:: ruins ::
Laying flat upon my back,
All the world in motion
Everything goes by so fast
I feel like I’m frozen
After all is said and done
Did I fail to mention
Everything I haven’t done
All my good intentions
This is my holy hour
this is my world on fire
This is my desperate play
this is where I am saved
I’ve no fear of height or depth
I’ve no fear of crashing
The single thing I fear the most
Simply feeling nothing
This is my holy hour, this is my world on fire
This is my desperate play, this is where I am made
This is my kingdom come, this is my freedom song
This is my helpless state, this is where I am saved
Let my ruins become the ground you build upon
Let my ruins become the start
Let my ruins become the ground you build it on
From what’s left of my broken heart
:: over now ::
Lift your eyes girl,
I know you're broken,
Left from the same war,
That you never knew.
Your way is just to fall just like before you.
But the way isn't to long,
You're almost there.
There's a feeling that you won't make.
All you have in store.
This time is just a season,
You deserve much more.
Lift up your head,
Look out the window,
‘Cause it's almost over now,
Take back the time that your fear has stolen.
‘Cause it's almost over now.
Don't let it get you caught in that tunnel,
The end is always a few steps away,
There's a feeling of resistance,
You can't seem to fight.
This time is just a season,
You can make it right.
Your eyes are open,
Your heart clean,
But you're lookin',
To be free.
Lift up your head,
Look out the window,
‘Cause it's almost over now,
Take back the time that your fear has stolen.
‘Cause it's almost over now.
- needtobreathe -
:: former self ::
I lose things. Often. I’ve lost my wallet, my keys, and I’m always looking for that other shoe. The old adage is true—no matter what it is that I’ve lost, it’s always in the last place I look. I’ve learned the fastest way to find my lost item is in fact to retrace my steps, to go back to the place where I saw it last.
Except for my faith. When I lose my faith, even if only for a moment, I cannot go back to the last place where I saw it. I cannot retrace my steps to find it lying on the kitchen table.
To say something like “the moment I lost my faith” seems cataclysmic, but it really wasn’t. It was quiet. I was alone, in my car, in my office parking lot the moment I listened to the whisper that God could not be trusted. I had certainly heard that whisper before, but this time, I listened. It was terrifying.
In that split second, my heart busted wide open. That moment in time changed my future. I knew I could not go back to the way that life used to be, but I also knew I could not put one foot in front of the other without Jesus. I quickly humbled myself before God, but like Peter in my heart I could not ignore that I had just denied my Jesus.
This loss of faith was not something that was noticeable on the exterior. I didn’t leave my church or abandon my principles. I didn’t rebel and decry the notion of a personal God. Instead, I begged God to come to my rescue. I may have lost trust in Him, I won’t deny that, but I still knew of His goodness and His faithfulness to me. I knew that He would not abandon me.
I came to a point when I recognized that so much of what I had been basing my reality on simply was not true. Even the way I had interpreted God’s hand in my life was based on these misassumptions. I had based my life not so much on a lie, but an inaccuracy, and I needed to rebuild. I was living for the storybook ending I thought was coming, but I wasn’t even reading the right story.
God did restore my faith with one that was greater than ever before—different, most certainly, but greater. What I have now is a faith of quiet confidence. My Father will prevail. I am His child; victory is mine, and I wait patiently for the day when all things hidden in darkness will come to light.
I love God and believe He is doing a good work in my life. But this new way of faith is a little bit shaky, and the truths that calm my fears now aren’t exactly the same as the truths to which I once clung. I would like to go back because that other faith was easier, and my circumstances now are harder. But I can’t. I can’t pretend that I’m the same, and I can’t ignore the new place God is taking me.
Each moment of each day, God is using something to change part of me. Maybe He is also doing something else to keep another part of me exactly how it is. Because of this ebb and flow, I understand the truth of the biblical promise that I am a new creation.For many years, I thought that newness only applied to the tear-filled moment after the 12-year-old me prayed to accept Christ into my life. From there on out, I thought the Christian me stayed the same creation until heaven. But the 15-year-old me was certainly different that the 19-year-old me, just as the 24-year-old me was different from the brand new, post-loss of faith, 25-year-old me. All of these me’s from years past that are so much alike and so much different add up to make the me of now. This me will press forward and learn more and change a little bit and stay the same a little bit.
Tomorrow morning when I wake up I will be a new creation. Tomorrow night when I fall asleep, I will be a new creation. There is no end to this newness. Thus my faith must daily—sometimes even hourly—evolve. I cannot remain the same person and pursue God.
I still don’t understand why God allowed me to live in that deluded state, believing and clinging to something that most certainly was not in my future. I do know though that God used me in that time. I know that He changed me and molded me to become more like Him, to gain some of the wisdom that I so desperately desire. My faith at that time was based on an outcome, a promise I believed God had given me, rather than in the actual person of God.
It is He who is described as both unchanging and as an all-consuming fire. Upon encountering God, I cannot expect to stay the same. Of course He will change me. He makes me new, new like the morning sun, new like the whitest snow.
~relevant magazine~
:: made to be known ::
One of the greatest complaints heard from those of us in the post-college vacuum stems from the feeling of being alone—really alone. We just left the world where you live with three other people in order to afford rent and see another thousand or so every day on campus—where “résumé builder” activities force us into contact with dozens of unexpected people and class projects turn into uninvited bonding experiences with miscellaneous classmates. We live in a world where, as “grown ups” we’re supposed to find our own way to work, live in our own place and decide for ourselves who we want to spend time with. We move (or our friends move) to find jobs, and suddenly we find ourselves falling through the cracks of the relationship world. No classmates, no family, no school friends. Just us and whoever we manage to collect.
Now, don’t get me wrong, most of us can spark a conversation with an interesting acquaintance and sometimes manage to turn it into coffee or a date, but most of us still feel alone—if we let ourselves.
In college, I lived with four other girls. I was highly involved in my church’s campus ministry, and pretty much every spare moment I had outside the classroom (and the homework drill) I had somebody to talk to.
Then I graduated.
My friends moved away or got married. I lost contact with those who were still in college because our schedules had become so drastically different. I was still a 10-hour drive away from family, and my highly populated community fizzled out. By the end of the summer after graduation, the only people I really talked to anymore were my boyfriend and one other friend.
I quickly spiraled into serious depression. Everyone had let me down. Not one of the many friends who promised to stick with me had actually done it. I had stayed in Orlando to follow God and found myself completely abandoned.
This has been hitting me hard the last couple of months, as my boyfriend and I have been going through some rough times, and I have had no one (except, periodically my one other friend) to talk to about it. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, my other friend called me on it. She asked why don’t I at least try talking things out with one of the few friends I still have contact with from college.
“I’d scare her,” I replied. “I’m too messed up right now.”
She just looked at me. And that’s when it clicked.
We live in a world where success is being polished, put-together and cutting edge. Even our junk, if we admit to having it, needs to be of a certain type—needs to be cool, extreme or counter-cultural. Nobody wants to just be a mess. We have to spin our stuff just right or figure out which tone of voice to say it in, to make sure that when people hear us, we come out looking good. So we learn the tricks. We pick up a vocabulary that makes our struggles sound mild (really, we have it all together) or interesting (don’t you just wish you could be as cynical/jaded/messed up as me?), and we shade everything we say just right.
So nobody ever knows us.
I’m the queen. I wear black and scowl from underneath my eyebrow bar, make sarcastic comments and listen to angry music—and I get off as the cool, counter-cultural, artistic type. People miss the part where I get in my car at the end of a rough day and start crying like a girl. (I am one of those though I don’t always like to admit it.) They miss the part where I sometimes just want somebody to tell me it’s going to be OK, because I feel lost and sad. All the jokes and the funky clothes and the rock music just become the wall I use to keep people out—when all I really want is for them to come in.
So, finally, I tried talking to my friend. I told her that things were rough and that I didn’t know how it was going to work out and how scared I was of a good thing going bad. And she didn’t get scared, and she wasn’t overwhelmed by my mess. She sat there, across the table from me at Chik-fil-A, and told me that God knew what He was doing either way and that I could call her anytime because she loved me and wanted to be there for me.
At the end of the day, the places where we most need people to be there for us are the places we’re most scared to let them into. We buy into the lie that says that people will only stick with us as long as we can sell ourselves just right, and we hide our real wounds so that nobody really knows us.
But the fact is that we were made to be known, both by God and by other people. Allowing others to know us is terrifying, and sometimes we get burned, but the alternative is worse. Because without the vulnerability and openness that real relationship requires, we live our lives cold and alone, starving for community that we just can’t find any other way.
~relevant magazine~
:: a weird place ::
I am in a weird place these days. I think it was Bono who was talking about his experiences in school as a kid. In a writing class his teacher was talking about “writer’s block” and said that it happens to all writers at one time or another. She said that when this happens, writers struggle to write anything until the block somehow goes away. Bono innocently asked, “Then why don’t they write about having writer’s block?” His teacher proceeded to scold him and said that was not how things are done! But I wonder if he was on to something. Maybe I’m having a “God-block” these days—who knows for sure? So I will follow Bono’s advice and write about what’s going on.
The weird place I’m in at the present time—I think—has to do with two or three factors.
One of the most significant things is the reality that hit me a year and a half ago or so. I realized then that I did not have what you might call a “relationship” with God, as one person to another. In fact I’d never had one at all. Yes, I knew a lot about Him—all that eight years of Bible college and seminary could teach me about theology—which turned out to be quite a bit, in fact. But what I realized, after reading Searching for God Knows What, that what I had was a relationship with a set of theological concepts—and not a real person. But theology is not a real relationship. So in a sense I said, “I reject God”—not that I rejected Him as a person, but rather jettisoned the false belief that I had a relationship with Him. The problem is this: where do I go from here? This is uncharted territory for me, and to this point I’m not sure if I’ve had a lot of success in that department. So I’m in a weird place there.
A second problem I’m having is with church. When I came to the realization about theological concepts acting as a substitute for a relationship with God, I started to see and hear that kind of stuff all over the place in church. For the first time I realized that mainly what church leaders tell people to do is to read their Bibles and pray more, and in this way they will get to know God better. And worst of all, when I was a pastor, I did the same thing for years too. But it’s all I knew to do, because I thought it was the truth. Is there some truth to it?
But do you know something I have just found out? Did you know that in Biblical narratives, God—as He is portrayed by the human author—is just another character? In that sense He is no different than David, Abraham, Moses or Paul. All Biblical characters we read about are to some extent abstractions from the real person who lived in time and space. We read about them from the ideological perspective of the actual author. J.P. Fokkelman says that when we read about God in the Bible, that He is a character—a language construct—a creation of the narrator and the writer. In other words, it’s not as simple as merely a one-for-one correlation, of black-and white theological statements made smugly about “who God is” and what He is like.
Now I’m not saying that the Bible doesn’t accurately portray God; I think what I’m saying is that the observation I just made challenges everything we have come to believe about our nice, safe categories of theology proper. What I’m actually saying is that I think God is so much bigger and more incomprehensible than what we read about Him in Scripture. Surely words on a page can’t contain all of Him.
Therefore can church leaders just sit back and tell people to “read their Bibles and pray,” believing that will solve all their problems of what it means to have a relationship with God? It sure sounds spiritual, doesn’t it? But I just can’t believe it’s that easy. Guess what then? You guessed it—weird place.
And here is what I believe is my final problem: lack of authentic, intentional, Biblical community. For a lot of years I had a taste of inauthentic and unbiblical community, but then, before I came to the U.K., I had an all-too brief taste of the real thing. We helped to start a new church in Portland that is all about authentic community. And now that I’ve been without it for almost two years I see the difference. I need people in my life who love me enough to tell me the hard things that I need to hear, to point out my blind spots that I inevitably have. I need people around me who will challenge me to grow, who will help me to become who I am. I need people to help me process these kinds of challenges I’m having right now, who will offer unique insights from a whole bunch of perspectives, all of which are valuable and necessary. I need people around me who have the attitude that when they win, I win too. So without community, I’m in a weird place.
Anybody else in a weird place?
~relevant magazine~
:: prayer ::
May today be all that you need it to be today. May the peace of God and the freshness of the Holy Spirit rest in your thoughts, rule in your dreams tonight and conquer all your fears. May God manifest himself today in ways that you have never experienced. May your joys be fulfilled, your dreams be closer and your prayers be answered. I pray that faith enters a new height for you; I pray that your territory is enlarged and I pray that you step into your destiny within the ministry. I pray for peace, health, happiness and true and undying love for God.
:: office rumors ::
*ohmygosh* This is so great! And by great, I mean well done.
I just found out that I've been part of an office rumor! No joke. *Way to go me! LOL*
Apparently one of the guys upstairs made a remark during inventory that me and my boss' son liked each other or something. ?!? It's gotten so bad that his dad had to ask him about it!!! *LOL* What's even more hilarious is that we were pretty much strangers before inventory. We've probably only spoken no more than 30 words to each other and he's stopped by my office maybe 10 times for like 2 minutes each, and then we work inventory together a few times... ?! I can't believe it!! Inventory's over and we're back to being strangers again. What a sad source of office entertainment.
Points to the guy who started it. I can't even look him or his dad in the eye without laughing. I haven't laughed this hard in such a long time.
This is the best birthday present EVER! *LOL*
