Centroid of the mechanism...

Every Thursday night at 7:30, a couple of my dear girl friends hold a women's Bible study at my school. We're going through a book called "The Cross Centered Life" (man, my blog might as well be a plug for every Christian book I ever come into contact with, huh?), and each week one of the leading girls summarizes the chapter and talks about what spoke to her. Tonight Juliette discussed several good points about how Jesus loves us each personally and individually, we are only living the cross-centered life when we are filled with assurance and joy (note - not the same as happiness; see C.S. Lewis for more explanation), and legalism can sneak in as focus on our sins rather than God's grace. One thing that really stood out to me though was an offhand comment that she made about how everything that we find satisfaction in breaks down and falls apart except for Jesus. It's a simple and obvious comment really, but due to some recent changes in my life, I've been thinking about it more often. Juliette mentioned that it happens within ministries too, and I have experienced that personally when a ministry that my life used to center around dissolved due to lack of participants just last year. Every person my life has ever revolved around has either grown distant or our relationship has changed; or worse, the person himself changed. There's only one constant in life, ever. I think Radio Babylon captured it best in their awesome comic strip "Coffee With Jesus":

Hmm. How very true that is. I know this isn't up to my usual witty/anecdotal post standards, but it's been a rough week, and this point touched me... so I wanted to share it with you guys, however briefly. :) Take a good look at where you're centering your life. If it's not on Jesus, chances are you're due for a collapse. I know from personal experience - it happens to me every time I take my focus from Him. Leave your heart in His hands. Make Him the center. That's all, folks.

I am a baby sea turtle.

When I was a child, grandma's house was a very exciting place to me for the sole reason that while my mom and my grandma chatted, I would be set in front of a television which, unlike mine at home, actually had cable. This meant I had full access to explore Nickelodeon and the Disney channel to my heart's content - a thrilling prospect! One of my favorite shows on Nick Jr. was "Gullah Gullah Island", a series about a group of families who lived on an awesome island and apparently spent all day every day learning things about nature, themselves, and each other. I very clearly remember one episode in which the family went down to the beach one night to watch baby sea turtles hatch. It was so amazing to watch these tiny little turtles, no bigger than the palms of the children's hands, flop and waddle their awkward way toward the sea and half-leap into the incoming waves. It still amazes me to this day... how can something JUST HATCHED, which has spent its entire life until this point growing and developing in the sheltered safety of a soft egg buried deep in the sand for protection, break free of its egg, push up through the sand, and rush toward the perilous, mighty ocean without a second of hesitation? (Can you imagine a baby being just delivered, and immediately hopping up and trotting toward the hospital parking lot to go home?) How does a baby turtle even have the strength to do it, when these creatures have had no chance to exercise their tiny little muscles until the moment of their glorious emergence? There's only one answer: because that's how God made them. He put it into their teensy little minds - or maybe hearts - to push up out of their soft prison and upon encountering the wide world immediately race toward the raging ocean as fast as their floppy little fins will take them. And He gave them the strength to do it.

Sometimes I have doubts and worries about the future. I worry about whether or not I'll be hired for the summer job I need to help me stay in college next year. I worry about what I'm going to do for the roughly seven months after I graduate before I plunge into the internship I feel God calling me to. I wonder what I'm supposed to do with my life after the internship is complete. And yet, like those baby sea turtles, God is calling me forward. He already knows where I'm headed and what I need to do to get there, and He will draw me toward Himself as I go.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
~Jeremiah 29:11

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works,which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
~Ephesians 2:10

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.
~Proverbs 3:6

One more thing I learned while watching baby sea turtles hatch... when the time came for a baby turtle to flounder toward the ocean, Ranger Mike instructed the family to keep all of their flashlights off, because the light of the moon and the stars on the water is what leads the baby turtles to the ocean. Seeing other lights would make them turn away from the ocean and wobble toward the flashlights in their confusion. How often do the appealing things of this world make me turn from following the glorious light of God? 

Brothers and sisters, let us not turn away from the one true light to any of the meager imitations this world offers. "[L]et us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1b-2)" Let's be baby sea turtles, trusting the Creator to lead us and give us the strength we need to complete the journey, constantly plunging forward - awkward though we are. A mighty ocean waits before us! 

No one like You/How He Loves Us

This morning's Pandora worship session woke me up with a good dose of David Crowder. In his song "No One Like You", the first verse claims, "Every day, You're the same. You never change, no never!" That's always been a no-brainer for me. Duh... of course God never changes. It's just a fact. We take it for granted... why sing about it? But this morning I realized that it's not just a fact - it is a huge blessing. God's unchanging nature is a gift to His people. When I think of my best friend in this city, I would love to say that he never changes; but that's entirely untrue. When I'm having a bad day, sometimes he can be the sweetest, kindest, most helpful friend I've ever had. But other times he's having a bad day too, or tells me to suck it up and move on, or sometimes he's not even here at all. Sometimes when I say "hi" to him from across the courtyard he'll make a completely 180 from where he was going just to come over and give me a hug. Sometimes he'll glance up just long enough to toss out a grumpy "hey" and continue on. Even though I completely trust him as a person and trust that he cares about me and loves me as a friend, I can't trust him to be the exact same person - or to act the same toward me - every day. God's not like that. Every single day, no matter whether I'M close or distant, grumpy or happy, up or down, He's always pouring out his grace, love, mercy, affection, gentleness, kindness, patience, sweetness, etc. into my life. In fact, I would even say that he slathers me with love. Slather - isn't that a great word? A friend of mine used it yesterday, then noted how it's a combination between "slop" and "lather". So it's like, "Heap it on and rub it all over!" SLATHER. I think that's how God's affection is given to us. Slather style. He scoops up as much love as we can humanly handle, plops it onto our heads, and rubs it into the darkest corners of our hearts with zeal. And He never stops doing this.

"I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness."
~Jeremiah 31:3b

For great is his love toward us, and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.
~Psalm 117:2

"I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me."
~Jeremiah 32:40

And these are only a few of the hundreds of verses in the Bible which display God's incredible care for us. Praise God - He will never stop loving us and doing good to us! What a remarkably undeserved blessing.

What a sight!

"So in the end, explanations always fall short, and we're left with a choice between sight and faith, between practicality and belief. Because beyond the world that we see with our eyes is another world that pulses beneath the skin of the visible - a world of prayer and spirit, of love and the future, of wonder and ultimate reality. And that world is even more real than ours since it's only because of the invisible that the visible is even here."
~Stephen James, Sailing Between the Stars

It's amazing how much we see - and don't see - with our eyes. I can see the crow cawing joyously outside my window as he bobs up and down on the tree branch. I see a small yet powerful body, graceful wings, glossy black feathers, a sparkling black eye. But what it is really? Nothing more than an assortment of vibrating molecules, which absorb and reflect different parts of the waves and rays and particles of light that strike them. If we were to see a crow without our brains filtering the reflecting light rays and meshing together  the moving molecules, I think it might look something a bit like this:

But because of the way that we are created to see, it comes across to us like this:

However, if you were created not as a human being but as a snake (which "sees" primarily by sensing creatures by the heat they give off), a bird would look more like this:

If you were a bat, you would sense a bird by the sound waves reflecting back from it by using sonar. But as humans, we cannot see the thermal image of another living creature. We can't detect the precise waves of sound bouncing off of a solid object. We can't even see uv rays or microwaves, which I've been told that some reptiles can. How much more might we be missing out there just because we are not equipped to see it? Even the things that our brain CAN perceive are not always relayed to our senses.

"The brain processes 400 Billion bits of information a second. BUT, we are ONLY aware of 2,000 of those." -Dr. Joseph Dispenza, D.C.

There is simply too much information for us to respond to all of it without going mad. So when it comes the the spiritual world... well, to quote one of my favorite Christmas movies, The Santa Clause, "Seeing isn't believing...believing is seeing. Kids don't have to see this place to know that it's here. They just...know." Just because we cannot see the world of spirit with our eyes doesn't mean that it's not just beyond the ends of our fingertips. Regardless of what our eyes tell us, a lot of crazy stuff exists in this world that we can't - or don't - perceive. This is why faith is such an important part of our relationship with God - because

"Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
~Hebrews 11:1

Think about that as you go about your day... especially the fact that Jesus is always with us, "even to the end of the age". Even though you can't see Him standing beside you, that doesn't make Him any less there. Our human perception is flawed, but God's perception is perfect. And at the end of our lives, when our transformation comes and we are made like Him... man, that'll be a sight to see! :)

Twenty-thirteen, no regrets!!!

"No regrets!" is one of the defining cries of my generation... or at least of my friends at camp last summer. Whenever we did something a little crazy - like going rollerskating with a full knowledge that none of us had any skill on wheels, or buying the most awkwardly patterned thrift store shirt ever, or eating that third corn dog - we would plunge into the experience yelling "Twenty-twelve, no regrets!". This went hand in hand with the more popular "YOLO" (You Only Live Once), expressing our desire to live life to the fullest and emphasizing the fact that, no matter what the consequences, this choice that we were about to make would be worth it. All of us want to be able to live our lives without regrets, because regrets imply bad choices, being wrong, dealing with painful consequences, guilt. Guilt never feels good. It doesn't make you want to yell "YOLO!" at the top of your lungs... it makes you want to curl up in a miserable little ball and whisper, "Can I live twice? 'Cause I messed this life up pretty badly." Well, guess what? There's good news! God is really into second chances. :) Salvation gives us a chance to start anew. He will wipe our slate clean the moment we ask Him... and you know what the best part is? After He does that, your sin is GONE.

"For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.”
~ Hebrews 8:12

The way I was raised, any wrongdoing produced a major guilt trip from my mother. Even after repentance and consequences, often there would still be a lingering sense of guilt, especially if the results of my sin continued long after the punishment did. For the longest time, I thought this was an appropriate response to my failings... "I did a bad thing, and I should be sorry that I did it... in fact, if I'm sorry enough, or for long enough, maybe it will make up for what I did." It's only been in the past couple of years that I've finally accepted that guilt is not an acceptable response to grace. Guilt is meant to convict us of sin and lead us to repentance, not to make us feel like terrible people even after we've repented. I was reminded of this incredible truth this morning when I was reading in 2 Corinthians. Chapter 7, verse 10 states clearly:

"For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation WITHOUT REGRET, whereas worldly grief produces death." [emphasis added]

Let's remember this important truth as we continue this crazy journey called life. I'm speaking to myself as much as to you when I say, don't hold on to your guilt after repentance. Stop taking the punishment that Jesus already took FOR you. Accept the work of grace, give up your own self-deprication. Let's live our lives with such a close connection to Jesus and His mercy that, even after we fail, we can still hold our faces up to the King and cry out joyfully, "TWENTY-THIRTEEN... NO REGRETS!!!"

Oh, and remember this important truth too...