Temptation to Vacation

This past week, I have vacationed.  I’ve slept late.  The kids haven’t had school, so I haven’t been teaching.  I got way behind on laundry.  I haven’t had anything to prepare for at church.  Geoff and I had a getaway.   I ate Chateaubriande and indulged in desserts.  I have taken a break from all of my responsibilities.

And I’ve taken a break from devoting myself to my Lord. 

It’s curious to me that, during this week of vacation, when I found more time to spend quality relational time with the people that I love, I found less time to relate to Him.

A.W. Tozer reminds me, “God is a person, and in the deep of His mighty nature He thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves, desires, and suffers as any other person may.  In making Himself known to us He stays by the familiar pattern of personality.  He communicates with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions.  The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion.”

If I truly know God as a person, why is it that I am still tempted to view conversations with Him as a responsibility?  A duty?

There have been many times in our marriage when I have found myself at moments of choosing… to take the hard road of moving toward my husband when every sinful tendency in me wants to avoid.  In those moments, the temptation to flee… to hide… to vacation from the relationship is overwhelmingly strong. 

It’s this temptation that has crept into my life with my Lord lately… to vacation from the relationship. 

And yet, it’s the grace of my husband’s love and the promises he made that draw me back and keep me pressing into the hard work of staying connected, confessing my temptation to vacation even as I choose to unpack my bags and stay home with him.

Thomas a Kempis said, “Temptations reveal who we are… And yet, temptations can be useful to us even though they seem to cause us nothing but pain.  They are useful because they can make us humble, they can cleanse us, and they can teach us… the key to victory is true humility and patience; in them we overcome the enemy.”

Love draws me.  Grace keeps me.  I sadly confess my temptation to vacation… and begin to unpack my bags.

Entertaining Grief

I’ve been entertaining grief… Which explains why I didn’t write last week.

Last week, sitting at the table with my uninvited guest meant having a hard time finding words.  It meant more silence than usual… more long pauses… less enthusiasm for ordinary communication (although blogging hardly feels ordinary to me yet).

In one of the long pauses last week, I was reading a little book about thriving.  In it, I learned more about joy and connectedness and the brain’s elasticity and potential for healing. There is a part of the brain, a ‘joy center’ that grows in response to joy-filled relationships – the kind where people are delighted to be with each other… the kind where you feel energized and more alive.  Most of the brain stops growing (or at least dramatically slows) at different stages of development… but the right orbital prefrontal cortex, the ‘joy center’, never loses its capacity to grow.  In this part of the brain, broken records are re-recorded… old dogs learn new tricks… and hopelessness is pregnant with expectation.  We can truly be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:2).

But instead of joy as our center, many of us live with fear at our core.  Rather than being drawn by the delight we experience in the presence of others, we are driven by the threat of all that could go wrong.  Rather than faithfully pursuing the good, we haphazardly run from impending disaster.  Our fundamental attitude toward living is one of defense and protection…

This was my posture through most of my childhood.  This was the way I limped through the first two years of grief after losing Mom.  I never wanted to feel this awful again… this was to be avoided at all costs.  But in the midst of the misery, Immanuel found me… and sat with me in the deep dark pit… no explanation was given… only presence.

“He reached down from on high and took hold of me… He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because He delighted in me.”  And that delight sparked the renewing of my mind… began physically shifting my ‘center’ away from fear and into joy.  “People underestimate how good it is to live with joy in charge instead of fear.” 

And it was grief that began the shift… it was in entertaining the uninvited guest that the far off Yahweh began to become Immanuel.  

http://gapingvoid.com/2009/02/10/joy

Uninvited Guest

An uninvited guest showed up on my doorstep this week… The Thanksgiving leftovers had been eaten, given away or frozen; the Christmas decorations were up… and we were three days into our Jesse Tree tradition.  And suddenly, there was Grief… uninvited, but refusing to be ignored.  Tapping me on the shoulder and whispering into my ear… “Remember me?”

It had been a while… and I had forgotten how commanding a presence this uninvited guest can have… how duplicitous: one moment, a strident voice piercing any other conversation, the next moment a sullen shadow lurking in corners.  I had forgotten that Grief must be greeted… engaged… given a seat at the table… how Grief must be listened to and even appreciated… how the energy required to ignore Grief is better spent being hospitable…

This will be my 12^th Christmas without my Mom, the 7^th without my Grandfather, and the first without my Grandma.  Grief has visited at different times and in different ways… and has stayed for different amounts of time.  But this time, something new is happening when Grief visits.

In this past year, I have learned much about joy and the way joy can heal… the way that joy can transform the brain.  “Joy is being with someone who is glad to be with us,” says Jim Wilder.  There is only one person who can always be glad to be with me… And as I build joy in relationship with Immanuel, I build capacity to fully live… and to entertain Grief.  (more on this in future posts)

And so, as Grief makes its first appearance this season, it is different.  Rather than dominating, Grief is sitting beside Joy… and God is with us… the Joy of the Lord, becoming my strength (Neh. 8:10).      

Suddenly

This past Sunday, I had the task of preaching the 2^nd coming of Christ… for the 3^rd time in less than 6 months.  And it wasn’t until this last time that I realized why the first two times had been so challenging…

The first time was from Mark 13 and I arrived at the proclamation that Christ calls us to watch and to pray.  We are all called to stay awake and to guard against apathy and indifference in our anticipation of the coming King.

The second time, we were going through the Lord’s Prayer and I was given the petition “thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  I wrestled with this one as well… but ended up sharing that as we pray the Kingdom into impossible situations and hopeless circumstances, we begin to find hope.  We begin to remember that today’s reality is not all there is… that Our Father’s Kingdom is surely coming in the future… and is indeed already breaking in!  We begin to hope for the only thing that is worth hoping for… we begin to hope as sons and daughters of the Kingdom… for the coming of Our Father’s Kingdom… and this is the only hope that will never disappoint.

And then this last time, I was stumped.  Not that I have any delusions about being able to exhaustively explore any promise of God to the point that there is no more to receive… but it was definitely difficult to have these sermons come in such rapid succession: May, October, November.  So as I expressed some frustration to Geoff at not knowing where to go again, he casually proposed that maybe God was trying to tell me something. 

And in that moment, Christ suddenly appeared… in a kairos moment kind of way.  And I began to wonder… what am I needing to receive in this third invitation to preach His return? 

And I began to admit that I had always shied away from passages about his sudden return… and it started to make sense.

I associate ‘suddenly’ with trauma.  And it’s no wonder… My father was killed in a car accident.  My mom had an aneurism and died suddenly.  There’s a good reason that I took up kickboxing in college… I’ve lived my life, ready to defend and protect at a moment’s notice… expecting to have the rug pulled out from under me without any warning whatsoever. 

And the word ‘suddenly’ makes me take a fighting stance.  Images of people being swept away as in the time of the flood of Noah, one person being taken and another remaining, slaves being given over to be cut into pieces, and bridesmaids who pound on locked doors certainly don’t help.

And so I saw that the concept of ‘suddenly’ needed to be re-imagined in me.  And the Good Shepherd began to lead and guide, to restore my soul.  And I reflected on how Immanuel has been suddenly appearing in my life in the last year as I have become more convinced of His promise to be with me until the end of the age… like when my son suddenly appreciated me for something simple… when I read an email from a friend in Africa and was suddenly amazed… when a breeze suddenly kicked up and made me take in a breath of wonder… suddenly surprised by how much my husband loves me… suddenly sensing the presence of the Lord as I listened to a friend pray for another friend… suddenly aware of the Lord’s presence with me in an ordinary moment as I was knitting a hat… suddenly… Christ suddenly appearing, and me, being transformed by His presence.

Suddenly… the miracle baby John, suddenly leaping in Elizabeth’s suddenly fruitful womb as Christ suddenly appears, cloaked in Mary’s sudden yielding.  Advent is the season of hope… we watch and we wait and we expect His sudden appearing…

Immanuel - Is God with Us (more thoughts)

I’ve been thinking about the Incarnation all week… about reason and understanding… knowledge and mystery… and I’ve been reflecting on why the Incarnation is so important to me, not just as a believer, but as a woman.

I hesitate to write some of the reflections I want to write… because I don’t want men to stop reading as soon as they see the content… and I don’t want to, in any way, alienate any women who have not given birth.  For some, it’s been a choice.  For some, it’s been a terrible grief.  For some, it’s just not been.  I know sometimes, in the church, there can be an atmosphere that suggests that a woman is somehow ‘less’ if she is not a mother.  And this is not an atmosphere that I wish to affirm or perpetuate.

At the same time, I cannot change the fact that I have given birth and cared for two infants… and that God has shown me some pretty significant things during these times of mystery. 

The Advent after Soren, my firstborn, was born, I pondered the baby Christ in new ways. 

How could Mary give birth to God Himself?  She birthed Him, changed His diapers, sang Him to sleep, bathed Him, and fed Him from her own body!  Her body was broken for Him…  This baby was the Savior of the world… the once and forever king in the promised line of David.

In the loneliness of that first year at home, I found great fellowship with Mary, and especially during that Advent season.  I pondered some of the questions she might have pondered…

Why would God allow Himself to be swaddled?  to be rocked? fed? bathed? nursed? changed? at the mercy of teenage novice hands?  Why would He allow Himself to be not only a child… but the child of an inexperienced mother? 

He who created movement was a quadriplegic lying in a manger. 

He who invented language was unable to communicate through intelligible speech. 

He who has dominion and authority over all things placed Himself under the authority of a teenage girl.

He who sees all things took on the monocular blurred vision of an infant. 

He who is unconquerable became frail to wear our frailty.

He became naked to wear our shame.

He became helpless to help our helplessness.

He became dependent to give us someone to depend on.

He emptied Himself to become our fullness.

How can this be? 

And yet, that first Advent, I realized I had never believed it so fully.  Immanuel… God with us.   And the first one to know Him… to experience His presence… was a woman. 

And somehow, in a faith whose leaders are predominantly male, this matters to me.  It makes Christ’s humanity seem less ‘male’ and more ‘human.’ 

Immanuel - is God really with us?

I had a conversation yesterday with some friends who do not believe in the Trinity.  And yet, they talk about the satisfaction of the law being made through Christ, salvation being won through Christ, the restoration of our spirits in Christ, Jesus as the Son of God… and yet, they don’t believe Jesus was God made flesh…  And it made me really think…

How is my understanding of Immanuel so different?  As we approach Advent again, I am drawn to thinking again of the Incarnation.  Why is it so significant that Christ was God in the flesh?  I know that this is an age-old theological battle… and to address it in an historical, theological, or literary review kind of manner would take more than one dissertation and a whole lot more study and research than I can ever reasonably have time to do. 

So I can only speak personally… why does it matter to ME, personally, that God put on flesh?  And why is it so important to me, in my faith and practice, that God not only wore skin and walked around in His creation, but was born as a baby?

I will post on this a few times as I continue to think of this… but for today, I’m really resonating with Philippians 2:1-11.  Just this past week, I was faced with the choice to take on the humility of Christ or to ‘defend my honor’… and it was these verses that reminded me that I really did NOT have a choice as a follower of Christ.  Radical submission to the flesh & blood of the local body of Christ is only possible for me because my God took on the nature of a servant and was embodied in His own creation. 

Christ limited His limitlessness for the renewal of His beloved… He humbly, gently, submitted Himself to human constraints… and it’s out of that reality that I can admit my own constraints and humbly submit them to His limitlessness… for the renewal of his local body.

This Little Light of Mine

I’m terrified.  I’ll just get that out in the open to begin with.  There are all kinds of reasons why this is scary… but none of them are good enough to keep me from going forward.  And so this crazy, unexpected, surprising journey that Christ invites me on continues to move forward in yet another way I would never have anticipated… going public with my secret blog.

It was about a year ago that I began to silently lament what seems to be a lack of feminine presence in the online world of the missional church.  I especially noted that each of the blog links listed on the Ecclesia Equipper Blog belong to men.  Take note, I knew better than to lament out loud because I knew the response to my lament would be something along the lines of… ‘well, start a blog then.’  How could I respond that I had already started a blog… but hardly ever wrote on it, and kept it so well hidden that it was impossible to find. 

And so I started asking God why I was so reluctant to let anybody know I had been thinking about blogging… and I realized a few things that were holding me back.  There were more than three, but these emerged at the top of the list:

1)   Pressure – I feel a bit like if I attempt to process my life of leading as a woman, my voice will somehow be expected to represent other women whose journeys are entirely different from mine.  I never wanted to take up the cause of women in the church or to somehow lead a movement… and I tend to want to run away anytime I begin to feel like this is expected of me. 

2)   Time and Mutli-tasking – I am a woman who does a lot of things.  I am called, not only to church ministry, but also to mothering… and not just to mothering, but also homeschooling.  I don’t have a lot of time to read other people’s blogs… so it seems pretty outrageously arrogant to think people will read mine… and if someone does read my blog and comments… how will I find the time to actually interact?  And do I blog about mothering, or about homeschooling, or about preaching, discipleship, or a mixture of all of those?  Does it need to be focused? 

3)   Fear – what if I say something really stupid?  And here’s where I put the pressure from #1 on myself – without anybody doing it for me.  There are some men who already view women as overly emotional, hysterical, irrational, sentimental, and unfit to do theology or lead a church… what if I say something ridiculous that somehow confirms this stereotype? 

So as I mulled over these stumbling blocks, a funny thing happened.  A song popped into my head… “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.”  I remembered singing that song in mixed company when I was a little girl.  I never thought about my ‘little light’ being somehow not worthy of shining because I was a girl and not a boy, didn't worry about what others might think of my light, and didn't think about messing it up.  We all had a little light… and we were letting it shine. 

And so, here I am, despite my fears and my insecurities, and my anxiety about pressure and time, letting this little light of mine shine… and hoping and praying that this blog will somehow reflect the light of Christ.

Magical Thinking

In the last few weeks, I’m beginning to see some buried tendencies toward co-dependency and it’s starting to shed some light on my constant habit of reflection.  From my earliest days, I can remember a constant state of looking back… at all the things I should have done differently.  Sometimes, it was coming up with the perfect thing to say long after the opportunity to say it had passed.  Other times, it was changing an action to produce an entirely different result.  Whatever the case, things always turned out much differently, much better, in my reflection than they had in my reality.

Our greatest strengths are often our greatest weakness.  This habit of constant reflection has proven this over and over.  I consider this habit of reflection to be a great strength… because I actually DO learn from my mistakes.  I am intentional about going back and making up for wrongs, asking for forgiveness, making things right… restitution.  And, by God’s unfathomable grace, I actually change my ways and act differently at the next opportunity… repentance. 

But I am also enslaved by this ‘morbid introspection.’  I beat myself up for my mistakes… I replay the errors, dissecting all that went wrong and inserting all the correct responses.  I question my decisions, wondering if I will regret them.  And this is the world I live in… never good enough.  Co-dependency psychiatrists call it ‘magical thinking’ and say it’s a desperate attempt to fix what went wrong in my childhood.

As I face my childhood, there are some things that still hurt… things that I have a hard time calling by name…  and these wounds run deep.  I’m beginning to recognize that these wounds have been robbing my joy for almost 40 years…

It’s time for the tide to turn.  The only 'magical' thinking stands in setting my mind on 'Thy kingdom come'… let me live in the lightness of now and shed the heaviness of ‘what were you thinking?’.

Equality - do I believe it?

I just finished reading a whole lot of books about women in leadership in the church. The reasoning behind my rush of research was because I have finally been convicted of the need to 'land' somewhere in this debate. For years, I've been content to not know what I think about women leading alongside men in the church... but now, as I'm being put forth as a pastoral candidate at our church, I finally needed to decide. Is it OK? Is it biblical to call a woman into a pastoral role? Or this role reserved for men?
As long as I didn't know, I didn't have to risk the possibility of being told that I will not be a pastor. As long as I wasn't certain that the call that I've heard was also confirmed in scripture, then I could deal with the possibility that our community may not be ready to accept a woman. But, as Geoff told me, I was simply resisting an opportunity for sanctification. I was refusing to move forward on the road of faithfulness... and so I had to decide.
So I went away for 24 hours and I read and I prayed. And I was really surprised to find that the old idea of women being inferior beings actually has a root in my soul. I was reading Sarah Sumner's book, Men and Women in the Church, when I was overwhelmed by the reality that I have truly believed that I should not be in a leadership position because I am actually inferior to men. I know I'm not alone in that unconscious belief... because I see it manifested in the way many of us, as women, function in our relationships with men in the church.
But the Lord is gracious... and He is helping me to experientially inhabit the truth that I am equal to men, equally created to bear his image, equally called to be a steward of the earth, and equally called to know Christ and to make Him known. And that is the first step on the road to understanding my role in leadership...