2011: What A Year

2011 was nothing short of a roller coaster ride if I've ever been on one.

God was so so gracious in all of His dealings with me. In fact, I was telling a friend the other day, "God has done an incredible work in three short years and he continues to show me increasing favor."

I believe last we (you and I) talked I was wrapping up the end of my summer session at the Boys & Girls Club. With great expectation and anticipation I can tell you I am now back in the great state of Texas (indefinitely).

So many prayers were answered this year.

Prayer for...

A job
Direction
Increased faith
The salvation of souls
Roommates
A place to live
Revelation of sin
Humility
Community that runs deep
Greater love
Financial provision
Grace, grace, and more grace

...one of these days I'll read through my old journals and make a running list of answered prayers.

Famous last words, right?

Well, if you think about it, all prayers are answered in some way or another. If we really believe God is all-good and all-loving, then even in those prayers He "seemingly" didn't answer He worked in our best interest.

God says of David:

“Because he loves me...I will rescue him; I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name. He will call on me, and I will answer him" (Psalm 91:14-15)

He does the same for all of His children.

Take heart, though oft His answer seems terribly late, He loves us most when He says, "Wait."

In the past I could read all these stories of saints waiting for years for God to answer them and for whatever reason (ahem, lack of faith) I always thought, "Sure, He answered those guys, but will He really answer me? Little ole me?"

Truth be told, at those moments I thought myself a giant holding onto my little pocket-sized Jesus. Little? Yeah right, my head was anything but little.

And after waiting only 10 months in the-middle-of-nowhere Alabama, He answered! Shocked? I shouldn't have been. Or should I have?

There is this funny tension between knowingly expecting God to answer our prayers and our surprise when He does. What's that about? Seriously, please email me if you know.

Alas, I seriously digress.

2012, I'm expecting even greater things from you. I have a hunch you will not disappoint.

To leave you with one last reminder of God's amazing grace:

I have been given the best job with the best co-workers and the best bosses, not to mention incredible roommates and Church family, any girl my age could ask for.

To God Most High be all glory, honor, and praise forevermore!

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Summer 2011...long overdue

This has been quite possibly the most challenging and most rewarding summer yet. Well, it's neck-in-neck with nannying those three little ones last summer.

They are each a blessing in their own way.

What continues to blow my mind is how great each of these 192 chillins (children) have impacted my heart. Each holds a delicate piece of it in their hands. Naturally some have bigger pieces. After all, you can only get to know a few so well in 9 (relatively) short weeks.

Goodness, God is so gracious to me.

If only I could recount all the amazing things He has done this summer. After running full-force ahead for nine straight weeks, it's going to take a few weeks to fully recover and a couple more months to let the beautiful details of His brilliant plan sink in. I wish I could explain how I experienced Him in even the smallest of details.

Jon Bloom captures the essence of what I want to say:

...nothing that happens to you today is really ordinary. Every small and great thing you encounter or do has millions of stories behind it that are so enthralling that you would sit dumbstruck for days just to learn about them.

And your extraordinary life is shaping and being shaped by many other lives, human and non-human, as it goes along. In ways both witting and unwitting your words and actions are influencing the course of other lives. Your choice of a parking spot could have a life-altering effect on someone else.

Do not let a belief in the sovereignty of God dull your amazement over this. Let it add, not detract, from your wonder! Just think of how God designed his creation to occur.

I wish I knew each of these kids' stories. No two are alike. At the same time, I don't think I have the capacity to handle the weight of each of their stories. Broken homes. Broken families. Broken hearts. And yet, I see the infinite grace of God and His plan of redemption in each of their eyes. That is a gift in and of itself. In the midst of brokenness there is hope.

Hope of eternity spent rejoicing in the holiness of our Father. Hope that I pray God will reveal to each of these precious treasures.

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, "Abba! Father!"  The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

                                                                               (Romans 8:14-17)

The one thought resounding in my mind for the past few hours has been that the most rewarding things tend to be the most challenging.

We are not promised a piece-of-cake life.

But, oh, taste and see what is to come!  

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

And that which, by His amazing grace, we are able to see now...

 

And always enjoy the ride...

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Resolved

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18).

My, oh my, God is good! I wish I could divulge all the amazing things He is doing in and around me right now, but suffice it to say He is most definitely alive in this small town. He continues to remind me that His grace is sufficient; that those who are faithful with little will be entrusted with much; and that no one, absolutely no one, is beyond salvation.

Oh, Lord, help my unbelief!

Inspired by the resolutions of Jonathan Edwards written some 288 years ago, I drafted a much more simplified list of my own, and here now, for the purposes of documentation and accountability, I am publishing them for the whole world to see.

I have already failed miserably. Alas, my hope lies in the scripture first listed in this post.

I resolve to love God each day with all of my heart, soul, mind and strength.

I resolve to give my Lord the first fruits of my labors.

I resolve to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, trusting that all else necessary for His glory will be given unto me.

I resolve to share His magnificent gospel with all peoples, tribes, tongues, and nations placed in my path.

I resolve to love my neighbor as myself, giving sacrificially and expecting nothing in return.

I resolve to pray for my enemies daily, conscious of the fleeting time with which their eternal destiny will be determined.

I resolve to have no other gods than the one and only Father, Spirit, and Savior of the world -- Jesus Christ -- and to forsake all things competing with them for my affections.

I resolve to daily lay all things at the foot of the cross in hope of being filled with and led by the Holy Spirit, by His grace, for my joy and His supreme glory.

 July 17, 2011 (or somewhere around there)

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The Great Paradox of Christianity

The more we get what we now call "ourselves" out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of "little Christs," all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented -- as an author invents characters in a novel -- all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to "be myself" without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call "Myself" becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call "My wishes" become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men's thoughts or even suggested to me by devils...Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideals. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe:  most of what I call "me" can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own...


There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most "natural" men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been:  how gloriously different are the saints.


But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away "blindly" so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality:  but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original:  whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end:  submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever by really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.


C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

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Love

"[Love] is a grace which all people profess to admire. It seems a plain practical thing which everybody can understand. It is none of 'those troublesome doctrinal points' about which Christians disagree. Thousands, I suspect, would not be ashamed to tell you that they know nothing about justification, or regeneration, or about the work of Christ, or of the Holy Spirit. But nobody, I believe, would like to say that he knows nothing about love! If men possess nothing else in religion, they always flatter themselves that they possess 'love'" (J C Ryle).

And, yet, how many of us know the meaning of biblical love? More importantly, how many of us practice the greatest of the graces.

I will be the first to confess my weakness in this area. It is so easy to consider myself greater than the children I work with daily -- so easy to feed on their frustration, so easy to lose my temper, so easy to vomit up words I will immediately regret.

And, yet, I have graciously had my heart of stone replaced with a heart of Love. Certainly this was not my own doing. I experience this sick, pleasurable self-righteousness when I set my mouth free to race down the path of destruction. I revel in laying my foot down, in establishing my territory, my authority. But all of this, naturally, is of my flesh.

"The natural heart knows nothing of true love.

The love of the Bible will never be found except in a heart prepared by the Holy Spirit. It is a tender plant, and will never grow except in one soil. You may as well expect grapes on thorns, or figs on thistles, as look for love when the heart is not right.

 

The heart in which love grows is a heart changed, renewed, and transformed by the Holy Spirit. The image and likeness of God, which Adam lost at the fall, has been restored to it, however feeble and imperfect the restoration may appear. It is to 'participate in the Divine nature' by union with Christ and Sonship to God; and one of the first features of that nature is love. (2 Peter 1:4)

Such a heart is deeply convinced of sin, hates it, flees from it, and fights with it from day to day. And one of the prime elements of sin which it daily labors to overcome, is selfishness and lack of love.

Such a heart is deeply aware of its mighty debt to our Lord Jesus Christ. It feels continually that it owes to Him who died for us on the cross, all its present comfort, hope, and peace. How can it show forth its gratitude? What can it render to its Redeemer? If it can do nothing else, it strives to be like Him, to walk in His footsteps, and, like Him, to be full of love. The fact that, 'God has poured out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit' is the surest fountain of Christian love. Love will produce love" (J C Ryle).

And, so, by grace, I will continue to labor in love -- in loving others so all may see and know and taste the love of Christ -- because without love I am nothing.

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Glory Defined

There are many things I love about the writings of C. S. Lewis:  the dry humor, the vivid imagery, the eloquent use of words within our limited vocabulary. Most notably, though, I cherish his God-given ability to put into words that which I feel but cannot adequately express. Such is the case when it comes to glory.

The fact that I will one day be filled with all of God's glory (correct me if I'm wrong) has always been a double-edged sword. It is a marvelous truth on the one hand, yet I've always thought it vain to delight in God's delighting in me. After all, we're supposed to be the ones delighting in Him for all eternity, right?

In part...

"Glory suggests two ideas to me, of which one seems wicked and the other ridiculous. Either glory means to me fame, or it means luminosity. As for the first, since to be famous means to be better known than other people, the desire for fame appears to me as a competitive passion and therefore of hell rather than heaven, As for the second, who wishes to become a kind of living electric light bulb?

When I began to look into this matter I was shocked to find such different Christians as Milton, Johnson, and Thomas Aquinas taking heavenly glory quite frankly in the sense of fame or good report. But not fame conferred by our fellow creatures -- fame with God, approval or (I might say) 'appreciation' by God. And then, when I had thought it over, I saw that this view was scriptural; nothing can eliminate from the parable the divine accolade, 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant.' With that, a good deal of what I had been thinking all my life fell down like a house of cards. I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child; and nothing is so obvious in a child -- not in a conceited child, but in a good child -- as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. Not only in a child, either, but even in a dog or a horse. Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures -- nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior:  the pleasure of a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before its teacher, a creature before its Creator. I am not forgetting how horribly this most innocent desire is parodied in our human ambitions, or how very quickly, in my own experience, the lawful pleasure of praise from those whom it was my duty to please turns into the deadly poison of self-admiration. But I thought I could detect for a moment -- a very, very short moment -- before this happened, during which the satisfaction of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared was pure. And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be...

To please God...to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness...to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son -- it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is," (The Weight of Glory).
 

What a marvelous burden it will be!

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Congratulations...

***Drumroll***


shala_darkstone


You've won the $25 gift certificate to CNSstores.com!!


Thanks to everyone who participated! I had fun writing all the names out and letting someone draw the winner.

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