of chasms and justice

Last night was one of those desperate moments. 


Of seeing sin in my own heart and feeling helpless because I really desired it. 
I WANTED to be angry; I WANTED to hold onto "justice."


It was a moment of truly seeing Him and realizing I was on the opposite side. 


So what do you do in that moment of looking up from the situation and realizing...I am alone. 


When you see Him across the other side of the Grand Canyon, it seems, with no bridge in sight?


How can He be over THERE?!?


Does He not see what the situation demands?


Where is justice? Where is truth?


But for some funny reason, He is telling ME to come over THERE.


What.


Is.


This.


No way. He needs to come over here and fix this right now.


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A few days go by.


And a few more.


Alone. Alone. Alone.


He has not left my sight, but I am not going over there.


Never.


That would hurt too much. 


Surely love and forgiveness...are horribly inconvenient, nagging truths right now. 
I want another truth. I want my truth. The obvious stuff. The kind that doesn't touch my heart.


------------------------------------------


Finally, desperation.


I cannot live like this for long.

His justice is better. His way is not mine. He wanted me, died for me, while I was a sinner.

Not when I was perfect.

Not when I had anything to offer.

There is something more important than how I am feeling, how I am assessing the situation.


Him.


Simply Him.


And yet, over there.


He is still over there, across a chasm that I cannot possibly cross, because I have never been able to purify my own heart, never been able to make myself righteous.


What do I do with this mess?


Screaming, crying, weeping for change.


But not in the situation, this time...in my own heart.


___________________________


and then, a miracle!


He 


meets


me.


___________________________


For if we confess our sins, He is faithful and JUST to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:9


Maybe His justice looks a little differently than I expected.


May I extend such to others.


Selah.

beautiful redemption

Matthew 1:5-6

Salmon was the father of Boaz by Rahab, Boaz was the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse. Jesse was the father of David the king. David was the father of Solomon by Bathsheba who had been the wife of Uriah. Solomon was the father of Rehoboam, Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asa.

In two short verses, three extremely broken women are listed.

1 - Rahab, a prostitute.

2 - Ruth, a pagan Moabitess.

3 - Bathsheba, an adulteress and illegitimate mother.

You probably know their stories...

Rahab, a prostitute, saved the lives of Joshua and Caleb when they were spying out the land of Canaan. She hid them in her house while the whole city was looking for them. Because of this, she and her family were the only people spared from that city when the Israelites advanced.

Ruth was originally a Moabitess before she married into a Jewish family. Even then, after her husband died, her mother-in-law freed her to go her own way, back to her own people. Yet Ruth clung, not only to Naomi, but to her God.

Bathsheba, the wife of one of David's mighty men, slept with David, became pregnant, and later became his wife after David had her husband killed. This whole situation was so grievous to the Lord that He would not allow their first child to live. And yet...one of her sons carried on the lineage of David, and later, Jesus Christ.

It just really hit me as I was reading this how much God believes in His own redemption. He chose these women to be in the lineage of His Son!

Even now, He calls us, redeems us, accepts us...and then fits us right into His great plan!

...to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved. - Ephesians 1:6

Praise be to Him forever and ever, because He has redeemed us!

Sweetly Broken

Please remember with me those times of sweet brokeness.

You, lying at His feet.

You, whose heart ached until you thought it could ache no more.

You, weeping, screaming, yelling at the top of your lungs to Him.

In those moments (seasons), it is nothing short of miraculous that He meets us in the pain as One who has actually experienced the same. [Hebrews 4]

I fight to remember these truths - 1) God desires us to pour out our hearts before Him, no matter that He already knows. 2) He has never left or forsaken us. 3) He has always been for us. 4) He has guided us through the dark with the absolute best leadership we could possibly have. 5) He will reveal His plan and purpose in the truest, rightest time - probably when we feel least likely to hear it. 6) He will not always reveal His dealings with those close to us. 7) Sometimes He's really scary...but also patient with us...when we accuse Him of being the devil, or the worst thing that happened to us, and tell Him to go away. 8) He stays even then.

Thank you, C.S. Lewis, for the below.

"Who are you?" he said, scarcely above a whisper. "One who has waited long for you to speak," said the Thing. Its voice was not loud, but very large and deep. "Are you - are you a giant?" asked Shasta. "You might call me a giant," said the Large Voice. "But I am not like the creatures you call giants." "I can't see you at all," said Shasta, after staring very hard. Then (for an even more terrible idea had come into his head) he said, almost in a scream, "You're not - not something dead, are you? Oh please - please do go away. What harm have I ever done you? Oh, I am the unluckiest person in the whole world!" Once more he felt the warm breath of the Thing on his hand and face. "There," it said, "that is not the breath of a ghost. Tell me your sorrows." Shasta was a little reassured by the breath: so he told how he had never known his real father or mother and had been brought up sternly by the fisherman. And then he told the story of his escape and how they were chased by lions and forced to swim for their lives; and of all their dangers in Tashbaan and about his night among the tombs and how the beasts howled at him out of the desert. And he told about the heat and thirst of their desert journey and how they were almost at their goal when another lion chased them and wounded Aravis. And also, how very long it was since he had had anything to eat. "I do not call you unfortunate," said the Large Voice. "Don't you think it was bad luck to meet so many lions?" said Shasta. "There was only one lion," said the Voice. "What on earth do you mean? I've just told you there were at least two the first night, and-" "There was only one: but he was swift of foot." "How do you know?" "I was the lion." And as Shasta gaped with open mouth and said nothing, the Voice continued. "I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you." "Then it was you who wounded Aravis?" "It was I" "But what for?" "Child," said the Voice, "I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own." "Who are you?" asked Shasta. "Myself," said the Voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook: and again "Myself", loud and clear and gay: and then the third time "Myself", whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it. Shasta was no longer afraid that the Voice belonged to something that would eat him, nor that it was the voice of a ghost. But a new and different sort of trembling came over him. Yet he felt glad too.

Fascination

...a Person is so much more fascinating than a place. let us not settle for a mountain-top experience and miss out on the One who holds our hands through the mountains AND the valleys, day-by-day.

...experiences will not leave us unshaken; knowing our Maker will. unless we trust the One who is leading us, we would never dare venture out into the unknown, into the wilderness. too unsettled, too shaky, too dry...perhaps...

...yet trust implies a relationship, a knowledge intimately produced as you walk through life with Someone. how much better to be with the One we love in desolation than to be surrounded by the best this life has to offer without Him!

...like a steady undertow in my heart, these three verses have been tugging me deeper...may they do the same for you!

The steps of a man are established by the Lord, and He delights in his way. When he falls, he will not be hurled headlong, because the Lord is the One who holds his hand.

Draw me after You, and let us run together!

I shall run the way of Your commandments, for You will enlarge my heart.

Psalm 37:23-24, Song of Songs 1:4 , Psalm 119:32

Quick Thoughts on Failure

Failure does not define who you are. What you do when you fail, does.

At some point, you will fail everyone.

3 main responses to failure:

1. Avoiding responsibility
2. Assigning yourself to the condemnation “corner”
3. Falling on your knees in dependence on Christ

Remember 2 Corinthians 12:9-10 – “And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong.”

You put your whole hope and trust in the Lord and not in your own obedience or strength or ability to do things “perfectly” according to X standard. These things will fail you.

Psalm 37:23-24 – “The steps of a man are established by the LORD, and He delights in his way. When he falls, he will not be hurled headlong, because the LORD is the One who holds his hand.”

Thoughts In the Wilderness

Hello there, all the way from Baja Mexico! :)

I am surrounded by desert and mountains, and I find that the Lord will often use my surroundings to teach me about Him.

Let's dive in...

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“I have been waiting 3 years for you to go deeper with Me…”

I love how blunt the Lord is.

I sit here thinking I have it all together, that my life is “on track,” that I know what the Lord wants…and with a few simple words, He wrecks me.

Thank God. Thank GOD.

I think sometimes we fear the rebuke of the Lord because we are used to harsh reprimands from our fathers and mothers. Yet, we forget Hebrews 12 – “They [your earthly fathers] disciplined you for a short time as seemed best to them, but He [our Heavenly Father] disciplines us for our good, that we may share in His holiness.”

Have we also forgotten this word? – “Without holiness [sanctification], no one will see God.” [Hebrews 12:14]

The punishments and rebukes of God directed toward believers is extremely interesting to me, because even in His wrath, His just anger toward our sin and rebellion, He never leaves us alone!

Consider what Moses wrote to the Israelites as he recounted their rebellious history with the Lord between their deliverance from Egypt and their conquests in the promised land:

“For the Lord your God has blessed you in all that you have done; He has known your wanderings through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you; you have not lacked a thing.” [Deuteronomy 2:7]

Lest you think the Lord felt sorry for them, consider what Moses also says:

“Now the time it took for us to come from Kadesh-barnea until we crossed over the brook Zered was thirty-eight years, until the generation of the men of war perished from within the camp, as the Lord had sworn to them. Moreover, the hand of the Lord was against them, to destroy them from within the camp until they all perished.”

[Deuteronomy 2:14]

Throughout those forty years, the unrepentant died out, and the repentant/next generation lived before God, while still enduring His punishment.

Why do we assume His punishment means He is far from us, as believers? Yes, we are dealing with consequences, and for the record, sometimes they are consequences we deal with BECAUSE OF other people. But maybe He means those consequences to train us in righteousness so that we will NOT fall again, so that we will LEARN to fear Him, so that we will LISTEN and OBEY during our next test. Those that did not perish surely saw those who did – do we really think that was coincidental on the part of the Lord?

A perfectionist mindset says that all must be done perfectly or we are outcast, miserable, failures. Yes, our sin and rebellion will have consequences. But why do we run from Him when we are wrong instead of running to Him? Do we prefer to die in the wilderness, or live?

I like this line I heard once in a movie: “I’d rather be miserable with you than without you.” Haha – that sounds pleasant. But when facing the unknown, or perhaps when we see what we must now do because the Lord is disciplining us, it may seem miserable indeed. Hebrews 12 again says: “ALL discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.”

When we must turn and face the wilderness, let us determine we’d rather walk through it together with the Lord instead of apart from Him.

His “wilderness training” shatters our sin nature.

His grace is perfect; His training complete!

Let us follow our Shepherd, for He leads perfectly.

Amen.

pieces of my heart

If my life were a puzzle, and I a child, then perhaps my heart would be the picture.

I know the puzzle-maker; He is my Father. He alone knows the full picture; He has never shown me the box cover!

So here are some pieces of my puzzle in this ending of May and beginning of June…nothing grandiose…nothing pauperish…just my heart as I know it.

the nations – woo me; burden me.

the Word – is sooooo salty…it makes me thirst, then bids me drink.

His Spirit – is more and more dear.

His salvation – is my delight!

a bible study – deepens me.

school – though done for a season, wrestles with me.

my “job” – frustrates, delights, laughs, cries…all of these reactions are mine, on a weekly basis!

I was telling a friend that the best things about this year have been the internal workings of Christ in me.

I haven’t moved to the nations.

I have a steady job.

I go to a community college.

All is…the same? Blah.

Blah.

Blah.

Blah.

Oh, but my for my HEART.

I find it growing deeper in love with Him each day!

This is the life I’ve always dreamed of...

(Somehow, I just thought it would happen due to circumstances, surroundings, peoples…but I find these things can neither separate nor push me toward the love of Christ in and of themselves.)

Just Christ.

The simple beauty of the Gospel.

hE mAdE a WaY fOr Me

He is mine and I am His.

Unmerited grace. Undeserved mercy.

That’s my King…

my Lover…

my Friend.

Tonight is the first night I can think of in many months where I walked away from watching a movie I knew I would enjoy to spend time with the One who loves me.

There is a...newness...to this season.

All my "why's" are being wrapped up in Him - He is my answer.

As my pastor said this Sunday: The question is not "Does God love me" for He has already answered that question! The question is: Do I love Him?

Who knew what joy could be found in the answering?

For I find myself in one place dancing and laughing and crying in my room with Him, in love, only to find myself in another place where my love has failed, and I am burdened by my sin. In that place, He finds me...quiets me with His love...and makes me new.

I have never met anyone like this Man. I probably never will.

He is mine and I am His.

It is enough.