every morning for the rest of my life and be even more in love with Jesus than I was the day before. It is completely impossible for this to be true if I live to be 80, there is no way a human being can contain that much love, but “with God all things are possible (Mt 19:26).”

A few things God is working me through, around, in, and so on:

• What if we believed—as in had no doubt—in Matthew 19:26, Matthew 17:20, John 14:14, and Philippians 4:13?
• The Christian church in the time of Paul and Peter and John and such apostles (that wrote parts of scripture, brought thousands of people to know Jesus Christ, did miracles, spoke with total confidence and authority, et cetera…Acts 2:38-43) was certainly a smaller number of people than today. What if the church today took Christianity as seriously as the apostles did? If less than twenty people did what scripture and history tells us, why shouldn’t we expect even more?
  
• Sometimes we pray and pray and pray for something; for God to make our hearts like his, for his will to be revealed to us, and so on. And despite constant prayer and earnest seeking of God nothing changes…this might be because God has already made our hearts like his, and we just have to do.

Unnecessary Backtracking

Sometimes when I talk with Jesus it’s not a happy topic—not to say that I don’t want it desperately—and this is what some people call conviction, it gets confused with feeling guilty sometimes, the difference is that “guilty” demands a sentence, and because of this extraordinary thing called grace I am completely innocent. Conviction leads to reformation rather than punishment.

But even knowing this, we often feel like we’ve lost ground when we’re convicted, don’t we? Like we have to work harder to get back to where we were. Like we got a “go back three spaces” card in a divine game of Monopoly. And this gets us down, this gets us stressed, this causes us to spend time walking in place, trying to build our muscles up again for actually moving. But when you fall down, you don’t have to spend a week working your muscles back into shape. You just get up and keep going. When you make a wrong turn, you don’t have to go back to your starting point. You just have to turn around.

And this often can lead into a very subtle guise of selfishness…our prayer starts to be all about us, we focus on where we’re at spiritually, we beat ourselves up for making the same mistake again, our prayers and thoughts all begin to point inward, and we get ourselves under a magnifying glass. We get so focused on every detail of our lives and how it affects what we think is important in keeping spiritually disciplined.

The problem with this is that all it takes to be spiritually disciplined is earnestly seeking after God. Simply falling in love with Jesus. John 14:15 says “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” And what if this meant we will keep his commands if we love him, instead of we will love him if we keep his commands? What if keeping Jesus’ commandments was an effect of loving him, rather than a requirement to love him? 1 John 2:3 says “By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments.” It is proof that we do know Christ when we keep his commands. It’s an unavoidable effect of falling in love with God.

As Jesus said, “You will know them by their fruits.” (Mt 7:20)

When we’re convicted, when we fall, when we fail—there is no time to make up. There is no ground to regain. We haven’t lost anything. And any time we spend trying to “make up” for it is time wasted. We can’t go back in time, we can only choose how to use the time that’s coming toward us. It is selfish for us to use that time trying to do what God has already done for us—making sure the old has gone (2Co 5:17), trying to renew ourselves (2Co 4:16), trying to earn forgiveness (Col 1:13-14).

And I think this selfishness is a huge reason why the church today seems to so often be dysfunctional.  It is so concerned with attendance, programs, publicity, taking care of its self-determined “needs,” finances, et cetera et cetera, and where is God in all this?  So there are movements to try and “get back” to what a church is supposed to be, and they create programs and publicize and it ends up being the exact same thing under a different title.

But the successful ministries all can be boiled down to simply loving Jesus.  Being absorbed with progress, statistics, appearances, “making up” what’s been “lost”…it’s all a distraction.  We don’t have to concern ourselves with doing things that God has already done for us.  We don’t have to make things “right” before we can start pursuing our Savior.  We just have to get up, we just have to turn around, we just have to start DOING IT instead of planning for it and talking about it and publicizing it and mapping it out.  Jesus is ridiculously contagious, He doesn’t need us to make Him more appealing.  What do you do to make the Creator of the universe more appealing???

God does not need to be advertised, He just needs to be loved.

We love Jesus; He provides the rest.

How can you turn your magnifying glass into a telescope?
Where has selfishness been secretly dwelling in your life?
What have you been distracting yourself with that keeps you from just DOING?

Autopsy

I believe that it is somewhat factual to say that if a heart were to be split in two, it would not function as well as before. And assuming that this is true, it follows that it would be even harder for the heart to work if it were split into thirds, and it would become even less effective in four pieces, and so on. But even knowing all this, I still portion out my heart to so many different things.

What if my heart was undivided? (Mt 6:24)

What if I stopped trying to explain God and simply loved Him? (1Co 2:14, Col 2:20-23)

What if I was convinced that God knows all my needs? (Mt 6:32)

What if I actually had faith that He WILL provide? (Mt 7:8)

What if I did things on faith, without first having to be proven wrong? (Mt 14:25-31, Jn 15:5)

What if I prayed for absolutely impossible things and truly believed that God would do them? (Mt 17:20, 19:26, Jn 14:14)

What if I stopped assuming that I know what’s best? (Eph 2:10)

What if I acted like I truly have the mind of Christ? (1Co 2:16)

What if I actually believed that the Creator of all things moved and spoke and worked through me? (2Co 4:7-10)

Birds and Thorns and Love

Birds are chirping outside, it’s quite late. Or early, rather. And I wonder how easy life must be for birds, who don’t have any sense of right and wrong. Because I find myself wanting to be free of the restrictions, the expectations, of life as a Christian sometimes. And to be like a bird, that gets to do whatever it wants whenever it wants, poops wherever and whenever it feels like, and so on and so forth, this sounds like something that is desirable. And sometimes I am convinced that this would be more…something, I’m not sure what—fun? satisfying? free? rewarding? fulfilling?—than living as a Christian. So I do it. I decide to live—

(which really is a decision to die.)

—the way I want.

Because it’s fine, it feels good, fun, free, to do what I want, until it’s done. Until I find myself right where I began, as dumb and soulless and inappropriate as a bird. And it’s fine, it feels normal, until I crawl back to my Father, blood on my hands and dirt on my face and no words to say, the prodigal son himself, and I rediscover for the millionth time how incredibly good God is. How satisfying he is. How free, how rewarding, how fulfilling, how much I want it. Everyone says you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone, I tend to not know what I’ve got until it’s gone and then I get it back again, because I seem to be reasonably oblivious to what I’m missing until I find myself back at the feet of Jesus. Which is where, by the grace of God, I always end up, because at one point in my life I decided to surrender to him, and he decided to love me unconditionally. And I’ll never understand that transaction, but I’ll always be thankful for it.

Thank God for being beyond my understanding, and for creating us in his image—for while we are obviously not anywhere near the realm of perfection, some of us have been blessed to understand small fractions of God’s character, and without love not only would I be a thorn in God’s side but a very lonely individual on earth as well.

Paul knew too.

I Do What I Can

I do try so very hard. It probably rarely shows, but I do. I do my best to live like Christ, to speak truth and show love and present as best fruit as I can. I only strive to be more like Jesus. And this is
so
very
wrong.

Being a Christian does not mean living like Christ. Being a Christian means letting Christ live through you. And I am eternally thankful for this, because I try so very hard to live like Christ, and I fail every time.

How are you letting Christ live through you?

And how are you trying to live like Christ? Because trying to live like Christ means you are taking it upon yourself to do what only God can do. Trying to live like Jesus means you are attempting to be something that doesn’t need the cross.

When you are trying to live like Christ, you are trying to live without him.

Thoughts on compliments

Every time I speak I always feel like everyone is listening to what I have to say, this is good for a speaker I guess but I don’t like it much—most people enjoy having others to listen to them, I am one of these people most of the time, but when I speak I am supposed to be teaching, I am supposed to be speaking truth, and this is a great responsibility and I am all too aware of my unworthiness. Compliments are such a strange concept, the greatest artists were rarely praised until after their death (Beethoven, Van Gogh, etc.), and the greatest teachers were usually met with violent adversity (Jesus, Ghandi, etc.), and how often was Jesus complimented on a sermon or David on a Psalm? This is a concern until I am reminded that even in death it is not I who will have done anything but Christ through me, and so while this makes me even more undeserving of compliments it makes me more comfortable with speaking, because it is no longer I who speak, but Jesus through me.

I have friends with different sayings or habits or ticks that I have picked up over time, I wonder if the idea of Jesus speaking through someone is similar to this; the more time one spends with Jesus the more they pick up on his habits, his sayings, his voice inflections—and this is of course not so much a literal thing, but in the same way that when I say a phrase that my close friend says all the time it is my friend speaking through me, so it is when I speak truth that Jesus breathes all the time…I am just trying to understand how God “speaking through” someone works, it is a confusing idea and if I am to be spoken through I want to present as little resistance as possible.

Praise God for using such a damaged vessel as myself, and for doing things that are beyond my understanding (whether this is such an instance or not)!

…grace…

And I’ve been given this great gift, but bother myself with the wrapping paper. A paper cut from unwrapping a treasure chest should be so quickly overlooked, but I cry wolf, and when I’ve been comforted I find something else to turn my ungrateful whimpers towards. The temperature of the room, perhaps? And while you’re at the thermostat, I pull some bills from your pocketbook on the coffee table (that never deserved to be a resting place for selfishness and greed) and slip them in my shoe—for it’s my sins that seem to guide my ways when I concern myself with wrapping paper and temperature preference. And though you know your wallet’s light, you smile and comfort me once more…dear God, what a wretched piece of work I am! What a broken monster I’ve become!

Thank you for the treasure chest that I don’t appreciate—but someday I will appreciate it. Someday, when paper cuts become lacerations, and I’ve been burned and frozen over time and time again, then I will appreciate.

It’s not fair that you took those wounds for me. I guess all I have left, then, is “thank you for the treasure chest.”

Memory Lapse

It’s strange, really. We dedicate our lives to the creator of the universe, and things get changed and we start to understand the meaning of words like love, hope, peace, joy, faith…life starts to mean something, things start to make sense (often only after a period of intensified confusion, but we get there eventually). There is this guy, his name is Jesus and he hasn’t been around for about two thousand years, and his life is still shaking people up and doing really crazy things. And I say he hasn’t been around, but I’ve talked with him, I try to regularly, because it is ridiculous how much he loves people and I want to be like that. He talked a lot about another guy, his “Father in heaven,” who has a bunch of different names but most people usually call him God, because he apparently created the universe and is omniscient and omnipresent and supernatural and such. And Jesus said that when you “give your life” to God, he heals you and gives you those things, those words; love, hope, peace, joy, faith. And there is no end to those things when they’re from God.

But what’s really strange is how easy it is to forget all that. It’s not hard to believe in God when things are going good. It’s not difficult to give your life to God when you don’t feel like you need to fix anything. It’s quite easy to have faith when we don’t need it, isn’t it? It’s when things go wrong that believing in God is hard. It’s when there are things in our life that we know need fixing that it’s difficult to just let God handle it. And most of the time, we know what needs to be done. Most of the time, the answer to every problem, the solution to every struggle, the repair for everything that’s broken in our lives is simply to love God. When it all comes down to it, all we ever really need to do is be in love with Jesus. It doesn’t matter how complicated our lives are, it doesn’t matter how hard of a decision we have to make or how painful things may be, if we’re honest with ourselves, the only real answer to our cries for help is Jesus. There is nothing complicated about it. It’s not a lot of steps to remember, it’s not anything we need to practice for, and it feels like cheating sometimes because it’s so easy, but it really is that simple.

Why are the simplest concepts sometimes the hardest to execute?

Why is it that something so easy in theory seems so hard in reality? Because we can tell ourselves this, we can be told this by others, it doesn’t matter how well we know it’s right—that doesn’t always make any less difficult to carry out. Just because a solution is obvious doesn’t mean that it’s easy; there is a big difference between knowing where to go, and actually getting there. And this can be really discouraging sometimes, can’t it? It’s one thing to be lost, but when you know what needs to be done and STILL aren’t able to do it, it’s a lot more discouraging. People give advice, and sometimes they say things that really click with us and really help us along; other times they say things that we already know, and that just seems to make the whole situation more frustrating.

So what can we do about this? How can I make simple things simple?

I have a feeling that the God Jesus talked about has a pretty much infinite understanding of how we work, how we think, what we can and can’t do, and what our limits are. There’s another guy who was fairly influential in the creation of Christianity, his name is Paul, and he wrote a letter to the church in Corinth. At one point in this letter (which I think would have taken quite awhile to read, let alone write), he says that God will never let his children be tempted beyond what they can bear (1 Cor. 10:13). Which means I’ll never be tempted to worry, I’ll never be tempted to anger, I’ll never be tempted to anything that I can’t withstand. And of course this doesn’t mean we’ll never have hard times (Matt. 5:10-12, John 15:18-19, Acts 14:22, Rom. 8:16-17, 2 Cor. 1:5, 2 Cor. 4:8-10, 2 Tim. 1:8, 2 Tim. 3:12, 1 Peter 4:12-13, to name a few), but what it does mean is that even though the answer we are looking for is right in front of our faces, God understands that it’s not as easy as it sounds.  He knows that we’re human, he knows we fall, and he knows that it takes us awhile to get it all figured out to the point that we can actually go in the direction we know we need to.  We can try to fix things on our own and fail, and God will pick us up.  And we can try to fix things on our own again, and fall again, and he will pick us up again.  And we can fall
and fall
and fall
and
fall
and
f
a
l
l.
And God will always be there to pick us up and say, “It’s alright.  I love you.”  We can fall until we can’t stand, and then he will carry us.  (Despite the cheesiness of the ‘Footprints’ poem, it’s true.)  And eventually, we will get it.  We will figure out what it means to fall in love with Jesus, and we will understand why that’s all we need to do.  And as long as we’re trying for that—as long as we’re trying to go in the direction we know we should be—God will always be there to help us back up.  And sometimes it does seem too easy, like somehow we’re cheating life out of our pain and suffering and worry and distress…but I’d rather have hope than misery, wouldn’t you?