Fire with Fire

Fight fire with fire is a phrase I often hear people say, but I don't think they understand what it means.  You see, in fire prone areas sometimes to prevent a devastating wildfire people use controlled burns to keep flammable brush under tabs so that if wildfire does break out it won't be able to spread since it won't have the fuel necessary.  I personally have never seen a firefighter out at a house fire with a flame thrower trying to tame the flames.  But that's how we use the phrase often.  If you don't believe me just take a look at the body image debate currently occurring.  It saddens me to hear body shaming going on both ways, overweight and underweight, too much make-up and too plain.  Inasmuch as it is true that no matter what your body type you are beautiful, I think that this is still missing the point.  The point is that we cannot defeat body shaming through focus on the body, fighting flesh with flesh.  The only way to defeat it is to look beyond the flesh to the true nature of each person, the God-given, intricately woven beauty in the depths, once you catch sight of that beauty you cannot help but see beauty in every body you see, skin and bones or extra curvy, pimpled, short, tall, mediocre, short hair, frizzy hair, no hair, each one will exude beauty to you and when you catch this beauty you transmit it to others through your words and actions.  Another contemporary example is the ISIS crisis, people who spread fear, anger, and hate so vehemently that it cannot help but touch the depths of our souls.  The response I have seen has sadly often been fighting fire with fire.  Articles posted left and right about the danger of Muslims in America, hate spewed forth against these men and women, fear about how this is the end of time and we will be destroyed gruesomely by them if we do not first destroy them.  Fear, anger, hate.  But we are never told to take an eye for an eye, we are told to forgive as our Father forgave.  We are told to love.  We will never defeat hate by hate, we will only replace it, we will never defeat fear with fear, we only strengthen it, we will never defeat anger with anger, we will only multiply it.  But we can love.  Love is the antithesis of hate and fear.  We can forgive, anger cannot occupy a space that forgiveness inhabits.  We can listen to the words of our Teacher, who prayed "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" even as he died at the hands of evil men, and we can pray for our enemies.  Our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against rulers, principalities and powers of this dark world, so why do we continue to try to fight with fleshly weapons?  Today I challenge you, and I challenge myself, to ask what is the spiritual response to the fleshly circumstances that are rising against you today.  And I challenge you to fight fire with water, with a fire extinguisher, by smothering, by kicking dirt, by whatever means necessary, but for goodness sake, stop trying to fight fire with fire.

Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust

I've been chewing on a thought for a while now and I think it's time to share it with you my friends.  In Song of Solomon it says that "He has brought me to His banqueting table and His banner over me is love" and in Psalm "He prepares a table for me in the presence of my enemies, He anoints my head with oil, my cup overflows".  But to be honest, I don't always feel like I'm at a banqueting table, a lot of times I just feel hungry.  As I pondered this phenomenon one day, I remembered a picture of another banquet table.  In the movie Hook, after Peter has had a long hard day of  trying to remember how to be Peter Pan, he sits down at a huge banqueting table, but to his dismay it is covered from end to end with empty dishes.  Like Peter we are often brought to the banqueting table but see nothing but emptiness.  It is only when we begin to believe in the truths God has spoken, when we begin to trust that He will fill us, when we choose to live in joy and love in the moment in which we are, that we, like Peter, suddenly see a table filled with every delight imaginable, a table filled with enough for everyone at the table with more to spare for whoever we could desire to invite.  And every time we believe, we hear that same sweet voice in our hearts that says proudly "You're doing it, child!"  So don't wait to see the feast set before you to dig in today, take a huge bite of that ribeye or cake or donut and you will find that it is indeed there and that it will fill both your need and your desire.  Oh taste and see that the Lord is good!  A good practical step to start with?  Pray this, "Lord I thank You that Jesus Christ came to be the bread of life, I thank You that He gave His life that I might be filled with the goodness of God.  I believe that You are more than enough for my every need.  I believe that You are good and that You give good gifts to Your children.  I believe that You provide for me and I place myself in alignment with Your word that whoever hungers and thirsts for righteousness will be satisfied and that whoever believes in You and eats Your words will never hunger, and I say that I am hungry for You and Your words and Your righteousness."  Dig in.  This is the best meal you'll ever have.

Two are better

For my first post-wedding blog, I think it is only fitting for me to talk about a lesson learned from marriage.  You see, I haven't been willing to write for a while because I've felt like such a mess.  For the past 5 months or so I've been slowly picking up the pieces of my heart that have fallen around me due to various circumstances and each time I can't help but wonder how I got to a place that circumstances could break me like that.  I consider myself a strong person.  I consider myself a grounded person.  But the past two years have felt like a crushing weight to my soul.  So much loss.  So much fear.  So much loneliness.  So much that didn't go according to plan.
And then I got married.  You see there's this little thing in marriage called proximity.  If you get overwhelmed or peopled-out during the day, you still get to sleep next to a person.  You're around this person 24/7, and the funny thing is you care about them so you don't really want to give them crap just because you feel like crap. The first few months we were married, I was about to be done with myself.  I was trying so hard not to let all these negative emotions out on my husband and my feeble attempts failed.  I tried to deal with everything at once; again fail.  But little by little, day by day, my anguish was washing away.  Each time, I saw where these hurts came from and I asked myself, how did it get so far?  How did I fall like that?
And to be honest, I started to get a little scared.  If I could fall like that once, what was to keep me from falling like that again?  And to be honest, it could happen.  But God is faithful to pick me up and brush me off and set me back on the path of righteousness.  Along with that though, God spoke to me again one of the passages from our wedding vows, "Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil.  For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow.  But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!" (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 ESV).  I have found it a lot harder to fall now that I have Josh.  First off, he calls me out when I have something against someone, and I may not acknowledge his call out at first but I do end up dealing with it.  Second, it is a lot easier to tell when something in me is off when I'm constantly around another person and when isolation for the sake of isolation is so glaringly obvious.  Third, I love Josh too much to let him take the brunt of my bad moods because I need to deal with something, so I just deal with it.  Yes, it's a lot more work than I may have bargained for.  But oh yes, two are definitely better than one!