God of the messy and the inconsistent,
God of the distracted and ashamed,
God of the broken-hearted and grieving,
God of the discouraged and anxious—
Thank you as we start the year afresh,
We do not fear our own weakness or lack.
That we don’t have to pretend with you,
For you already know us inside and out.
Thank you for choosing to be the God of the messy.
Thank you for not expecting us to have it all together,
Or figured out or planned ahead.
Thank you for your patience in our failings and flaws.
In the work I do with pastoral counseling, we discuss the past and the way it has shaped our view of ourselves today, as well as our views of God. I do believe there is validity in doing this analysis to a degree, as it allows us to know why we do what we do presently, and also how to do something different as we move forward. So often we need to know the problem before we can allow God to heal the problem.
I do, however, believe that there is a limit to this, as continuing to go over and over the past ends up getting our eyes on the hurts and not on the way through. We must allow God to take the hurts of the past and replace it with our new identity. He has already done this, but we get to recognize how that plays out in our lives. Instead of continuing to believe we are worthless, shameful, unloved and unacceptable, we get to move into the reality that Jesus has made us worthy, shame-free, loved enormously, and acceptable completely. The more we focus on the past, the more stuck in it we become. So, it becomes a fine line between understanding the past and the effects on today and letting the past continue to control our present and future.
Mike Wells used to say that dwelling on the past and our pain for too long is incredibly boring. We get bored just over-analyzing all of it and getting nowhere. I want better, more and new. I don’t want to allow whoever hurt me to continue to control where I go now, both mentally and physically.
I have been intrigued by David and his life quite a lot this year, and have loved watching his emotion be expressed in so many of his psalms. He is angry, sad, depressed, confused—so many emotions we tend to stuff and pretend God doesn’t want to hear about. David is very honest about all of them, and I love that God receives it. The other thing I’ve noticed about David’s writings is how much He focuses on praising God, even in the middle of less than ideal circumstances.
This man had a rough life. He was running away from people who were trying to kill him often—sometimes they were enemy armies, and sometimes they were people who were supposed to be allies but betrayed him. His own son ended up making him run for his life. David made a lot of mistakes, and the Bible is very honest about too. We are never under any fantasies of David being perfect with a perfect life. But still he praised God, and thanked Him for His love and faithfulness.
I read recently that studies have shown that anxiety and gratitude cannot coexist in your brain. If we are focusing on gratitude and praising God, even in the middle of suffering and struggle, we don’t let the anxiety have the run of our brain. Praise actually becomes one of our greatest brain weapons. We are able, no matter the circumstance, to stop and praise God. We may not be thankful for the situation, but we can thank Him for His love and faithfulness just like David did. We may be in physical pain, in mental anguish or in emotional upheaval, but we can still worship Jesus and lift our spirits. I find it fascinating that Paul and Silas in Acts (***) were singing praise to God WHILE in prison. Yes, God busted them out, but they were singing before that happened!
My friends in Haiti are isolated from the world again after the gangs fired on a commercial plane and the airport was closed this week. They were ousted from their homes for over a year while fighting raged around them and they went into hiding. They have shown up for teen and preteen kids who are watching their friends die, and who are still healing from their pasts. I am so blown away by their faithfulness.
I speak to several woman who are raising kids while dealing with debilitating illness and chronic pain in themselves. They show up for their families in the ways they can while desperately surviving their own health journeys. I know they often feel like they are failing, like they can’t do what other moms can do. But I stand in awe of their faithfulness to keep showing up.
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.
What do you do with the brokenness you see inside you? When the façade doesn’t cover well and the cracks show through, reminding everyone around you that you are flawed and imperfect? How do you live through the shattered image, with all the beautiful shards mocking you from the ground while you sit naked and bare?
We did a birthday party for my son this last weekend. A bunch of his friends came over and did a Nerf gun war in the backyard in childhood bliss. I was talking with my son later that night and he totally shocked me by leaning over for a hug and saying, “Thanks for the fun party, Mom.” More often than not, my kids complain about what they don’t have rather than being thankful for what they do. And (who am I kidding here?) so do I.
I need the revelation of the sacred in the mundane, the extraordinary in the everyday and the supernatural in the earthly sameness. I forget so easily, and go about my day with crazy drivers and bickering kids and toilets to clean. Maybe for you it’s the emptiness or sadness or stillness rather than the busy.
My friend and mentor Mike Wells used to talk about recognizing God in everything a lot. He probably taught it often because all of us needed the reminder constantly. When things happen in our lives that seem bad, it’s really hard to recognize God in them. We want to get an answer to why circumstances are the way they are, and usually we want to lash out at God for allowing the particular problem. Or even to doubt His existence because we don’t see His hand in caring for us in the midst of the suffering.
Do you ever feel that you are the only one who endures days, weeks or months of what feels like silence from God? The valley of the shadow of death stretches long in front of you, and it looks like a tumultuous relationship, or anxiety, or unemployment or just the mundaneness of it all making you feel insignificant and unimportant. And it seems God has taken a lunch break and is unavailable, or worse has decided to punish you for something while He remains aloof?
I can often feel unacceptable. I feel I haven’t met the standards to be accepted. I’m not funny enough, kind enough, pretty enough or whatever the standard in my head is. I measure myself by so many standards I’ve set up and always find myself lacking. It is an exercise in futility—work so hard to perform right and be what you have deemed as acceptable, and yet constantly fail and feel as though you can’t measure up.
Do you ever feel that life is a constant comparison of your efforts with the standard, and you are found wanting? It’s like piling the measures of your life on your chest, one after another, hoping that at least one of them will read “Success” and you can feel like you made it. What is the measure of your life?
This morning, so many people woke up and couldn’t dream up the strength to get out of bed. I can think of ones who face chronic pain and illness, ones who woke to support loved ones at yet another doctor’s appointment, ones who see an uncertain future for a rocky relationship, ones who approach what seems like an insurmountable obstacle.
It is amazing to me to look back over my life and see the hand of God at work all throughout to reveal/ uncover Christ in me. Early in my life, I would fight the tools He would use. I still do, but much less often and with less intensity. It’s in those struggles, the very tools that I used to see as the enemy, that I am now seeing the tender invitation of God to a deeper relationship with Him and a life of freedom.
As most of you know, we are expecting our first baby in June (this is a republishing of a post I wrote in 2011). Although my pregnancy has not been bad at all, there is a certain amount of impatience that seems to develop as we wait for the baby to be born. I love to feel him kick and wonder what he will look like, but I’d really like to just have him out and be able to hold him and watch him grow.
I love happy endings. I really can’t stand it when I watch a movie or read a book, and the ending just leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. In fact, I actually rewrote several book endings when I was a kid because I didn’t like the original version. (Because, you know, they’re only timeless classics celebrated for their incredible stories but I thought I could do better!)
Like a child, He said. The humble one, the gentle one, the teachable one. These will be able to see the beauty of heaven. At that time the disciples came to ask Jesus, “Who is considered to be the greatest in heaven’s kingdom realm?” Jesus called a little one to his side and said to them, “Learn this well: Unless you dramatically change your way of thinking and become teachable, and learn about heaven’s kingdom realm with the wide-eyed wonder of a child, you will never be able to enter in. Whoever continually humbles himself to become like this gentle child is the greatest one in heaven’s kingdom realm. Mt 18:1-4 (Passion Translation)
Who am I? Apart from Christ, no more than a broken woman with no special powers or intelligence. A mother who gets impatient with her kids and lives in regret often over the reactions. A wife who loves imperfectly and sometimes focuses on the flaws rather than the good. A person who beats herself up often for all the lack, forgetting to remember the Source for any good thing.
I have talked to several people whose parents, from the day they were born, conveyed the message they were unwanted. Some parents had wanted a girl and didn’t know what to do with a boy. Some got pregnant by “accident” and felt immediate resentment toward their little one. The feeling of being unwanted stuck around and these children have been constantly looking for someone to tell them they are wanted since then. But people are terrible at consistency.
How often have you wondered if you are a complete idiot like some would suggest? You believe in God despite the suffering you endure, and you believe His Life within allows you to do things that would be impossible without Him. A lot of people would roll their eyes and wonder how someone could be so stupid.
Although most parents and people around us try to love well, sometimes they miss the mark a bit. Sometimes people are fighting their own insecurities so much that they lash out at others to try to make themselves feel better. Of course, that doesn’t work, and instead leaves a person feeling even less loved. Sometimes we can even take the feeling of being unloved to the extreme of being unlovable.
I recently heard a man say that he dealt with life throughout the day by reciting Psalm 23. He said it was the best antidepressant he had found. I think if it had been anyone other than Mike Wells’ old mentor from India, I might have ignored this because so many formulas have been thrown at us they sound hollow. But this wasn’t a formula to him—it was a way of refocusing.
