Without words

I think we place far too much importance on words.
This seems a strange statement to be made from a girl who always keeps a book or 2 on her person, but I still believe it to be true. Oh, words are a beautiful way of expressing ourselves, but without actions, without truth, they are empty. It is our actions that give meaning to our words. They breathe a life into them that mere lettering alone cannot do.When I tell you I love you, I want you to be able to smile and say, "I know." because my every action has already made this clear. When I am happy or sad, confused or intrigued, my face gives me away before I have the chance to verbalize these emotions.

Is the same not true of our faith? We are called to be a light into the darkness, and yet so many of us fall into the mode of being "normal." We blend, we do not stand out and I am the greatest culprit. The greatest desire of my heart is to be so in tuned with God that without words I scream his praise. I fail every single day at this, allowing the my worldly weariness to overwhelm me, but oh when He shines what a glorious moment.

I am often afraid of what the future holds. I fear myself, and I fear those around me. I stumble blindly through the darkness, but with God by my side and his word as a light I am able to climb above. I am able to shine and to see and if I light a a candle in my heart it will eventually shine brightly enough for the whole world to see.

That is my prayer.

Father, shine through me.

How quickly we forget

This morning I was reading Psalm 77. It is a beautiful psalm crying out for God to remember. How quickly we forget how much we are loved. I wonder if it truly ever sinks in for me. There are moments when I am almost euphoric about God's love for me and this dying, broken world. There are moments, however, when I feel lost. I feel as though I am drowning and crying out to God thinking he does not hear, but that is as far from truth as God's love is from the east to the west. He always hears. He always remembers--if you can wrap your brain around it God is the very act of remembering itself! How could he forget?--it is we who forget.

Sometimes when I pray I feel a block. Undoubtedly it is my own prideful fear preventing me from having faith in my prayers.

Sometimes when I pray I become overwhelmed--a flood of emotion washing over me bringing me to my knees.

Sometimes when I pray, however, what I feel is something that can only be described as a stillnessa quiet peace within me that assures me that no matter the outcome he is with me and all will be well.

I recently had coffee with a friend. He fascinates me. Our entire relationship up until this point was comprised of brief chats outside of our apartments. Our schedules rarely mesh and yet God was waiting for the perfect timing. As we sat outside of Starbucks our conversation bounced from life to books to music to superheroes. Each passing minute getting more and more intense as we tried to wrap our brains around the complexity of another human being. All the while I prayed silently to God both for an opening to profess my faith with the boldness I felt it deserved and thanking him for placing this incredible human mind before my own. Each topic touched briefly on the outskirts of faith, but there was no opening to truly take a plunge. And then suddenly there was a shift. I am not sure what I said, but it garnered an incredulous look. He leaned forward, squinted his eyes in concentration and said, "I'm curious. What brought you to this point in your faith? Its evident that, like me, you truly think about every situation so what made you believe what you believe?" I was stunned. I blinked a few times and leapt directly into my testimony--by the grace of God I had shared it only the week before with my small group. My thoughts were cohesive for once. With every pause he urged me on with questions of his own, questions of science and theology of doubts mixed with a desire to simply learn, it was incredible. When I reached the end he said, "You're something else." I smiled and attributed that also to God. He explained to me his hesitations in Christianity, but made it clear that he wanted to talk further. We talked for another few hours, always coming back to God. I did not want the conversations to end. For the first time I was wholly confident in myself and in my faith and I knew that this was something that could only have been a gift from God. I was reminded of Harry staring into the Mirror of Erised. Only by wanting to acquire the Philosophers Stone--acquire, but not use for his personal gain--was he able to get it. It was only when I prayed simply for wisdom with the intent of love--love and nothing more--was I able to be confident and truly trust God.

In a similar vein another friend recently came back into my life at a moment when he unknowingly would need God most. By pure chance he showed up in my office for military business. We hadn't spoken in weeks. He was avoiding me, afraid perhaps that I might disapprove of his actions, but now he was moving and his time was short. We hurriedly made plans to hang out and he suggested that he join me for small group. As our group discussed our prayer requests, he received a phone call. A friend of his who had been stationed overseas was either killed or seriously injured. He was terrified. We prayed immediately. And then he received the confirmation he dreaded most in that moment. His best friend had been killed.

There are no words to comfort another in that moment. Nothing that anyone except for God can do, but it became overwhelmingly clear to me what God had done. This friend who had strayed so far from his faith would have been alone in his barracks room when he received this information. He would have had no way to reconnect with the wife of this now gone friend. He would have had no one to offer him assurance of God's goodness in tragedy, a hug, or just the presence of another human. In his moment of despair who knows what he would have done, but God, knowing what was to come, put him exactly where he needed to be. Surrounded him with people who would pray for him, take him where he needed to be. He surrounded him with people who truly loved him, and I could not have been more thankful. Was I a necessity in that situation? Of course not, but God chose to use my friends and I to show his love. Wow.

God moves in the stillness. He is there when we think he is distant. He is there when we do not hear him, and a simple examining of the world that he has given us proves that. All creation sings his majesty.

Sometimes we miss that. Sometimes we forget, but sometimes we are thrown into God's goodness and the memory of how large he is can bring us to our knees.

"I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your wonders of old. I will ponder all your work, and meditate on your mighty deeds. Your way, O God, is holy. What god is great like our God? You are the God who works wonders; you have made known your might mong the peoples."

-Psalm 77: 11-14 ESV

Lately

I have felt as though I am floundering.
I have a thousand things racing through my head constantly and an overwhelming desire to write, and yet when I attempt to formulate those thoughts into coherent sentences all that comes out is silence.

I want God to speak truths into my heart. I want to feel my thoughts align with His, but I am so overwhelmingly flawed by my own pride. I get in the way of God and nothing seems to make sense.

Sometimes I feel as though people look to me for some profound insight into their hearts. To enlighten their walk with God as if I were more in tune with what He is saying to them, but when I listen all I hear is the noise of my selfishness screaming.

Father,
"Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander [that] my faith will be made stronger in the presence of my Savior"
Amen.

The beauty of Grace

I am not proud of my past. I generally do not talk about it and so much of it seems to be a blur to me. Certain words or conversations will trigger a memory of some forgotten moment in time. I re-live that memory and then quickly file it away neatly into the recesses of my mind, but then there are moments when I intentionally pull those dusty boxes off of their shelves and remember that who I was does not define who I am today. It merely reflects the beauty of how much my savior loves me that he would pull me back out of the darkness.
In the midst of tragedies I see His light shine. See him drawing my friends, my family in the same way that he drew me. Calling them in their sadness to the hope that is so much larger than we could ever imagine.

never fails

Sometimes I need God to smack me in the face. To drop me on the floor when vanity mingles with pride and insecurity. To remind me that I am an imperfect human navigating through a broken world with a perfect God to guide me.
I get caught up in myself, but I was given a heart to touch the broken. I want to change the world, but I hide in a corner of fear. But then God whispers to my heart and reminds me of my place.
He reminds me that the girl who is difficult to love needs it all the more. He shows me that the boy I do not understand is worthy of my patience because I was unworthy of love, but He loved me, and though I stray He is patient with me always.

Father, I ask that you lead me. Take my heart fully and make it wholly new, wholly yours. Align me with your testimonies.Give me life in your ways alone, Lord and let me see this broken world through your eyes. Let me love as you love. Keep me from the temptations of pride and remind me that the only good within me comes from you. Only you, Father. Without you I am a wreck. Thank you for your grace, and for saving this broken life.

Choosing Doubt

 I do not think I shall ever truly grasp the weight of the sacrifice that Christ made for me. We, as Christians, get so caught up in the legalistic aspects of our faith that we often become self-righteous rather than embracing true humility in Christ. It saddens me to watch as so many who claim Christ as their truth stumble before one simple question, "Why?" We do not dig deeper into our faith. We accept it because we are told to do so and when asked to delve deeper our response is often, "Well, because..." or we point blindly into the Bible with no real answer in mind because we haven't truly studied it.

Now don't get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with trusting God's word as absolute truth and knowing that it can answer the questions that people throw at you, but when I think about the other things in my life that I believe and defend my answer is much more concrete. I have a natural curiosity about a plethora of things. Sitting on the beach I want to know more about the ocean. Staring at the sky I want to know more about the universe. When I read a good book I want to know more about the background story. I may not be an authority on all things (I can barely touch the surface on most actually), but I have this inherent desire to learn. To know more about this beautiful world that God has given me. And I know I am not alone in this.

So when it comes to the Bible why are we so often content with saying, "This is truth and that is the end." Rather than doing research. Do we fear that if we look too closely our truth will crumble? Do we feel as though these truths are so beyond us that we might as well stop asking? What a small box we place God into when we think He does not want us to know Him and stop trying. Our relationship with God should be paramount. It should be treated as the greatest relationship of our lives. The one that truly rubs off on us, shaping the way that we see the world the way. The way that we speak, that we walk, that we treat those around us. (In the same way that after being friends with someone for ages you realize that you have picked up a lot of his or her personality quirks and have made them a part of who you are.) Close proximity with another creates this desire within each of us to know and to be known. Is that any different with our God? He wants to know us. Wants us to bring everything to His feet, but He also wants to be known. He wants us to yearn for Him as He yearns for us.

When I began truly seeking God I found myself in awe of how big he was. I thought I knew. I could give you the typical Sunday School answers, but God is bigger than that. I think we do Him and ourselves an injustice when we do not seek to know more, to have an answer for our faith (which we are called to have in 1 Peter 3:15). I think we as American Christians--myself the biggest fool--fall subject to our own intellect. We place God into a box. We do not seek to know and so we never learn, but God has given us this insatiable curiousity for him and for this world that he has created. We must step out of this flimsy box we have created into the great realm of infinite knowledge that God has given us.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 7, "For everyone who asks recieves, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened." What an amazing promise! Paul writes in his letter to the church in Phillipi that we need to, "work out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling". The pursuit of knowledge is a terrifyingly beautiful thing because the more you learn the more you know and that is often scary, but how wonderful to know the one who created it all?
Last year I read The Life of Pi by Yann Martel and one of my favorite quotes from the book says,
"To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."

How often do we choose doubt rather than truth?
How often do we allow our lives to be run by our own selfish desires finding them to fall short?
How much greater would it be if we sought to know--with everything we have--the one who gave us the ability to know?

This morning I re-visited a message by Ravi Zacharias. It is an excellent start to asking some of the bigger questions of faith. I hope it encourages you as it did the same for me. Challenging me to look deeper into myself for the answer to the hope that lives within me

Oceans

You know those songs that you listen to and they kind of leave you on your knees in both humility and praise? Sometimes we just need to be shaken by God. To be reminded of our own futility and our breathless desire for him.
This morning I woke up and decided to listen to Hillsong’s new album Zion.  My friends Caleb and Rachel have been telling me to listen to it for ages, but I was stubborn and held out on buying it until last night. The night before, Marilee and I had this great chat about the different ways that God speaks to us and how they do not make our relationship with him any less powerful or real than the others. The way that I hear God’s voice is often through what I like to call “chance chances” (I got this term from the book of Ruth because when she happened across Boaz’ field the Hebrew for that moment translates to “her chance chanced” and I think that is quite beautiful) Moments that at the time seem to be mere coincidence, but in retrospect reveal God’s providence in our lives. So my chance chanced upon the song Oceans (Where Feet May Fail) and my heart could not have needed another song more. It is a song that describes beautifully this past year of my life. From falling on my face with my own pride and sin, to growing closer to God to doubting myself and my faith to realizing that if I know nothing else in this life I know that God is good and that is enough.
This song reminded me of where I was and where I am going and of one of my greatest prayers. It culminates in the repetition of a fervent prayer for aligning my heart to God’s and a promise to call upon Him and to trust him to keep me in his grace because in the end that is truly more than enough.