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October 23, 2008
Thank You for Your peace. Please let it guard my heart and mind completely, so that no doubts or guilt come in to steal my attention and trust from You.
You’ve got my attention. I am taking You completely seriously. I am not boxing You in- I can’t afford to. Move in whatever way You will. You said it would be a wild ride, and it is. You said You had a surprise, and You did. I believe You have more to surprise me with, something beautiful and blissful. I need to believe that. I need to believe in Your goodness, care, and power. I need to believe in Your grace, love, and healing. In Your heart for redemption and restoration. You comfort me beyond words. I am so in awe of this place You have brought me to.
Back to today…
Wow. That seems to be my word lately. What is it about that word that compels us to say it when we are in awe? I’m certainly in awe. God is speaking to me all over the place. In stinking Barnes ‘n’ Noble, for crying out loud! It’s beautiful. I am so excited. I bought “The Message//Remix: Pause” today, a cool unconventional Bible I’ve been desiring for about a year now. I can’t wait to dig in.
It’s funny how He works and relates to us on our level. He is speaking to me in exactly the ways He knows I will hear Him: through words of knowledge from a new mentor, through hidden meanings in everyday experiences, through sudden perfect opportunities. He has hedged me in front and behind, drawn me into the wilderness, and now speaks comfort to me (Hosea 2:6, 2:14).
I want to turn all of these experiences into some substantial writing, but I think I’m simply too in shock and would have to dig deeper into my heart than I am prepared to do in the middle of the MiraCosta library.
Soon, soon. I always deliver, dear Reader.
August 27, 2008
I’m reading Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers. (In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a novel based on the book of Hosea, one of my favorite books of the Bible.) Two evenings of reading, 217 pages- half the book. Yesterday I got teary-eyed. Today I cried.
I see myself in Angel- not in what she’s been through (thank God for that) but in her misunderstanding of Michael. I’ve been getting to know God my whole life, and yet I still don’t understand His love. I don’t even know how to describe how I don’t understand it. As Psalm 139:6 says, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is high, I cannot attain it.” He makes me promises, and the minute circumstances look less than perfect, I fall apart. I think I was foolish to believe it; it was too good to be true. What I miss time and time again is His love. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances look like, He’s still going to pull through for me. Because He loves me. What on earth does that even mean?! Just when I think I understand it, I fall back to square one: pure amazement and mind-boggling confusion.
In an instant, the meaning of a verse that I’ve heard more times than I can count hit me hard. Proverbs 3:5: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.” It’s probably because I’ve heard it so many times that I never understood it. They were empty words, ones to which I always subconsciously responded, “Yeah, yeah, what else is new?” But the moment I read it in the context of God whispering it to Michael in this book, tears streaked my face once more. How often I find myself kneeling before God without a scrap of understanding about what is happening around me! Those are the times I despair the most, the times that I worry and fret and think of what I can do to fix it. I plan and work and freak out, all because I don’t understand. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. He’s going to keep His promises. He’s going to take care of me, of you, no matter what. It’s those times I truly do need to look at the birds and the flowers and see how well He cares for them- and then look at myself, and how He has pursued me relentlessly and provided for all my basic needs and even my wildest dreams. So why should I worry? Why do I freak out? God knows what I need…
Let my well-being of the moment be a mystery to the world.
I’ve been reading More Ready Than You Realize: Evangelism as Dance in the Postmodern Matrix by Brain McLaren for a few weeks (it’s a short read, but I’ve had little free time). I must say, my thinking on the subject of evangelism as well as our entire approach to the Christian faith has been altered considerably. Not just an advice-from-experience book, “More Ready Than You Realize” deals heavily with the modern vs. postmodern mindsets. McLaren talks about approaches to finding/identifying truth and ways to think about “conversion,” among other things. My traditional evangelical Protestant background beliefs have now been swapped for these old-is-new-again* ideas he presents. Let me explain.
I thought of a perfect example for this post as I drove home from ballet class today (it’s a rather long drive). I’ve volunteered to give my “testimony” at Seven24 [my church's college group] this coming Sunday. (Ignore the fact that it’s getting postponed a week.) In my pre-McLaren mindset, I thought about giving my testimony the way that a majority of Christians do these days. The point is to tell how awful and sinful your life was until you “got saved,” which should be a specific and identifiable event. Now, for someone who has literally been a Christian all her life, that approach makes things a little complicated. First of all, I don’t have a horrific sinful past to divulge. No drinking, partying, drugs, or sex to speak of. Not a bad thing, certainly! But where’s the excitement in a goody-two-shoes testimony? That’s not all, however. “I don’t know when I got saved,” I thought. Could it have been at seventh grade Winter Camp, when I experienced God emotionally through worship for the first time? Or was it at an earlier age, when a rather violent rant of my father’s had me kneeling at my bedroom door literally crying out for God’s help? (I don’t want to spoil all that I’m going to say at Seven24, so I’ll stop there with the specifics.)
Yes, pre-McLaren, I had a little problem. No sin horror stories to tell of, no “conversion-event.” I knew that this didn’t make me any less of a Christian, nor did it mean that I had a lame testimony, but it still felt as though something was missing to make it truly awesome. Something traditional and logical.
And then I read McLaren’s book. Conversion isn’t usually an event. Wow. Didn’t realize that. I don’t claim to understand how those who weren’t raised with Christianity become Christians (I actually find it fascinating), but this book gave me a little insight: it’s usually a process, beginning with seeking, then hearing, then bending, then pursuing. Little by little, someone goes from knowing next to nothing about the Christian faith to being a disciple of Jesus. Amazing! Knowing this now doesn’t make me wish it had been that way for me, but it has made me begin to pray for the kind of “spiritual friendship” McLaren talks about so that I can witness the change firsthand and help bring it about in someone else’s life.
McLaren also mentions a couple other ways of being brought to faith, including how it seemed to go for John the Baptist. We find it recounted in Luke 1:15, when it says that John was filled with God’s Spirit in his mother’s womb. “What?” you say, “He was a Christian before he was even born?” Yes, that would seem to be the case, wouldn’t it? Now I’m not claiming to have been filled with the Spirit before birth, but as I commented to God last night, I’ve always believed. I’ve always loved Him. As soon as I could understand that there was a God who made me and had a Son named Jesus who died to save me from my sin (maybe age three?), I believed it and held onto it. Never did I question, doubt, or reject it. I’ve simply always believed- known, even. As I told my friend Haley last year (a spiritual friend I wish I could’ve held onto a bit tighter), there is nothing in the world that I am more sure of than God. Hence no “conversion-event” for me.
This is just one snippet from the many ideas I could tell you that I’ve learned from this book. It was rather not what I expected; I’d say it was better. It’s taken me back to basics, back to the simple beauty of “in the beginning God.” Yes, wresting with heavy theological questions can be fantastic, but doesn’t the profound truth of God’s infinite capacity to love you and all humanity just take your breath away? I could stop there and simply marvel at that fact for the rest of my life.
*By “old-is-new-again” I am referring to the fact that McLaren has identified where the modern church went wrong and brought it back around to what Jesus actually taught. For example, the modern church established the concept of “believing before belonging” (one must be a believer before they are fully accepted into a church family) but Jesus taught “belonging then believing” (through being accepted in a church family, an unbeliever can come to faith). This is concurrent with Jesus’ statement that they shall know we are His by our love for one another. How can they see that if we don’t let them in and treat them the same?
