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Hannah Morrell
The Wilderness

Several years ago, my husband and I were camping in Moab, Utah with our one-year-old son. Camping is probably a generous term—we did have a pop-up camper and weren’t really roughing it. We did, however, drive about half an hour outside of town on a dirt road to the middle of nowhere, and then parked the camper at the top of a rocky hill. The views were spectacular, and we would only see another car on the dirt road about once every few hours. It was a little taste of the wilderness, with only us and our little camper. No cell service, no toilets, and no other people around.

This seemed like a fantastic experience until we decided the next day to head back into town to get a few groceries. After piling in the truck, my husband tried to start the vehicle, but it wouldn’t start. The truck’s battery was dead. And the wilderness experience that seemed like a lot of fun became quite scary.

I started to panic, wondering how we would ever get out of there. No cars came by on the road, and it was at least a day’s walk to get back into town with a one-year-old and only so much food for camping. Finally after a bit of worry, my husband brilliantly figured out that he could use the camper batteries to jump the truck battery, and we were finally moving again.

But what about the figurative wildernesses in which we find ourselves where we can’t figure a way out, and we sit and wait with no resources and no hope? Wildernesses are a real experience in life, and one which often catches us by surprise. I’m not sure why, as so many of the people in the Bible went through years and years of wilderness, sometimes figurative and sometimes quite literal. There are stories of prison, hardships, desert-living, wandering, frustration, hopelessness, disbursement and aching for home.

The Wilderness
Posts
Hannah Morrell
Why I Choose Jesus

I get questions a lot of times about why I love and serve God even when He doesn’t always give me what I want. A lot of people wonder why I continue to pursue relationship with Jesus, and consider it old-fashioned or burdensome. So, I wanted to write a post about why I choose Jesus.

It’s definitely not because of the people who call themselves Christians—although some are a wonderful gift to me and I’m so grateful for them. But the people in the Church are messy just like everyone else, and when we expect them to be perfect or to never hurt or reject us, we will be disappointed. I know, though, that people who believe in Jesus recognize they need something other than themselves to do life. So, as they are dependent on Him, they love people well. When they are relying on their own self-righteousness or rule-following, they end up in a place of religion which is toxic and downright abusive sometimes. The word religion means to bind over and over again. When we bind ourselves up in trying to please God without the power He has given us to do so, we are in a bigger mess than if we deny Him entirely.

I also don’t pursue relationship with God because I was raised to believe Him and brainwashed into doing so. In fact, I have had many reason NOT to pursue relationship with Him over the years, and it would actually be easier for me and make more sense to drop the whole thing! I could make more money, have easier relationships and not experience nearly as much rejection.

Instead, I love Jesus because He loved me first, not when I met His standard or expectation. He reached out to me in love with no strings attached. I don’t have to accept His love, and He experiences rejection more than any other person I know as many refuse Him.

Why I Choose Jesus
Posts
Hannah Morrell
Walking Like a Superhero

There’s a little boy I see every morning when I’m dropping my daughter off at school. He comes to help drop off his older brother, and always shows up in his Superman pajamas complete with cape. The thing that always strikes me as hilarious is how he walks next to his dad. He’s this tiny little man, but walks like he is 10 feet tall—he definitely has the superhero walk down. His cape flows behind him, and he takes large, commanding steps no matter where he is going.

I love watching him and it makes me giggle a little to watch him stride through the parking lot. This morning, though, God spoke and asked me how I would walk if I knew and believed the super power that dwells within me? That caught me off guard. You see, I used to always walk with my eyes on my shoes (which might explain some of my clumsiness). I didn’t feel that I had worth, and I walked like it. I didn’t understand Who I had, or who I was.

You see, when you have Christ’s Life within you, you have the power of the Living God walking around with you. He says He will be everything you need, and we have all of Him to meet all of our problems, dilemmas and circumstances. I think when I realize that I am the chosen dwelling place of God Himself (1 Corinthians 6:19), and that makes me His.

Walking Like a Superhero
Posts
Hannah Morrell
Cry of the Broken-Hearted

We cry out from a broken heart,
Shards lying all around us on the ground.
Our tears pour out—
It feels like they will never end.

The pain explodes from within us,
Our chests feeling like they will break apart.
Lying face down on the ground,
Our desperate plea for help and rescue escaping our lips.

Our Kind Shepherd is here,
Never leaving, never abandoning us in grief.
A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief Himself,
He will not turn away.

Cry of the Broken-Hearted
Posts
Hannah Morrell
The Powerful Force of Hope

Hope is often viewed as a destination—like saying we hope for the future, and believing we get the hope when we arrive at the future we are expecting or creating in our minds. We believe that our lives should “normalize” or the tough stuff should stop happening at some point, and that’s the point where hope is manifested.

I was reading Katherine Wolf’s Treasures in the Dark recently, and she addresses this after she has suffered an almost-life-ending stroke, multiple neural events, broken bones and recovery from all of those things. She says:

Whether I acknowledged it or not, hope had been a destination to me. Something to be attained or achieved. I thought I could successfully complete a one-time progressive ascent from hurting to healing to hoping, then hang out at the top for the rest of my life. Easy breezy! Maybe this sounds like something you’ve believed too. 

The Powerful Force of Hope

sin

Abiding Life

Abiding Life

So, you accept that Jesus is the way and you invite Him into your life, accepting the complete forgiveness He’s already given for all the ways you’ve tried to do life on your own, and recognizing He makes your spirit alive. In this acceptance, you emerge a new person with access to all the power of the living God who does not ask you to live life by yourself and in your own strength, but provides His through His Life within in the presence of His Spirit.

You aren’t trying to prove yourself or do the right things, but rather you are living out the worth that God has already given you. You haven’t earned it, and it can’t be taken away. Jesus said you have worth, value and meaning, and He wants relationship with you—that’s why He suffered and died to make a way ahead. He beat up death, sin, evil and darkness, freeing us from ever having to serve them. We do choose to serve them sometimes, but we don’t have to—we have another way.

So, how do we live life now? First, you acknowledge that you are loved without having to perform or achieve or do one solitary thing. You have been called a child of God, and He loves you immensely without your achievement. Second, it isn’t about sin. Sin was dealt with on the cross, and is our master no more. Instead, it’s about believing that God will do what He says and recognizing that I can’t do it on my own.

Life for the religious often becomes a hamster wheel of doing “for” God and staying away from the things that might make Him mad. But in doing that, we are missing the point. He wants relationship, not performance. We don’t love others because we’ve decided to love really hard. We love others because He loved us first and that love overflows out of us onto someone else. And the things He tells us not to do are not because He’s going to blast us if we do them, but we start to recognize that they are the places of misery for us. Often these are the things we run to in order to try to feel better about life—substances, people, ministry, image.

They aren’t just “bad” things as defined by religion. Anything that puts you in a place where you are trying to gain acceptance and love based on what you do or don’t do is bad for us. Instead, there’s a sweet dependence of relationship when we wake up and ask Jesus what we are doing today. And when His peace leaves, so do we. We don’t need an explanation, but rather we start to understand that His peace is a guide for our contentment.

Your Problem Isn't Sin

Your Problem Isn't Sin

My mentor told a story of a pastor who had in his church a young man wracked with guilt every Sunday. Every week, the man would walk to the front to confess his mistakes for the week, recommitting to being done with whatever he was doing that week. The pastor had finally had enough, and meant to call him out the following Sunday. As he stood at the front, the young man rose and began his weekly trip to tell the pastor about his mess-ups. And God spoke to the pastor and told him to tell the young man, “You can come again, and again, and again. I will never tire of you coming to me.” The pastor was overcome with the beauty of the forgiveness and compassion of God for this man.

I talk to many people each week, and often it can become a confessional of how they feel they have failed. The communication in many Christian circles has been one of obsession with sin, condemnation for wrong-doing and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to try to make God happy again. I don’t believe this is Biblical, though. Jesus is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. He says that apart from Him you can do nothing. He talks of how he forgets your sin, and throws it as far as the east is from the west. He talk of forgiving over and over, without resentment or demand.

Sin is not what keeps people from God—pride and unbelief does that. Sin has been dealt with on the cross. It’s the pride of feeling I must do everything independently, including “being good” although the standard for good is one which I cannot attain. It’s also the relentless unbelief that God doesn’t work to pursue me or want me—it is all up to me to live life in a way that pleases Him. So, we carry on trying harder, trying again and working ourselves into a depressing frenzy of self-torture.

Falling Into God

Falling Into God

I watched an interesting video recently of billionaire business owner, Sara Blakely, talking about her father’s raising her to welcome failure. Every night when his kids got back from school and they gathered around the dinner table, he would ask each of them how they had failed that day, and celebrate it! He wanted them to fail because that meant they were trying new things and not just staying in their comfort zone. Sara continues to do this with her own company employees today, having meetings where she asks them how they have failed and learned something new. 

God's Compassion for Us

God's Compassion for Us

Every couple of weeks, I attend a little ladies’ Bible study at my neighbor’s house. These women have been such a gift to me in their kindness, lack of judgement (even if I didn’t read all the homework!) and compassion in walking with each other. We are studying a series on Gideon, and I have been surprised at how much I see God’s compassion for the Israelites in some of the passages of the Old Testament. This people messed up over and over, running the opposite direction from where God had told them to go.

Because He First Loved Us

Because He First Loved Us

I don’t know about you, but I often forget the incredible pursuit of the love of God. I forget that He reached out to us while we hated Him, while we were sinners—our filthy rags of “righteousness” and of outright rebellion all mixed together in a mess and even still He did not turn away. He walked right into that mess and declared Himself victor as He willingly laid down His Life.

Walking with the broken to find hope in Jesus