Prepositions

Today's blog has a little something in it for the English lovers among us.  I recall as a middle schooler learning how to diagram sentences.  Now I can't tell you what gets underlined and what gets a box around it or anything like that, but I can remember that I was taught to strike through prepositional phrases.  Those are the phrases that come after words like after, among, beside, above, etc.  And I can't say for sure that this is what I was actually taught, but what I remember is that we strike through them because they are not critical to the core of the sentence.  That idea never really made sense to me.  And today I'm thinking of two sentences that change profoundly as you change the prepositional phrase at the end: "God saves us through this trial" or "God saves us from this trial".

You see, when I was young, I always thought God was in heaven to save us from trials.  Look at the Israelites in Egypt.  God heard their cry for help.  He sent Moses.  He saved them out of slavery to the Egyptians and out of their cruel labors into a land flowing with milk and honey (whatever that means).  And with that perspective, I looked for God to save me from trials.  Hard relationships, God will take me out of it.  Sickness, clearly healing is the answer.  Everything hard or ugly was to be removed because God saves us from trials.

As I've gotten older, my perspective has shifted toward the God saves us through trials lens.  Look at Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.  God didn't take them out of the fiery furnace, but Jesus got up in that furnace with them until the king ordered them to be taken out.  Look at Paul.  Three times he pleaded with the Lord to take away the thorn in his flesh (again, whatever that means), but God told him that His grace was sufficient and that He would use that pain and weakness to bring His power and glory on the earth.  So with that perspective, I stopped waiting for God to take me out of trials and started looking for how God was shifting me through the trial.  Hard relationship, what can I do better?  Sickness, how can I learn to be content in this?  Everything hard or ugly was sticking around because that's how God was shaping my character.

In the last few days though I've started to think that maybe the answer isn't one perspective or the other.  It's more situational.  If I'm in a God saves us from situation, a God saves us through mentality will make me hopeless.  If I'm in a God saves us through situation, a God saves us from mentality will keep me from seeing what God is trying to teach me.  So then in every situation, there is a directive to pray to find which perspective is going to bring life in that moment.  Or perhaps the more simple answer is to just focus on God and know that whether He saves from or through, He's going to save and all things will work out for our good because that is His promise.  Hmmm I guess that strike through method works after all.  God saves through trials.  God saves from trials.  God saves.

Legacy

I've been thinking about these beautiful people a lot lately.  It's hard to imagine that they've both been on the other side of heaven for over 10 years now.  I still think about them often.  I wonder what they would think of the person I've become.  I wonder if they would be proud. 

Donald and Fannie won't be found in any history book for Donald's long years working at Mars or Fannie's skill at raising four daughters in the tumultuous 60's, 70's and 80's.  But we, their family, can't forget them.  For the first time in my life, I questioned the exact reason why it is that I am so inspired by them.  The world's standards certainly wouldn't place them on the list of the 10 most inspirational people of the 20th Century, but I would.  I believe it is because they demonstrated a life well lived.  These strong people lived what they believed, every day.  Sure they made mistakes, as all people do.  But the evidence of their faithfulness is demonstrated in the four courageous daughters they raised and the seventeen grandchildren their daughters raised in turn.  

I often find myself striving toward some great feat, a project, or a movement, in the hopes that by doing this I will change the world.  I admit, I sometimes look at my life and wonder what I am doing, that I must be wasting the potential within.  But then I thought about Donald and Fannie.  They never accomplished one "great" task but not a single fiber of my being thinks they missed their potential.  In fact, I do think that they were world changers.  I am constantly inspired by their faithfulness in the every day.  I often wonder how much world missions were affected by the time they spent on their knees and the sacrificial giving they poured out.  They loved with everything they had, they gave more than they had to spare, and they lived with integrity throughout their lives.  If this is a life to be inspired by, then perhaps my goals have been wrong.  Perhaps the goal is not a great feat or movement, perhaps instead the greatest life is the one lived faithfully in the small moments, it is the life that moves with the leading of the Holy Spirit, not the trend of the day.  

(baby Rose here)

And that brings me to these beautiful people right here.  If I take stock of who I am as an individual, what most people would call my personality, much of it traces to these wonderful people.  That efficiency, mind for processes, and love of the outdoors - that was passed down from them.  They raised five incredible children, who in turn had thirteen children themselves.  In each of us, the grandchildren, you can catch a picture of what Erhard and Nancy look like.  We have a thirst for adventure.  We have a heart for service.  We yearn to change the world.  Erhard was and Nancy is one of the strongest people I've ever met.  Their lives were not always easy, but they too knew the power of being faithful in the small things, in persevering especially when obstacles came up in their way, in loving with their whole hearts throughout their whole lives.  They also taught us that in the game of life there are no "gimme's", but that victory is the sweetest when you've truly earned it.

I could go on and on about the people that have written the legacy that I have the privilege of walking in, but I should stop, for now.  Instead, think of the beautiful legacy that you have received from those that came before you.  What's your favorite piece?  What has that taught you about living your best life?

The Sound of Silence

There is a roar rising up in my belly.  There is a movement stirring up in my bones.  It's coming out when I least expect it.  It feels like I'm coming to life again.  I have been known and have known myself to be a quiet, non-charismatic type of person.  But I'm finding it difficult to still the roar within.  The roar began unexpectedly though.  It didn't start with me seeking a shout.  It started when I sought silence.  And in the silence I've heard a sound that I cannot forsake.

Silence seems so innocuous, so inconsequential.  But there is a deep power in it.  Scripture says, "Be still and know that I am God", in the silence is the knowing.  In the silence a deep faith rises.  One that says, I can let go of my sense of control, I can let go of my need to do, I will trust that God is on the throne.  Scripture also says, "In repentance and rest will you be saved, in quietness and trust will be your strength".  I knew all of this, but last year when I was reading a book (Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzero, I can't over-recommend this book) it came to life for me.  The author suggests to begin practicing silence daily by setting a short timer for before and after your devotional.  I started with a two minute timer two to four times a day.  Even that is difficult for me most days.  The swirling of the world around me draws me in.  The religion I get stuck in tries to pull me away.  It says that my time would be better spent praying for someone or doing something.  But God has never failed to meet me in the silence.  He is never silent.  He has accomplished more in me and in my circumstances in two minutes than I have accomplished by fighting tooth and nail for months.  In taking an action of faith to believe that God is on the throne, I have experienced His reign.

Oh my dear friends, I wish this meant that I've arrived.  Instead it has only made the tax-collector's prayer more real to me, "Have mercy on me, a sinner."  In the presence of the One who is holier than I can comprehend, I find that I am more in need of His great mercy than I could understand.  And He gives it so freely.  And it is in that place of my being coming undone that the roar of heaven overtakes me.  The merciful, glorious roar that rises up to a King worthy of all praise and honor and glory.  The powerful roar coming from the Lion of Judah's lips that He allows me to share in, as His voice shakes the foundations of the earth, breaks off every chain, and rips open every grave.  The mercy of God alone permits me to share this wonder, because I fall so short so often from this magnificent call.  And before you say, well Rose, I know you and you're totally not there, let me say that I know that so much better than you will ever know.  Please share with me places where you've seen the goodness of God manifest in your life recently or share the desire of your heart to see Him in certain places in your life.

Oh the Humanity

Today I'm reflecting on the extreme grace and wisdom of God.  He knows when to come to us with humor, when to be what I would term harsh, when to be gentle and gracious.  He knows each situation is different and each individual unique and He speaks to each one individually as they can receive.  That's why I think the Lord knew what he was doing when He started speaking a phrase to me in December whenever someone did something rude, inconsiderate, or offensive, "Oh my gosh, it's almost like they're human!" or "Oh my gosh, they aren't perfect!"  The humor in it disarmed me every time and I had to chuckle.  It is as if in my mind I expect that no one else has a bad day and is just short on patience, or that we all have it all together, or even that other people should be perfect.  Lord knows I'm not.  I suppose that's why He started saying that to me. 

It's about how I look at people, not instantly equating what they are doing with who they are or making assumptions about their motives because of their actions.  It's about even when it's clear as day that the action was hurtful, making the conscious choice to admit that I don't know what led them to that action but I will release them from it; whether it was made from a place of hurt, frustration, exhaustion or malicious intent is not mine to decide any more nor should that weigh into my decision to forgive.

 

Prior to about a year or two ago I thought that I was a very non-judgmental person.  And in some ways I am.  I've heard people share some messy or dark things without batting an eye because the Lord has shown me that thing isn't who they are, even if that's where they are.  But still, I have notions in my mind about how things should be.  Some of those notions are even grounded in the realities of what is right and what is wrong.  But there is a place in me that is coming to understand the phrase: "First remove the log from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."  It doesn't negate that there's a speck.  It doesn't negate that when someone cuts me off in traffic in a way that jeopardizes both of our safety, it is wrong.  It simply means that instead of slamming on my horn and shouting "IDIOT!" in my head, I can give grace (and maybe a little love tap on my horn...okay, so I haven't mastered this one yet).

The crazy part of it all is that during the period of time that I've heard that phrase, "It's almost like they're human", deep places of bitterness that I've been working to dislodge have begun to shake.  Mercy truly does triumph over judgement. One of the other highlights to me was the other night, when I messed up (as I so often do), when the guilt of my failure was beginning to well up (as it often does), I heard that same hyperbole deep in my spirit: "Oh my gosh, it's almost like you're human!"  The tables had turned.  And as I had begun to show mercy to those who had/were wronging me, the Lord also invited me to show mercy to myself.

I wish I could say that I'm all the way "there" with this mercy thing but I'm not.  The beauty of it is that I don't have to be.  God never asked us to have it altogether.  In fact, the gospel is the story of how when we were at our darkest, our lowest, God loved us and paid the price for us anyway.  So I'm feeling pretty I'm excited for this next season.  I'm excited because I know that I don't have it all together.  I know that I'm more than a mere mortal through Christ (it's in the Word).  But I also know that God is still working in me to will and to work for His good pleasure.  And so I'm rejoicing in my weaknesses, because I know that through them God can make His power known (also in the Word).  Because y'all that know me know that I'm a mess without Him!  Thanks for being on this journey with me, until next time.

Peace!

Expectations and Hope

In the last week or two I started to notice that a joy leak had sprung up in my heart; I had let a sneaky thief in through a back door and I was (still am) paying for it.  A couple of dear friends helped me pinpoint its name in just a few minutes but the eviction process is taking much longer than that.  Expectations.  In my younger years I used to say that if you don't have expectations you can't be disappointed, and in some ways that worked, but in many ways I hadn't actually let go my expectations, I just started expecting the worst.  In more recent years, in my quest to be "more spiritual" I had decided that it was holy to have expectations, and in that way I fell prey to the common confusion between expectations and expectancy (more on that in a moment).

To be real, I hadn't realized just how many expectations had risen up in my life.  They created a landscape of unholy mountains for myself and my loved ones to climb.  And each time that one of these monuments to perfection proved to be insurmountable, my heart was left open to disappointment and bitterness.  Over the course of years, the ruins of these expectations left scars that would send ripples of pain through my soul each time I would think of the situations that led to them.  And what I'm learning is that the only way to overcome these scars is to allow myself to mourn the loss of those dreams.  The dreams of how things could be, of how things "should" be.  Because the pain of a broken dream is a real pain.  But for true healing to occur I can't stay there, and neither can you.  We have to clear the landscape.  Not only of our broken dreams, but of every vision, realized and far off, of what life should be like.  For me, I had to even clear away the things I believe are going to be God things in the future, because anytime I focus my heart on the gift of God rather than God Himself I fall hard.  (There's a tiny story in the Bible about that too, if you want to read about Abraham and Ishmael).

But here's where the beauty and joy begins to make its return.  I can't leave the landscape of my heart empty.  I must fill it.  So instead of expectations I choose to fill it with expectancy, or a word I like better: hope.  I don't hope for the gift of God.  I hope because God is giver.  He is good.  He is faithful.  He will come through.  He has great plans for me.  And I know that not everyone is like me.  Some people God gives extremely specific plans and they see the map of their life and they follow it and their perseverance is rewarded.  I've practically begged God to do this for me.  I've been gently prodded by people to make this map for my life so I can be more godly.  But that isn't how God speaks to me.  He asks me to trust.  To sit quietly and let Him be God and wait on Him to open the doors.  And when I receive that, I feel such a flood of peace and joy.  And when I surrender to God's will, I see those things that I walked in, that didn't work out, truly were places God had led me, He just used them in a different way than I expected.  He used them to make me who I am, to bring me to where I am.  And in that moment, hope brings new hope. 

As always, I am a work in progress.  Every day is a challenge to choose hope over expectations.  Every day I make the wrong choice.  But I'm starting to choose right sometimes.  And God has more than enough grace for me.  What about you?  How does God speak to you?  Does He use long winding maps or does He ask you to take step waiting for the next to be revealed?

Be-You-tiful

At their core, a person, or take it one step further...at your core, you, before the fall or after Christ's redemption, are good. You are created in God's image and were never meant to "lose yourself".  How do those statements make you feel?  To me, those statements feel like heresy.

But it is no heresy, the secret is the tiny phrase "in Christ".  In Christ I am new (2 Cor 5).  In Christ the person I was created to be is the real me.  God created each of us uniquely.  He created us wonderfully (Ps 139).  We were meant to be seen because we, the real us, reflect the glory of Christ (2 Cor 3).  A phrase I've heard over and over again that sounds so godly is: "I don't want people to see me, I want people to see Christ".  But this is a lie.  If you are in Christ then when people see you, they'll see Christ.

After my last blog post, I've been on the journey of learning about how to feel emotions rightly.  Not to shut down but also not to listen to every whim of my heart.  To be healthy and grounded.  And so when my sweet coworker told me about the book study her entire church is doing, "Emotionally Healthy Spirituality", I wanted in.  The questions above were inspired by this book as I wrestled with the chapter, "Finding yourself to find God".  The idea that God doesn't desire us to continually die to ourselves, but that our old self died with Christ already and that our new self, the self created in God's image was meant to be discovered and nurtured was a hard pill for me to swallow.  As usual, I decided to take this up with Holy Spirit and Scripture and what I found surprised me.  While we will lose our lives if we seek them, Scripture did seem to back up this concept of "our new self" rather than the understanding I had of my "self" being lost in Christ and that anytime that "self" popped up it was getting in the way of His glory.  Our new self is created in the image of Christ, it is immersed in the depths of Christ and it is growing into His image.  Would God want to hide something that looks like Him?  Would He want to hide something that brings Him glory?  The answer that I'm finding is no, He wouldn't.

So that begs the question, who are you in Christ?  To answer that question, I'll ask another.  What are your favorite parts of Christ, what is it about Him that draws you?  Because those will give you a clue to who you are.  For me it's these: Always there. Faithful.  Rich in MERCY.  Abounding in steadfast love.  Beautiful, the One who paints the sky in shades of pink, purple and blue.  Delightful. Glorious.  Your personality is from Him.  It isn't something that needs to be changed or overcome.

This journey is far from over (same with the book, I've only read 3 chapters so far!)  But I'm excited to take it, and I hope that you too find the strength and support you need to take on the journey before you.  Feel free to reach out to me to talk about your own journey or with Scriptures you love about this subject!  And thanks for your patience with my thought jumble.

The Journey Back to Self

You probably think this post is going to be about how I lost myself after the birth of my first child, all the work of diaper changes and feedings and the eternal nights, because according to society my son is a terrible sleeper (p.s. according to me he's just a baby who loves his mom and is not so great at the sleeping bit).  That is not what this post is about.  In fact, it is the opposite.  Surprisingly, the Bible is right when it says when you lose your life you will find it.  This is the story of how almost 12 months ago now I began to find myself again. 

You see, about 6 years ago I began facing some formative moments in my life.  They could have made me, but instead I let them break me and I haven't felt like myself ever since.  It began when I had to leave Africa because I just couldn't stop getting sick.  Oh, nothing major or terrible.  But a staph infection here and strep throat there and before I knew it I was missing so much of the work I was there to do to be sequestered in my room trying to recover but the relief just never came.  So I, along with the leadership there, made one of the toughest decisions of my life and I "came home" a couple months early.  It didn't feel like home.  I thought that was going to be the springboard to the rest of my life.  I loved the work so much.  I loved the people so much.  I didn't want to be in America, I wanted to be in Africa.  It felt like a resounding defeat.  And I left it as that.  When I arrived home, I was welcomed with a barrage of rumors.  The most well-meaning, kindest people I know were asking if I'd "left my calling" so that I could be with my boyfriend.  Out of respect for the wonderful people involved I won't belabor this part of the story, except to say that I faced the devastating destruction of relationships over the course of the next few years.  Perhaps the reason it haunted me for so long was because I wasn't an innocent victim in all of it.  I was as much responsible for causing these beautiful people pain as they were responsible to me.  In what I was sure was supposed to be the happiest time in my life, I struggled with deep depression, sobbing on the bathroom floor, begging God to take the pain away, and swearing that inasmuch as it fell to me I would never hurt anyone like that again and I would never be hurt like that again.

And this profoundly emotional and intuitive soul did just that, I didn't hurt like that anymore.  I didn't feel at that level.  I didn't speak my mind at that level.  I restricted myself from judging any action of anyone else and slowly my ability to discern what was happening around me faded away.  I constantly carried with me the weight of shame and failure.  I hadn't been enough for Africa.  I hadn't been enough for the ones I loved.  I failed them and I failed myself.  And no matter how I fought to lose the numbness of it all, I couldn't.  Don't get me wrong.  In the last 6 years, God has been incredibly good and faithful to me.  I married an amazing man, I achieved my goal of finishing my bachelors, I've been surrounded by many friends both new and old, and I experienced the wonders of new cities, beaches, and the majesty of forests and mountains.  But in the midst of it all, I've longed to truly know who I am again.

One of the biggest signals to me that there was something out of place in my personality came a couple of years ago when I took a personality training at work.  The pre-training assessment told me that I was a pure, unwavering analyzer.  According to this, I'm closed off and prefer to focus on problems and solutions than on people.  I would prefer no one talk about themselves to me but instead get to the issue at hand and leave my personal life in the mysterious shadows.  I was shocked.  I have a good dose of German efficiency in my soul, don't get me wrong.  I also like to solve problems, but mostly because problems effect people and I want people to have the best.  I knew something was amiss.  But I still couldn't put my finger on what was going on or how to fix it.

Then came Elijah.  There was something sacred about that immediate post-partum phase.  Maybe it was the extreme exhaustion or the roller-coaster of hormones, but I felt again.  I cried every week at church for a month or two.  I sat in silent wonder at the immense responsibility that Josh and I had taken on.  Suddenly, the things that happened years ago didn't seem to matter anymore, what mattered was the new weight of raising this little baby, whose destiny I can feel on him just as strongly as I can smell those wonderful presents he leaves for me to clean up.  Y'all I'm a mess.  100%.  But I love it.  I love it because life is meant to be messy.  Our emotions were never meant to be bottled up and kept hidden from the world.  Perfection isn't something to be achieved, it's who we already are.  And so I'm taking this next step of raw vulnerability to be more honest with you than I've probably been in years, because we weren't meant to live in the shadows.  We were created, I was created, to shine bright. 

If you feel so bold, please join me in this journey to be who we truly are.  Share with me what's going on in your life.  The people who walked with me during this time in spite of my distance are precious to me and I would love to walk with you as well in the reality of who you are.