When relationships bite!

As many of you know we have recently taken in a kitten. I am not a cat person but my husband has always wanted a cat and never was able to due to apartment rules. So we have a house now and I figured maybe if got a kitten I would warm up to him. We picked him in the litter because he seemed sophisticated. We named him Edgar Allen Poe and he has become a good friend to me over a lonely summer. Last night I had a dream that I was with a girlfriend in the woods and we saw a cat. I did not understand why she didn't like the cute thing. She told me she never let him get close and didn't like him around. But the cat was coming toward me and I reached out my hand to rub it's neck. But as he touched me I became frightened by the look of him and a shudder went up my spine as the cat did not stop at my arms length. He kept moving toward my face and neck and started making a growling hissing sound. HE WAS GOING TO BITE AND IT WAS TOO LATE TO PREVENT IT! That is where I woke up gasping and rolling backwards in the bed trying to escape. lol. I laid there awake at 5am thinking about my dream. I don't remember dreams often and asked the Lord what it may mean for my heart. I realized that in the dream, all I wanted from that cat was to be loved by it. I think often in relationships in our life we are just longing to be loved so deeply. So often as we move closer into a relationship we want to feel close (it's how God made us). But many times when we soften our guard to let someone in we are making ourselves vulnerable to a "bite". There is nothing worse than letting someone close and then finding that there is just pain and hurt that is reciprocated. I have felt that pain recently by someone close to me and it leaves me with such a deep ache. I feel like I am carrying it around with me all the time and letting it consume my thoughts. I find anger and bitterness that just sits in me until it erupts onto my husband or some poor stranger at Walmart :). Someone once told me that you can't expect balloons to grow from trees. And there are some people who are just not capable of giving us what we need from a relationship. That doesn't mean we should banish them from our lives or refuse to forgive. It just means we must try to not expect as much and realize that we may never get what we want or need from them. I thank God that he has shown me his safe, unfailing love through Christ. He will never fail and his love is "new every morning" (Lamentations 3). And through him I can continue to love those who hurt me (in healthy ways). I can give and give again because Christ did that for me at Calvary...even though I didn't deserve it. And you know what? It is so worth it when we take those risks and they turn out to be surprisingly awesome in our life. So here is to not giving up!

Just keep swimming

I was swimming through Lee Lake with a few friends and the waves were getting quite large as we cut back up the other side of the lake. I was concentrating on staying with my friend who seemed to be pushing it at a very fast pace. My mind was focused on one thing...swimming. There are so few times am just focused on one thing. So often I can even stress myself out trying to mentally juggle all the many things that need to get done to keep our life and home running smoothly. I think about work, appointments, making lunch for my husband and setting up coffee for the next day. I stress about family situations and how life still doesn't seem to be landing where I thought it would. I can wind myself up in knots in my mind just thinking of too many things at once. But as I swam today I only thought about what I was doing in the present and I wondered...what if my mind were this one tracked all the time? Life would feel a little easier that is for sure. Walking with the Lord is a lot like swimming. He helps me find that focused place of calm and reminds me that it will all be ok....and today I seem to hear him whisper, "Just keep swimming"!

Those Who Wait on the Lord....

So how many times have we read that verse from Isaiah 40:31?  "Those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength.  They will rise up on wings like eagles, they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not faint".  I mean really? How many times have we quoted it to each other?  How many times have we prayed it?  But still we may not feel our strength being renewed.  Instead, we may feel weary, anxious, depressed, alone but we rarely feel a new kind of strength within us. 

  Do you ever hear things like this and wonder, "Well, then why don't I feel stronger"? 

  Sometimes with passages like this we have heard a million times I think we can start to pick and choose what we see or hear.  We can make it out to be something it is not.  It is the difference between two strange words: Isogesis and Exogesis.  Isogesis is defined out of reading "into" the scripture.  Exogesis is defined by reading "out of" the scripture.  And what if there is treasure there to see if we dig a little deeper?  We need to try to pull out the meaning and not read into it what we wish that it said. 

  This passage doesn't say we will all feel strong all the time.  It doesn't say we will have renewed strength in every circumstance.  It is not a free pass to ask God (like a genie in a bottle) to give us strength.  It is a promise from him but it is conditional (as are many of his promises). 

  The passage actually says, "Those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength".  The ASV changes the word wait to "hope in the Lord".  Maybe we are overwhelmed because we want God's strength but we don't want to wait on his will?  Maybe we desire his peace but we don't want to hope in him while remaining under tough circumstances.  We will become drained when we are putting our hope in "things to change" and not in "hoping in the Lord". 

  It seems it is and may always be a pattern of God's will to keep me under difficult circumstances for long amounts of time.  Maybe God knows I  need the practice at putting my hope in  him.  I so quickly want to get out of a bad situation or ask God to miraculously fix it.  But it is part of our sanctification to "remain under" our trials as they produce perseverance in us.

   I was just doing the butterfly stroke this morning at swim practice.  The coach told us we would focus on it today, which many of us thought meant he would talk and we wouldn't have to swim much.  But instead, he kept sending us back and forth doing the same drills....over, and over and over until it was ingrained in us to do it without thinking.  "Go again" he would say.  We would come up panting, out of breath and begging for mercy.  "Good job! Do it again," he repeated.  By the end, I had little left to give but I knew I had the tools to improve my stroke.  It was boring, it was not fun and I sometimes questioned what good it was doing.  But it made me better!

  Jesus is making us better!  He wants to conform us to his own character and prepare us to stand before the Father "without fault and with great joy" (Jd. 1:24).  How he accomplishes that is up to him but it may often mean teaching us to stay in circumstances we would rather that he remove.  If we really want our strength renewed like the eagles than we must put our hope and full trust in Him daily.

  And what a difference it makes friends!  Try it.  Go ahead, get in  your Bibles and ask God to help you wait on him and hope in him alone.  He will not dissappoint.

Esther was a real woman!

 So did you know that Esther (named Hadassah) was an orphan?  I mean I guess I knew that but I never really thought about all it implied.  What would it have been like to grow up without a mother to teach you and comfort you and model for you feminine strength?  What would it feel like to not have a father to joy in her beauty and teach her about her value as a girl.   And what was it like to be raised by her older male cousin.  Now there is something to chew on.  We don't even know if her cousin Mordecai was married.  We just know he raised her and she became an amazing woman of confident, humble, beauty that drew other people to her without demanding anything.   
How many of us feel orphaned in this life?  Maybe our mother wasn't all we needed her to be.  Maybe she modeled more for us of what not to than anything.  Maybe we struggle even today to know what a real woman truly is.  What is beauty and what makes us feminine?  We live in a world that demands a lot from a woman.  We feel pressured to walk right and look right and fit into a very narrow box.  However, God created us in his image.  Woman wasn’t created last (in the order of creation) as an afterthought of God but as his crown of beauty.  And when it was finished God said “it is good”.  What magnificent words to let sink into our soul.  In God’s eyes we are good!

We are his finishing touch and have a vital role to play.  We offer our beauty and image of God to the world in different ways.  It comes through our smile, through a loving touch, through words of encouragement and our ability to be vulnerable.  These are all ways we leave a feminine fingerprint of God on the world every day.  We offer life and fresh air to people around us and we add our 50% to the picture God gave us when he created man and woman both in his image.  There are things unique about God that only women can show the world. 

The truth is that we are women because God created us that way.  That is what makes us a woman.  It’s not about how we walk or talk or look.  Esther was a woman through and through and she rose from an orphaned girl to a Queen by putting her worth and value in her God.  She rescued the entire Jewish nation by doing something only a woman could have done.

What Makes Us Women?

 So did you know that Esther (named Hadassah) was an orphan?  I mean I guess I knew that but I never really thought about all it implied.  What would it have been like to grow up without a mother to teach you and comfort you and model for you feminine strength?  What would it feel like to not have a father to joy in her beauty and teach her about her value as a girl.   And what was it like to be raised by her older male cousin.  Now there is something to chew on.  We don't even know if her cousin Mordecai was married.  We just know he raised her and she became an amazing woman of confident, humble, beauty that drew other people to her without demanding anything.   
How many of us feel orphaned in this life?  Maybe our mother wasn't all we needed her to be.  Maybe she modeled more for us of what not to than anything.  Maybe we struggle even today to know what a real woman truly is.  What is beauty and what makes us feminine?  We live in a world that demands a lot from a woman.  We feel pressured to walk right and look right and fit into a very narrow box.  However, God created us in his image.  Woman wasn’t created last (in the order of creation) as an afterthought of God but as his crown of beauty.  And when it was finished God said “it is good”.  What magnificent words to let sink into our soul.  In God’s eyes we are good!

We are his finishing touch and have a vital role to play.  We offer our beauty and image of God to the world in different ways.  It comes through our smile, through a loving touch, through words of encouragement and our ability to be vulnerable.  These are all ways we leave a feminine fingerprint of God on the world every day.  We offer life and fresh air to people around us and we add our 50% to the picture God gave us when he created man and woman both in his image.  There are things unique about God that only women can show the world. 

The truth is that we are women because God created us that way.  That is what makes us a woman.  It’s not about how we walk or talk or look.  Esther was a woman through and through and she rose from an orphaned girl to a Queen by putting her worth and value in her God.  She rescued the entire Jewish nation by doing something only a woman could have done. 

Beauty of Esther

So I have been leading a women's Bible study on Wednesday night at our church.  I have so enjoyed going deeper into the amazing book of Esther.  It is the only book in the Bible that doesn't mention the name of God.  Yet his scarlet thread runs so deeply through it.  I never thought about what it would have been like for her to be a Jewish orphan girl among all the harem of King Xerxes.  Here is a girl who grew up with her uncle and never knew the love of a father or had a mother to teach her about beauty.  Yet she enters 12 months of preparations to appear before this king and she manages to win the favor of everyone she came in contact with.  It is so rare for someone to connect with leaders and dignitaries and still have the approval of the women she lived with.  I bet she was pretty cool to be around.  She finally gets her chance to impress the King and could have chose diamonds, gold, silver, fabrics and she only wears what was recommended by the leader of the harem.  She was simple and not materialistic....yet she was well liked by the lowly and the popular.  When the King sees her he is so impressed.  She was humble and pure and lovely to him.  Yet she was intelligent, wise with her words, and scripture says she won the King's favor over all the most beautiful women in the land.  (Esther 2:17)

What is it really that makes a woman beautiful? Aren't we all searcing for it?   What draws people to her and makes them want more? 

In our culture today we are told that it is the perfect body, a lot of money and fame that makes a woman beautiful.  Not so with Esther!  All those who came in contact with her loved her and wanted to be in her inner circle.  Yet she didn't demand or control those around her.  She had a quiet confidence in her God and thus in herself.  And whether people knew it our not it was the "beauty of the Lord" that they were drawn to.  May we all aim to possess that kind of beauty.  Psalm 90:17 "May the beauty of Lord rest upon us and establish the work of our hands".

Sharing the gospel as a substitute

So I'm still so amazed how God has chosen to use Bill and my story to magnify himself. We have had so many people come up to us and tell us how they had talks with their kids about purity or how they shared it with someone else or how they want to remember us and use it in the future. So here is another story of his power when we offer up our stories and testimonies for his use.

Last week I was subbing atAlbion high school which is really just like an inner city school. I don't do it often but was feeling brave after spring break. The kids are very disrespectful and hard to manage but respond well when you appraoch them like a friend. Anyway, I had last period with 3 troubled kids who needed extra help because they were failing. Of course they told me that had no work so after awhile of them not listening and talking amongst themselves I decided to try to get to know them. They quickly began talking about how cool they were because they had slept around so much and how they did pot and didn't get caught ever. So I just told them about how Bill and I saved ourselves for each other and how we have so much trust for each other now. They asked me why I would do that and I told them that it was Gods plan he wrote in the Bible. "We often think his rules are to ruin our fun but they are there to bring ultimate happiness for us", I said. They asked about how I know the bible is true an how I know God is real. I quoted some scripture but started sharing the gospel. "We are all sinners and will some day stand before God and give an account for our life", I said. They started asking what "sin" was and how we can know we are going to heaven. It just so happened there was a Bible on the teachers desk and other Christian books. I opened it up and turned to 1 John 1:9. I told them about Christ and his sacrifice on the cross and how it will cover our sin if we ask him to live in our hearts. By now, the two girls were sitting on the desks in front of me telling me their stories and all the bad things they has done. "Will God forgive me for that too?", they asked. I told them that when Christ lives in our hearts God only sees Christ when he looks at you and that he will help you overcome your sin. The bell rang and I realized we had been talking for an hour. As they left one girl stayed back and said she wanted to accept Christ but needed to think about it. I told her to ask God to show himself to her and he will. He will always be there and she can ask him to live I. Her heart anytime day or night.

As I drove home I thought about how these kids didn't even know what sin was and God had used a simple thing like our story to point it out for them.

I pray for those kids...all tatooed and still looking for love in all the wrong places. I pray they would seek for God and find him to be a faithful, redeeming God who's promises fulfill us beyond our wildest imagination.

"those who have the Son have life" -John 5:24

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