Hiccupz

I had a dream a couple of nights ago. I was in a parking lot, driving my dad’s car. As I went to pull out of the parking lot, I scraped another car. Why is it always the parked cars?? Why is it a Beemer?? I got out to look at the damage. A few scrapes on the front of the BMW, and a long scrape all the way down the side of my dad’s car. Great. And then the emotions came flooding over me: guilt, shame, despair. I hate disappointing my dad. All my life, I have just wanted to make him proud of me, but then things like this happen: one foolish moment can ruin all those years of striving to please, or so it feels. I thought about his face when I would have to tell him about what I did to his car. How I dreaded that moment. True, he would forgive me, he always does, but he would still be disappointed. He would probably regret letting me borrow his car. I wondered if he would ever truly trust me. I realized that I could have been overreacting: he’s my father, he will forgive me and accept me and love me through it. And perhaps it was because of these truths that I made yet another resolution in my heart not to disappoint him again for a very long time. I thought about how I could avoid the same thing from happening, how I would drive very carefully and leave plenty of room for error. The very last thing that I wanted to do was fail my father, and I was determined to succeed.

After waking from this rather intense dream, I thought about the incident with the car and all of the emotions that I had felt. It felt so real. And then I thought about my relationship with my heavenly Father. Honestly, when I fail Him, it looks rather different. Sure, I feel convicted and guilty. Sometimes it even overwhelms me with shame. But usually, I stand a little embarrassed before God, apologize for my sin, and then move on. Unfortunately, I take the perfect love and pure acceptance and total forgiveness of my Father for granted.

If you really viewed God as your father, would it change the way you lived your life?  When we sin, is it against a faceless judge with whom we have no relationship or is it against our loving Father who raised us and loves us so tenderly?  Instead of viewing God as this abstract, impersonal Super-Being, let us come to know Him as our true Father.  When we understand Him as our Father, sinning against Him becomes personal, real, heartbreaking, and it provides the motivation to live a life worthy of the calling.  He is so very good.

Dear Father,

I am sorry for taking You for granted. May my heart break for sin. May I be far more concerned about pleasing You than how I am concerned about pleasing my earthly father, who you gave me as an example. May I wholeheartedly seek to please You, to obey You, to glorify You in everything that I say and do. May sin never be a little thing to me. May I resolve over and over to do whatever it takes to honor You.

I love You,

Your daughter

Water drops from the clouds and touches everything under it. The dry leaves and the thirsty trees, only one thing do they need: rain. And though there are countless plants and the grass extends forever, each cell is taken care of perfectly. The clouds, heavenly faucets, have a seemingly endless supply of water, limitless. Many people hate rain, the inconvenience of it, but it’s a beautiful process of these small rain drops falling from the heavens like gifts and sustaining all of life below it. When it rains, instead of despising it, know that this is God’s miraculous way of caring for all of the needs of His plant-life below. And at the same time, be assured that just as He has provided for a small blade of grass, He will also provide for you in His perfect way. He provides with abundance, with a limitless supply of blessings and goodness.

Matthew 6:26 – “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”

When a girl is in love with a boy, her whole world changes.

You know what I’m talking about; we might use words like “obsessed” or “extreme” to describe her.  It’s like she loses her identity and forgets who she even was before he came along.  She is somehow at his mercy.  She loses her will and he becomes everything.  She’ll sit in her room for hours just waiting for him to call or come.  She’ll wait for years for him, her hope untouched.  He consumes her every thought, hope, fiber.  Without him, it’s like she starts to die on the inside, like the life within her begins to diminish.  He is her very heart, breath, and life.  How can you truly live without your heart or without your breath?

But when she’s with him, it’s like she comes to life again and nothing else in the world matters.  Every second of life is beautiful and romantic and breathtaking, and she finds herself doing things she never could have imagined before she fell in love with him.  Her eyes are fixed on him in a way that nothing could change.  All of her previous well-thought-out hopes, plans, dreams – she cannot even remember them anymore.  They seem to have slipped into the background.  He is all that matters.

It’s probably pretty annoying to others around her.  They probably tell her she’s being foolish or stupid and they definitely do not understand.  They might say, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” or some other catchy saying.  But it doesn’t matter to her, for in him she has everything and she’ll give up anything to keep him.

And this is exactly how we were created to live with our first love, Jesus Christ.  “Whom have I in heaven but You?  And earth has nothing I desire besides You.  My flesh and my heart may fail, but You are the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”  Psalm 73:25-26

A hiccup from the summer.  A summer thought on a cold, winter day…

I was sitting outside today, admiring the beauty of our Lord. It was a sunny summer morning when a butterfly flew past me. I watched it for a while as it fluttered about, showing off its colorful new wardrobe. Sometimes it would barely move its wings as it gracefully glided through the air while other times it would flap frantically to stay above ground. It went up and down, side to side, and in loops here and there, but no matter what it did, it was full of grace and beauty. Though sometimes its flight was easy and other times its flight was harder, the truth that outweighed everything else was that it was flying! This creature had been given a new life. It was no longer crawling along the ground in the dirt and mud, moving slowly and low in its abilities. No, now it had the capability to fly above that old life and experience things that it never could before. Though the butterfly had its struggles, they were overshadowed by the gift of being a beautiful butterfly, a gift that even at its lowest point triumphed over the caterpillar’s highest points.

We, as Christians, are not promised an easy flight after we begin a new life with Christ. In fact, we are promised persecution and difficulties. Sometimes we can glide easily through our circumstances and a relationship with God is light and care-free it seems. Other times, it feels like we have to flap frantically just to survive and a relationship with God feels harder in light of circumstances. No matter what a Christian’s life looks like, that child of God has been bought by the precious blood of Christ and is an heir to a heavenly kingdom for the rest of eternity. Whether the flight there is simple or full of pain, the metamorphasized person, the Christian, can always hold onto the hope of an eternity with God and the gratitude of being saved and given a new life. That person is no longer a slave to sin, crawling in the mire and mud. No, God has given that soul the ability to fly above that old life and experience God like he could not do before. Though there are struggles, they are far outweighed by the salvation from the old life and the glory of God in a new life.

Sometimes we forget what God saved us from. Can you imagine where you would be had God not saved you? You would be crawling along in the dirt. Praise God that we can flutter in our new life, revealing our beautiful new wardrobe: the glory of God.

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.”  1 Peter 1:3-6

We had an unexpected visitor on Christmas night, and it wasn’t Santa.

My mom opened our front door to two birds nesting in the wreath. Startled, one flew away, and the other flew right through the open door into the house. Needless to say, we were all thrilled and confounded by the adventure. A bird in the house! The kids screamed and tried to make sense of it, the young adults chased it around grabbing at the prize, my mom went about cooking dinner, and my dad googled how to get a bird out of the house. We chased it from room to room to room. It made a lovely star as it rested on top of our Christmas tree, but one shake of the tree sent it flying again. I’m not sure who was tiring who: the bird or us! It flew out of reach onto a high window sill and so we all decided to sit down to dinner while we waited for it to move again. And as the bird sat on the sill, its heart pounding out of its chest, looking out and longing for the out of doors, I was hit with the irony of it all. Both the bird and my family wanted the same exact thing. We both wanted the bird out! So why the struggle?!

After dinner, we were able to corner the bird in my room while my friend caught the bird in his hands. He recounted to me the feeling of the bird’s frantic heartbeat against his skin. The poor thing probably thought he was breathing his last breath, about to be an after-dinner snack or something. But to its great surprise, the bird was taken to the front porch and released. Free.

And still the irony of the situation echoed in my heart. I remember a time in my life when I was trapped, by sin, by meaninglessness, by apathy. And yet I thought I had some freedom worth holding onto. Though God was pursuing me, I feared the claustrophobia of having to surrender everything to him: my freedom, my dreams, my future, my heart, my life. I tried to do it halfheartedly as I longed for something greater than myself. And the irony was that we wanted the same thing: my freedom. Then one day, I raised my white flag. He captivated my heart and I gave it all. He held me in His strong hands, as He led me to a world bigger than I had ever known, and released me to a life greater than I had dreamed of, with Jesus.

“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” Matthew 16:25

I was at my friend’s house the other day, a young mother with a toddler. The baby was sitting on her mother’s lap as some other people and I were sitting around the table talking. The mother was giving her baby chunks of apple to suck on, which the baby was absolutely loving. Then, all of a sudden, the baby decided to stop sucking on it and tried to swallow the chunk of apple. The baby started coughing, and immediately her mother took action. First the mother told her child to spit it out, but the baby did not want to give up the tasty chunk of apple. So then, the mother was forced to stick her fingers into the baby’s mouth and pull the apple out. It was a struggle, and when the baby was finally forced to surrender the tasty apple, she let out a wail. She was infuriated, so angry at her mother for taking away something so good. The baby’s face had anger and confusion all over it, and then it turned to sadness, as the tears began to flow and the baby cried and cried for her loss. She simply could not understand that that delicious chunk of apple could have caused her to choke and maybe even die, that as tasty as it tasted, it would only end in pain and possibly death. But she didn’t understand that. All she saw was something seemingly good and delicious being ripped out of her very mouth, while she was enjoying it. After a good cry, the baby began to calm down, though probably still somewhat confused, as she found comfort in the arms of her loving mother.

I knew those strong emotions of anger and sadness all too well. My own spirit had made those same intense expressions that I saw on the face of that baby. Anger, when something is taken away from you that you believe should have been yours. Sadness, and the pain that lingers once that someone or something is gone. The injustice, the cruelty, the insensitivity. Or is it love? When something or someone that I love is taken away from me, it is out of love, a mother’s love, a Father’s love, a love that cares more for me than I even know how to. A love that sees the bigger picture and the destruction and pain that might come to my life if it is not taken away. A love that longs to be gracious and does not withhold good from those whose walk is blameless. An unfailing, unending love that changes lives. And it is when we see this love that we can, even with unanswered questions, find comfort in the arms of our loving Father.

“For the LORD God is a sun and shield; the LORD bestows favor and honor; no good thing does he withhold from those whose walk is blameless.”  Psalm 84:11

“Yet the LORD longs to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show you compassion. For the LORD is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!”  Isaiah 30:18

A few months ago, I was living in a house with six other girls. Needless to say, it was a lot of fun all the time! Within this house, my friend and I shared the living room as a bed room. We embraced it as our own, so it hardly even looked like a living room anymore, though I hadn’t seen very many bedrooms with a fireplace in them. Anyways, my friend and I had pretty different schedules those days. She had a job that starts at 8am, so she generally went to bed early and woke up early. My job, on the other hand, had more flexible hours, so I could go to bed later and wake up later. We shared these rickety old metal bunk beds that were not as stable as they could be and were definitely louder and creekier than they should be. Each night, I was faced with the challenge of crawling onto my top bunk while my roommate was sound asleep in the bottom bunk. And each night, I probably startled her awake!  With the metal rickety sounds and the entire bed moving, she probably felt like she was in the middle of an earthquake or WWIII.

One night after I had tried my hardest at gracefully sliding into my bed, only to cause the same combustion as usual, I lay there as still as I could, thinking. No matter what I do, my actions will have a direct impact on my sister below me.

Yet that is precisely how God created us to live. God created us to live in community with others and for all of us to be connected like a body, with Christ as the head. We literally cannot move without touching someone next to us. Though we sometimes feel isolated and that no one sees or cares about who we are or what we do, this could not be further from the truth, whether we like it or not. A sin “done in secret” does not exist, as sin always destroys and whether you expect it or not, the sin will affect those directly involved, those indirectly involved, those not involved at all, and always our relationship with God. Though we try to go unnoticed or avoid community, we have been created in a way that this is impossible. And thank God that we are not each our own little island. But as much good as this community can create, the same degree of hurt can result. We need to be selfless and conscious of our actions, behaviors, thoughts, and motives, and search ourselves, lest we grieve the Holy Spirit within us and hurt those around us. If we must impact others, and we must, let it be full of blessings rather than curses.

“Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.  Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.  There is one body and one Spirit – just as you were called to one hope when you were called – one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” Ephesians 4:2-5

It was a dreary day in the neighborhood today. It is amazing how much the weather can affect your mood and attitude. It was wet and gray today, with huge, dark storm clouds looming above me. The heavy clouds seemed to make my spirit feel heavy and gloomy as well and I found myself adopting my surroundings. How fickle we humans are. Had it been sunny, I may have been whistling to myself, but as it were, my outlooks felt hopeless and bleak. Satan’s temptations to despair seemed stronger than ever and it just seemed like everywhere was dark and hopeless, that this dark sky spanned over the entire planet. But that was not true, for I looked to the horizon, as far as my eye could see, and I saw a glorious break in the clouds, where the rays of sunlight were brilliantly shining through. Just because it was dreary and dark where I was did not mean that that was everything. The looming cloud above me had enveloped me, feeding me the lie that all was hopeless and what I saw above me was all there really was and I found myself believing things like, “This must just be how everything is: hopeless.”

Lies!

In plenty of other places at the exact moment, the sun was shining victoriously, and even above all the gloomy clouds overhead was pure sunlight. Though I could not see that at the moment, it was still completely true. And I began to feel my hope rising, knowing that though my current situation might feel dark and hopeless, that wasn’t the end of the story. God holds the victory for now and forevermore and He is always shining His glory, even if we cannot see it at the present moment. There is always reason to hope because the clouds always disappear eventually. Distant rays of sunlight remind me that my Lord gives me a reason to hope, which cannot be touched by circumstances.

Psalm 27:13 – “I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”

Psalm 94:1 – “O Lord, the God who avenges, O God who avenges, shine forth.”

Have you ever noticed what hypocritical drivers we are? The other day I was driving and I ran through a stop sign, simultaneously cutting off another driver. In my defense, the stop signs were new to that intersection and I was used to having the right of way. In addition, I felt terrible for my mistake and how it might have affected the other driver. Unfortunately, the other driver did not know any of this: my excuse, my regretful response, nothing. Yet she let me pass without a dirty look or angry honk. Moments later, someone merged in front of me, not cutting me off, but slowing my pace. Immediately, my countenance changed and I found myself giving the driver in front of me a sarcastic driving lesson in my head, with my Christian music playing in the background. Though I had just done much worse, I didn’t offer a fraction of the grace that had been offered to me, let alone consider the possibility that my offender might have had a decent excuse or regretful response. Instead, I selfishly and arrogantly judged and condemned.

Unfortunately, our hypocrisy is not just restricted to our driving habits, but reaches to all corners of our lives. We are quick to judge and react, and oh so slow to forgive and understand. The world revolves around ourselves and when someone offends us, World War III breaks out.  But when we offend another, we have an excuse and expect to be understood. I talk to my friend about another person, bashing them because they gossip. Or I condemn someone for wasting time watching sports while I spend all day at the store.

Are we so blinded by the plank in our eyes? How it grieves the Spirit to see this.  Oh Lord, let us see You more clearly. Let us forgive others as You have forgiven us and love as You have loved us.  Thank You for the grace that You continually pour out.

Colossians 3:13 – “Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”

Ephesians 4:23 – “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”

An event has been popping up in my life recently, so I finally determined it was worth putting on paper. Yesterday, I was stuck in stop-and-go traffic, horns beeping, drivers aggravated, when I noticed a duck on the side of the road. The duck was carelessly waddling around, about a foot away from the perilous cars. I watched the duck for awhile, as if my vigilance would keep it out of harm’s way, but little by little, the duck inched its way closer to traffic. My car was forced to move, but my last glance of the duck was of his head stretching over the curb, pecking at something in the street. The duck was literally reaching his head into traffic. My insides froze and muscles tightened as I hoped for his well-being.

Then today, in a near deja vu, I was racing down the highway when I noticed a deer on the side of the road, munching on some grass. The deer was standing on the shoulder, where the grass meets the gravel, a couple of feet from bolting traffic, and it seemed as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Again my insides screamed in concern for this clueless creature. Neither the duck nor the deer seemed to have any idea how near they were to a fatal accident; they didn’t even glance at a passing car once. And yet their oblivion did not change the fact that they were only moments away from being roadkill, only moments away from death. In my mind, it didn’t even make sense for them to be grazing so close to the hard, black-topped road. The grass there was scarce and mixed with litter…How could it possibly be enjoyable? What’s more, only a few feet behind them was rich, green grass, and in a much safer location. Why do animals act like that?

Why do humans act like that? How often do we get so close to danger, at the cliff of sin, dancing carelessly at the edge? If only we would back away from the edge, getting far away from any chance of sin, then we could enjoy the safe, abundant living that God wants for us. Why do we put our necks out into danger when we don’t have to? And in what relationship is flirting okay as long as we do not take it further? The temptation will always be there, to flirt with sin and get as close as possible, but try not to fall over. Instead, let’s flee from it, resist it, and safely enjoy the luscious green pastures that God has prepared for us and to which He beckons us gently.

1 Corinthians 10:12-13 – “So if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you do not fall! No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.”

1 Timothy 6:11 – But you, man of God, flee from all this [sin], and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness.”