alienation

As I was doing my morning study in my CR Bible this jumped out at me and I wanted to share: "Denial tells us that we're getting away with our secrets. We think that no one knows - but they do. While denial may shield us from the full force of the hurt, it also prevents us from helping ourselves or the people we love the most. We don't dare to reveal our true self to others for fear of what they'll think or say if they catch a glimpse of the real us. We're convinced that we have to protect ourselves - and our secrets - at any cost. So we isolate ourselves to minimize the risk of exposure and possible rejection by others. But at what price? The eventual loss of all our important relationships."

I don't know about anyone else but I know I do this. I'm so worried about what others will think of me that I don't do the healthy thing which is share my feelings. I've seen the very dangerous place that this can lead to, depression. I've been there done that and I'm not going there again! I know that only God can help me and that's what I'm going through Celebrate Recovery right now. Wow, even admitting that is kinda scary and I guess freeing in a way. I don't want people to think that I'm messed up and am one of "those people" but you know what? I am one of those people. I am a human and I have hurts that haven't been addresses and I want to be free from that! While this journey may be a hard one I know that my God is faithful and he will guide me through to the other side of freedom and better relationships with people and I'm looking forward to that day.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will; that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever in the next. Amen.

Eve & temptation

Genesis 3:1-5:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die'." "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

I was reading this passage this morning and I had an "Ah-HA!" moment. I've grown up in the church and I've heard my fair share of bible stories, this being one of them but this AM was different. I was thinking of temptation and how easy it is for the devil to tempt us but the truth is we make it easy for him. The devil couldn't tempt us as easily if we really knew God and His character.

Let's look at Eve here. She's in God's presence everyday and even still she was tempted! Why? because she really didn't understand. When God told Adam and Eve to stay away from the fruit she knew that this was "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (Gen. 2:17). So in knowing that we know that if we eat the fruit from this tree we will gain knowledge of good AND EVIL. I know I wouldn't want that responsibility. But when the serpent comes over and asks Eve about these trees she leaves out the knowledge part and also adds that God told her not to touch the tree. I think deep down in her heart of hearts that was her out clause, she was probably frightened of the serpent and was going to use that piece of information to get away. But the serpent is just that, a serpent, "crafty" as the Bible calls him. He feeds this lie to Eve about how she won't die (which is true) but the serpent knows that what will happen will be worse than death! Eve trust this one liner from this sleazy snake instead of her WHOLE existence with God! Everything she knows about God she tosses aside for the one thing she was told not to eat!

That, my friends, is the devil's sole goal - to steer us even the slightest bit away from God and what we know about Him to lead us into a life of pain. "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy..." John 10:10a. If we hold on to what we know about God (learned from His word or from the good things He's given us) it will be harder for the devil to tempt us. We KNOW the King of Kings who holds the whole world in His hands, don't let one sleazy, crafty serpent separate us from that great relationship.

reruns?

You know that Coldplay has hit it BIG when you hear the SAME song on different radio stations within 10 minutes of each other.
I was driving to lunch, literally 5 minutes away, and Viva La Vida was on the radio. I went to get my lunch, hopped back into my car, changed the station and there was Viva La Vida AGAIN! I'm amazed...

confusion

I'M SICK OF THIS!
i'm sick of myself.
i'm sick of always finding myself back in this place...

God is breaking through me but i don't like it. the devil is attacking me and it feels like i'm just letting him. i don't like that EVEN more. i hate this enemy that we have! it seems like he knows me so well and can mess with me without me even noticing.

i'm totally at a place of brokenness, where love and confusion collide. i feel God's love but then i don't. i feel like i'm faking it but then i don't. i can't do this on my own! GOD HELP ME!!! pick me up out of the miry clay and set my feet on a rock. i want a new song to sing. songs about your love and your forgiveness.

only You can save me.

CHANGE!

So I went to get an oil change today... The guy who owns the shop knows my mom, but that's really besides the point. The last time I went to get my oil change I invited him to Saddleback Church's Easter service. I have no idea if he went but I invited him. Both last time and this time I've talked with him about my faith and Christians and religion and war, etc.... There was something that he said that made me so sad and reminded me that that's what the world must think. OH! I remember! It was something along the lines of "Look at history. Nothing has changed and it won't change. There's nothing that you can do to change the world." or something along that nature. I told him that I believe that it can change with LOVE.

It's strange how we got on the topic to begin with. I was reading The Irresistible Revolution and he asked me if I was reading my bible. I told him no and showed him the book I was reading. He asked me what it was about and I told him that it's about this guy who followed Jesus and it messed up his life and that's how our conversation got started.

Anyways, as I was leaving he asked me to let him know how the story ends. I'm getting him a copy of The Irresistible Revolution for him to read himself.

I love how God does that. I prayed this morning that God would rearrange my schedule and he did. I was planning on getting an oil change but I certainly wasn't planning on staying for a good half hour to talk to this guy. Thanks God.

tunes: Open Wide.Future of Forestry

quotes from tIR pt2

"God comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable... In my suburban comfort, I increasingly felt disturbed by God... my discomfort arose not from a cynical judgmentalism but from a longing for something more."

"The more I read the Scriptures, the more uncertain I became about my plans for the future, or even of the wisdom of making plans in the first place."

"People always want to define you by what you do. I want to be a lover of God and people... I was convinced that what we do is not really as important as who we are."

"Concern yourself with your vocation, and that is to be lovers of Jesus." - Mother Teresa

"It made sense to be single, and many of the people I had grown to admire had lived beautiful lives of singleness. And their lives would have been different had they been married (not bad, just different)."

"It was as if every good Christian should marry, and yet the more I looked at good Christians thoughout history, the less sure I was about that... Somehow I had missed the fact that singleness was a beautiful means of discipleship and that church history is filled with folks who followed God as singles - Jesus for one; many of the disciples and martyrs... What would Mother Teresa's life looked like had she been married?"

"I was attracted to God as lover. And then I began to experience God as lover, and quickly I became attracted to the Lover... Life is a romance with the divine."

"We can live without sex, but we cannot live without love, and God is love." - some Catholic monk

"I had come to see God as lover and provider and to desire a life of singleness and poverty."

"We've taken the blood at the foot of the cross and turned it into Kool-Aid." - Cornell West

"Totemism: the human tendancy to form our conception of God in our own image... take the values and traditions that we most admire about ourselves and project them onto a totem. Eventually, we stand in awe of that totem and end up worshiping an incarnation of the things we love about ourselves."

"God created us in his image, and we decided to return the favor." - George Bernard Shaw

"Buddy Jesus has become a white American resembling Mr. Rogers... I had grown very weary of this Jesus. THERE IS ANOTHER JESUS!... deconstruct the American totem, to take him (Jesus) off the totem pole we nailed him to."

"We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor. When the worlds of poverty and wealth collide, the resulting powerful fusion can change the world."

"I long for the Calcutta slums (or whatever your Calcutta slums are) to meet the Chicago suburbs (or your rich community) and for each to see God's image in the other."

"I truly believe that when the poor meet the rich, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end."


tunes: God of Justice (We Must Go).Tim Hughes

awesome quotes...

...from the Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne

"It's among the wealthy that we can find the most terrible poverty of all - loneliness."

"... assured me that the Gospels were not just for Mother Teresa and St. Francis, and that the Sermon on the Mount is as meaningful today as it was two thousand years ago."

"You guys are all into that born again thing, which is great. We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy too...But I guess that's why God invented highlighters, so we can highlight the things we like and ignore the rest."

"Jesus never says to the poor, 'Come find the church', but he says to those of us in the church, 'Go into the world and find the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned...I couldn't help but wonder if we had highlighted only some of the verses in our Bibles... I saw all of the thousands of people who were becoming believers and it brought me great joy. And yet I could not help but wonder with Dorthy Day, 'Have we even begun to be Christians?'"

"...ultimatly we will be seperated into two groups of people, sheep and goats, and the criteria will be how we cared for the poor, hungry, imprisoned, naked masses... will we be with the sheep?"

rich young ruler (found in Matt. 19:16-30): "He tells this highly educated and devoutly religious young man that he lacks o ne thing: giving up everything he owns to give to the poor." The mans face sinks as he walks away. "Jesus doesn't run after the man he simply lets the man choose his wealth...The great temptation is to compromise the cost of discipleship in order to draw a large crowd. We do not want to see anyone walk away from Jesus because of the discomfort of his cross...Jesus doesn't exclude rich people; he just lets them know their rebirth will cost them everything they have."

"Rather than accumilating stuff for oneself, followers of Jesus abandon everything, trusting God alone for providence."

"...the temptation we face is to compromise the cost of discipleship, and in the process, the Christian identity can get lost."

"And yet we can end up merely cheapening the very thingwe want folks to experience."

"Jesus warns people of the cost of discipleship... their biological families, their pocessions, even their lives... Jesus allows people to walk away."

"...the cross is not always seeker sensitive. It is not comfortable. But it is the cornerstone of our faith and I fear that when we remove the cross we remove the central symbol of the nonviolence and grace of our Lover. If we remove the cross we are in danger of promoting cheap grace. Perhaphs it should make us uncomfortable. After all, it wasn't so comfy to get nailed to it."