Dwellings

As children of God we should live in his house.
So often we come just to visit it.

I come in, unload my baggage at the door alongside my sneakers, soak in a bit of your presence and then politely say goodbye and leave. But if I really believe that I am your kid, that I AM a Child of God then I should live in your house,

That means I eat there, sleep there, brush my teeth there.

I bring my baggage past the welcome mat and dump it on the living room floor for us to deal with together, although admittedly you seem to do most of the cleaning up (kids are messy!). I don't just fill up on some weakly quota of God-presence.

I DWELL IN IT.

I sleep in God-peace and tell you my hopes for the day over breakfast. I listen to you as you tell me the way I should go, and then you tell me how much you love me. I worship as I enter the house and take you with me as I leave. I get to worship in the house all the time! I get to live  with my life soaked in the presence of the Holy Spirit. And that's crazy!

I don't just get to visit God's house but I am invited to live in it, because somehow God believes hanging out with me is a pretty rad thing. The God of the universe loves us and wants to adopt us as his own. Sometimes it feels easier to just visit God instead of live our lives with him. We get to control more that way, or at least we get to think that we do. When we live in God's house, he likes to give us all sorts of advice on how we do things, and that can be difficult for us. But this way we also cease to be spiritual orphans. God takes us in and claims us. He says that we are chosen, called and loved. He loves to spend time with us the same way a father loves to spend time with his kids. He speaks identity over us and calls us sons and daughters. With an option like that why should I continue to visit when the invitation to LIVE in that truth stands?

How lovely is your dwelling place,
    Lord Almighty!
 My soul yearns, even faints,
    for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh cry out
    for the living God.
 Even the sparrow has found a home,
    and the swallow a nest for herself,
    where she may have her young—
a place near your altar,
    Lord Almighty, my King and my God.

Blessed are those who dwell in your house;
    they are ever praising you. 

Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
    whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.
As they pass through the Valley of Baka,
    they make it a place of springs;
    the autumn rains also cover it with pools. They go from strength to strength,
    till each appears before God in Zion.

 Hear my prayer, Lord God Almighty;
    listen to me, God of Jacob.
 Look on our shield, O God;
    look with favor on your anointed one.

 Better is one day in your courts
    than a thousand elsewhere;
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
    than dwell in the tents of the wicked.
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.

 Lord Almighty,
    blessed is the one who trusts in you.

-Psalm 84

 "Sometimes "healing" comes in the form of strength to get you through even just the night, while believing fully and having that peace that everything will be okay"  

My friend said this in the midst of some crazy things happening in her life, and some of this blog entry is what I had written as a response of how her words described a season of sorts that I am in right now. I feel like right now God is putting me into a place of REFUGE, and recuperation, that Jesus is calling me into a place of relying on him more fully and in the process he's moulding my  heart to better fit into his.

I feel like this is part of the reason why believing that I can have healing, or that I am fully healed, is so hard sometimes. Because it's difficult to fully place myself into Jesus' hands and let him BE MY PEACE. I'm so stubborn and somehow I've been so tricked into the lie that maybe it's not going to be okay even though the GOD OF THE UNIVERSE says that it will be okay, in the end. I get worried that maybe it will happen again. That I will be hurt by someone else's actions. That I will have depended on someone too much so that when they let me down my life will go crashing down with it. And you know what? That's just a sign that I'm not entirely healed up yet. And I can say "it's been six years", or "it's been three years", or whatever, but time does not heal all wounds. Peace that Jesus has felt with my issues of the past and peace in how he is going to deal with my future is how I will know that I am healing.

Jesus is my peace. He's my security. My shelter from the storm.





Sometimes when
           You think you're pushing your movement, your manner, your message

it comes to light that maybe
those pushing things are just boxes
some filled with good intentions
       with valid points
            and valid dreams
                                    but also with those fears

You use busyness to cover that business
                   that never got taken care of.
That ambition is just sitting on top of
    the one time
                    when that one person
made a choice, of their own volition
that left you, head, heart, and mind
                 reeling, spinning

And now after the aftermath
moving out, moving on, pushing those boxes
            you're left without peace
and not because you didn't forgive
Oh no you forgave
but because you never left that war zone

Guard up
                battle gear
the sea is calm but you act like the war's still here

And maybe,            just maybe
       it's time you come out
              into the meadow land
and let someone dress those scabbed over battle wounds
It's time you rested while someone else
takes the first watch
         and the second
         and the third

Rest for our souls
Peace for our minds
And healing in letting go

Peace

Lately I've been stressed out. Like stupidly stressed.

I've been running around like crazy and trying to get school under control, while working lots, and just generally avoiding the things that are good for me, under the excuse that I don't have time for it. My de-stressor things, like hanging out with Jesus, and letting my artistic side out, and dancing and stuff like that. Which means that I have also been having a bit of a tough time clinging to that quiet place of God's peace. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Matthew 5:9 says "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God."

We are given peace, we have been fought over in order for God to put us in a place in relationship with him where peace can be ours! And now we are not just peace makers but peace bringers. We can bring God's supernatural peace into tense exam rooms, uncertain situations, and circumstances that seem hopeless. As children of God we have been marked with peace, and that should be visible to others.

Has anyone by fussing in front of the mirror ever gotten taller by so much as an inch? All this time and money wasted on fashion—do you think it makes that much difference? Instead of looking at the fashions, walk out into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They never primp or shop, but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them.

If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are never even seen—don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? What I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.    
-Matthew 6:27-33 MSG

Hope

You see hope starts out like an innocent flower, beautiful and delicate.

Then it grows and it can become monstrous. It outgrows the pot and crushes everything within it. It cracks the clay and it breaks the heart that was harbouring it. And when hope is delayed it stays that way. A hope deferred makes the heart sick. But when that hope is satisfied it's like the overgrown, tangled, gnarly plant shrinks back and recoils into the pot. Instead of being a rampaging reminder that hope has not come through and saved the day, it once again becomes a flower. A flower that stands for the faithfulness of a rightly planted hope.

Watch Me Fall Apart

Only love, only love
Give me shelter, or show me heart,
Come on love, come on love,
Watch me fall apart, watch me fall apart,
And I'll be yours to keep.
                                                    -Ben Howard, Only Love

I think this is a quintessential part of love; the ability to fall apart in the presence of someone else. To have your heart become totally bare and vulnerable in front of somebody. And it's a really hard thing to do. We as people long to uncover ourselves, and be authentic with each other, but after being burned by others who let us down or used our vulnerabilities for their gains it's not something that is easy to repeat. Just as it's human to long to be vulnerable with one another, to show our "true" selves, it is just as human to try and protect ourselves once we've been hurt before.

I find that gets in the way of my relationships. I have difficulty in cultivating deep friendships sometimes because I feel that once a friendship starts getting beyond just having fun and into the stages where we can discuss feelings, questions, and ponderings (the meaning of life, why we love, deep stuff like that :P ), I feel entitled to share some of the things that have hurt me. And in sharing these things I will probably fall apart. I'm suddenly becoming vulnerable to you because you now know the things that have come back to make me cry when I'm alone, the things that have haunted me in my sleep, the things that in moving past them I've had to admit that I am not strong. But in exposing myself myself there is something beautiful. It is true that I am not strong but it also becomes apparent that there is someone else who has been strong for me. Jesus' love over my life is fully exposed when I become vulnerable. Because what C.S. Lewis said was true, "to love is to be vulnerable".

So in letting someone else love me and in being able to reciprocate that love, vulnerability is required. And it's great, having that mutual understanding, that knowledge of the depth of a person in your friendships, romantic relationships, whatever your numerous relationships in life may look like. But it also hurts. That's the sadistic part of love I guess. Because love not only exposes your vulnerabilities it adds my vulnerabilities to your pile as well, allowing us to become hurt much more easily. But here's the thing, if we go through life loving others as authentically as possible, when we do get hurt, when others hurt us, when life sucks, when the people love hurt us, we will have someone to come alongside us and comfort us. Someone who knows our vulnerabilities and does not view them as weaknesses but simply as the wear and tear of loving authentically in an imperfect world.

In a community where we can learn to love like that we find beauty and that's part of the point of love I think.

Renovations

We are molehills begging to be made into mountains. We want more than what we have right now. We want to be more than what we are right now. And when God calls us to something greater, something that will begin to push the tectonic plates of our lives together and cause us to grow into a mountain, we shrink back. Our view of the mountain from the molehill was really just a large hill and anything bigger than that, like a real mountain, is too big for us to imagine.

C.S. Lewis said it like this (and he was taking it from another guy), "Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
 -Mere Christianity

I think this ties back into the whole being made in the image of God thing. We want to be better than we are right now because we know that we're imperfect people. We long for the perfection that God created us for. And in our pursuit of this perfection we get to the point where we consider ourselves slightly above average and stop there, thinking that this is the best we can do. Then God in his perfect love sees us, and says "This is great! You're growing! Come let's get you growing further into my plans for you."

I heard a guy say once that God is easy to please but hard to satisfy. That's because he loves our little human accomplishments, our blundering around our temptations instead of simply stepping over them as once would a gap in the sidewalk. God can do this but we can't, not just yet. God wants perfection for us, and not just our smaller version but his perfection, in all of his godliness. He doesn't just want us to be a decent little cottage with small dreams, a small life and only following him to the point where we're "slightly above average". No, he wants a palace in which our choices and prayers impact the nations. He wants us to dream big and then stretch those dreams out so that we can love more, help more, and chase after God with all that we have regardless of how everyone else appears to be doing it. God wants more for you and me than anything we could have ever imagined, and it won't be easy, and it definitely won't be painless, but I believe that these 'renovations' will be worth it.

After letting this sit and stew for a couple of weeks, I think I'm ready to tackle and share what God's been showing me about sin and how we get to respond to sin within a mindset of grace.

Jeremiah 2:13 says "My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water."

This verse is talking about when we leave God, when we ignore God, when we push God away in order to accomplish something on our own. And God calls this sin! This totally convicts me, I try so hard to be independent sometimes, even to the point of pushing God out of the picture. I work too hard to get something done that wasn't really meant to be done by me. God loves to step into our situations and our lives so that he can help us reach our goals. When we work on our own it's like building broken cisterns.














Dictionary.com describes a cistern as "a reservoir, tank, or container for storing or holding water or other liquid." In the bible days people would build cisterns to collect rain water to save in case of a drought or an event like that. But since the cistern is only holding the water, over time it would get stale and wouldn't taste all that great. 

When we "build our broken cisterns" we may accomplish our goal but in the process we break ourselves. We wear ourselves thin, and when we finally go to put our reward, the fruits of our labor into our cisterns, it runs out because we're broken. And in doing this we sin.

Sin is sometimes described using the Greek term of missing the mark (don't ask me what it is in Greek, cuz I don't know), and I think that description works really well. In the context of this verse forsaking God is a sin because it misses the mark or the point of God asking us to stick with him. By sinning we miss the opportunity for God to fix us and use us! God doesn't want us to be broken cisterns, he wants us to be wells. Wells that have springs of water flowing beneath them so that the water is always fresh and clean and good. God wants to be that spring of living water that fills us and helps reach our goals.

When we sin it hurts us more than it hurts God I think. God gave us boundaries so that once we were right with him he could help us even more. When we choose to sin, by leaving him, by breaking his rules about how we treat others and ourselves, we damage ourselves. Working without rest is damaging to us because it wears us down and breaks us. Worshiping idols or loving something more than God places unrealistic expectations about what our idols can do for us, and how much they may love us in return. These things only leave us broken and hurting. 

But when we turn to God he works to reverse the damage that sin does to our hearts. When we give God our trust and our permission to change us, change our work, our situations, and our lives he can heal us form the sin that hurt us. God is so good at healing us and giving us what we need.

John 4:13-14 Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." 

Sin isn't the main focus here. It's the power that God's grace has in restoring us from the hurt that sin causes in our lives. God loves you more than you will ever know and it's his dream to lead you to the place where you can be whole in him. And not just whole as in not being broken or hurt anymore! God has plans to use you! Plans to use you to help shake and move the foundations of the world out of its broken, hurting state, and into the total freedom and love that God has for each and every one of us! God's grace will change your life and with it you will never be the same.