A Race Fan

"God is a race fan." 

The older gentleman declared it with great confidence on the morning news. Just a couple of days ago, thirty-three drivers had taken the track at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in front of 350,000+ fans with a threat of rain that held off until just after the closest finish in race history. Literally. The rain started to fall on the victory celebration moments after the last lap. 

The gentleman could only believe that God wanted to see a good race just as much as he did, that God also enjoyed that spectacular finish. 

I can imagine such a statement striking a nerve. 

There are Christians who would believe that it's irreverent, a statement that has no business being made at all. To put God on a plane with human beings, to interject Him into secular human affairs, to ascribe to Him enjoyment of something human. Blasphemy! These Christians would say that a gentleman like this is giving God a bad name. 

There are non-believers who would scoff. Sure, God cares about a stupid little race, an insignificant afternoon of "fun" while children go hungry, disease runs rampant, wars are waged, hostages are taken, Christians are killed. What kind of God could be a race fan with so much chaos and destruction in the world? 

There are some who might try to create a middle road, claiming that God answered their prayers for a good race day, since He loves them and they prayed so earnestly for it. 

There are some who would say God could be nowhere near the track with so much sin and debauchery and *gasp* alcohol present. 

There are very few who would pump a fist in the air and say, "Yeah! God's a race fan!" 

But what if He is? 

God delights in His creation, and He delights in us, and He delights in our delight. Our God is a God of joy and festiveness and good things. He created festivals and parties and even commanded us to celebrate them. 

To put God on a plane with human beings? God put Himself on a plane with human beings when He came to be born in a manger and die on a Cross. 

To interject Him into secular human affairs? God interjected Himself into secular human affairs when He traveled into Samaria and sent the Good News to the Gentiles and declared all things clean and threw a miracle to the "dog" under His feet. 

To ascribe to Him enjoyment of something human? Jesus was highly criticized for eating and drinking and being merry. 

To be somewhere so near where sin and debauchery and *gasp* alcohol are present? Jesus came to save sinners, not saints. His feet were washed by a sinful woman, and He took a drink from another, and by the way, He turned water into wine. (Not, as some might claim, grape juice.) 

God has shown us again and again and again that He is a God of joy. That He is a happy God. That He delights in His creation, in us, and in our delight. 

There is absolutely no justification, in God's testimony about Himself, to believe that God couldn't be a race fan. 

In fact, I actually agree with the older gentleman - I think He is. 

God Has Forgotten

Forgive and forget. 

Two of the hardest words in the English language. We don't like to forgive, especially when someone is not truly sorry and has made no move toward atonement, and we certainly can't forget. 

Recently, I went to a 100-year celebration for my former elementary school. While hanging out and talking with friends and old acquaintances, this young woman came up to me and said she recognized me, but couldn't place me. I introduced myself, and she immediately got a little more excited. "Yes!" she said. "I remember you!" She went on to introduce herself, including her maiden name, and I remembered her, too. 

"You used to torment me and beat me up all the time," I said, matter-of-factly. It had been more than two decades since I had seen, or even really thought about, this woman who was once my bully, but the mere mention of her name brought all of it back. Here she stood right in front of me, seemingly excited to see me, successful in the world's eyes, and all I could think about her was who she used to be, a collection of scenes that are still stuck somewhere in my memory, ready to be recalled, apparently, at a moment's notice.

We don't forget very well. 

The same is true when it comes to our own transgressions, as well.

I have had moments in my life that have haunted me for years, times that I messed up or made mistakes or had to be corrected, and they've just stuck with me. I'm the kind of person who wants to apologize for the same moment every time I see you for the rest of my life, even if we just run into each other in the grocery store. "Oh my gosh - how are you? I am so sorry about that time that I...." 

But you know what? So often, when I bring up these moments that haunt me, the other person doesn't remember them at all. They've long forgotten about what I thought was the biggest blunder ever made in the history of the world. While I've been having nightmares about how much I wounded them and how desperately I wish I could take it back, they've moved on and sometimes, they didn't even know what I said. 

And yet, I cannot forget. And I spend far too long beating myself up for things the rest of the world has long since moved on from. 

Enter the Lord, whose grace and forgiveness humble me every time I remember them. 

In Hebrews 10:17, the Holy Spirit is speaking and He says, "Their sins and lawless acts, I will remember no more." 

Gone. Done. Finished. The sins and transgressions and goof-ups and mistakes that God sent His Son to the Cross to atone for have not just been forgiven, they've been forgotten. 

Which means two things: it means that the things that I keep beating myself up for are not even in God's memory any more...and it means that the things I cannot forget about others, like my bully, aren't there, either. He's forgotten them, too. 

And if God, who is the party most offended and most wounded by our transgressions, who is most crushed by our iniquities, has forgiven and forgotten, then how much more should I work on doing the same? 

God of Rest

Every so often, you will come across someone who reminds you just how many promises of God were fulfilled in Scripture - from the Lord's promise to an aging Abram and Sarai to Jesus's promise to His disciples to send the Holy Spirit among them. Quite honestly, it's a very long list. 

And while it's really cool to be able to go through His story and mark off all the promises kept, it's even better news for those of us who are still waiting on His promises to be fulfilled in our own lives. After all, if He kept every word He spoke to a sinner like David, who are we to believe He won't keep every word to us? 

For many of us, the promise our souls most look forward to is the one in Hebrews 4:1: 

The promise of rest. 

Let's face it - this life can be rough. Between family and friends and work and responsibilities and bills and bodies and pets and problems, it can feel like we're stuck on a hamster wheel, running and running and spinning in circles and all of a sudden, going so fast that we're not sure we can ever get off. Our world used to build in rhythms of rest, blocking out Sundays for faith and family, offering three-day holiday weekends every now and again. 

Remember the three-day weekend? Oh, how we looked forward to that. It felt like the most precious gift. 

But with the advent of the internet, email, mobile phones, social media, and a 24/7 economy that doesn't ever seem to breathe for fear of losing its momentum, we increasingly live lives that feel like we're on-call all the time. Like we have to be within reach of everyone else's fingertips, ready to drop even the most important things to us to go do what is most important to someone else. 

And everyone else's lack of preparation suddenly becomes our interruption, our emergency. 

As I write, the news is telling the story of a dry cleaner whose establishment had a suit someone needed for a special event, but that person had failed to account for a holiday and hadn't picked up the suit. "I personally left my lake house to drive up and get the suit for the customer," the owner said. 

How are we ever supposed to get any rest? 

Yet, rest is one of God's most-repeated promises. Come to me, and I will give you rest. You will find rest for your souls. ...The promise of entering His rest still stands.

There will be rest. 

That's really one of the greatest gifts of faith, I think, in a time like this. This promise of rest gives us permission to get off the hamster wheel. It invites us into a holy rhythm instead of a hectic one. It lets us set our boundaries around what God has given us, what He keeps inviting us into. 

There's not another single thing in the world that God could give us that we would so freely give away, yet we so often give away our rest, as if doing so was holy. But we need not do this. We should cling to our rest the way we cling to every other good thing of God in our life, for it is just as much His gift to us as anything else, and it is His promise being fulfilled right now, right here. 

So take that rest. Take that three-day weekend. Turn that phone off. Disconnect. Re-engage. Relax. Rest. 

For every promise of God is fulfilled. That much, we know. 

It's time we start living it. 

God of Wonders

Oh, how my soul so often longs to rest in something. 

I ache to cease from all my striving, from all the things that keep me trying to prove myself in the world. I long to stop trying to earn the things I have, to earn more than I have, to keep myself afloat. I want to be done thinking that I haven't done enough, that I'm not enough as I am, that there has to be more to me if there is ever to be more to me than this life. I want to get off this hamster wheel. 

But it's hard. It's hard because we work so hard for the lives that we live that it starts to creep into our faith, as well, until we're laboring not even to earn, but to keep, the eternity that God has promised us. As if, were we to stop for even a moment working so hard, that would be the moment that we would die, and it would all be for nothing. We keep a secret score in our head that tells us that yes, today, I still have salvation.

We know that God has given us salvation and that it is His free gift to us through grace. We know that it is finished, as Jesus Himself said before drawing what seemed to be His last breath. We know that it's not over, as we learned when He walked out of the tomb and spoke to us once more. And yet, something in us still needs the assurances. 

Something in us still needs to be able to look around and see it - it's real. It has to be real

It is real, and the author of Hebrews says we can see it all around us. God is proving salvation to us all the time "through wonders, great signs, miracles, and spiritual gifts" (2:3-4). 

He's proving it through wonders because how else does a tiny seed fall into the earth and die, only to become a great tree? How does a weed grow in the smallest crack of the sidewalk? How does a caterpillar grow wings and take flight? The wonders all around us remind us that God brings dead things to life in the most wild and unimaginable places. And He's doing the same with us. 

He's proving it through great signs because how else do the skies over our lives know whether to be red in the morning or the night? We look at the heavens and we sense what kind of day we are going to have, and we can see in them, too, the promise of eternity if we're looking close enough because God has painted the promise over all things. These are His great signs for us. 

He's proving it to us through miracles because how else does the lame man walk again? How do the blind see? How does the woman on the ventilator come off of it? How do the cancer cells vanish? How does the bank account keep having just enough in it when we just spent our last "just enough" last week? How does the traffic light switch just before a big rig comes barreling through it in the wrong direction, keeping us inches from disaster? Our lives are full of a little miracles, and they remind us that God has His eye on us.

He's proving it through spiritual gifts, through the little things He's wired us to do for Him and for one another that bring heaven to earth. That remind us that we are made for more than this. That give us that sense of something bigger than ourselves, something real. Something tangible. Something that we are an integral part of. And if He's made us an integral part of it here, how could we ever believe He hasn't made us to be part of it forever? Our salvation is sure because our God has made us part of His plan. 

Everywhere we turn, we see reminders of what the Lord has done. He's put these reminders all around us so that we can know it's not us who has to work for it; He's already done it. Our job is simply to let it all wash over us and rest in the promise. 

And isn't that what we want to do - deep in our souls - anyway? 

God of Truth

As a person who is generally very honest, it can be hard for me to believe that someone else is lying to me. Because my natural inclination is to not lie, it always seems to take me by surprise when someone else does. 

That said, I am also a person who is always secretly asking if someone is lying to me. I wonder if they're telling me the truth, just telling me what they think I want to hear, or have given up trying to tell me anything because I can be stubborn sometimes. 

At any given point, any one of these things - or perhaps all three of them - can be true. 

The trouble is that sometimes, I have the same questions about God. 

I wonder if God is sometimes lying to me. I know in my head that God is truth, but truth doesn't always feel good and it doesn't even always feel right, so I wonder if what I'm hearing, what I'm sensing, what is heavy on my heart is actually truth or if it's something less. I guess I should say that I don't wonder if God is lying to me so much as I wonder if that's really His voice. Is it Him? Or is it an enemy pretending to be him so as to lead me astray? 

But I do wonder if God has given up trying to tell me the truth because I'm too stubborn sometimes. I'm the kind of person who has a lot of follow-up questions, and it can be exhausting to try to convince me of, well, anything. There always seems to be one more question, one more assurance, one more what-if that I have in my head that needs to be satisfied. 

And sometimes, I wonder if I'm just hearing what I think I want to hear. If I'm projecting God's voice into my own wishes so that it sounds like He's saying what I want Him to say but really, it's not Him at all. It's me, shouting into my own void and pretending it's something of substance. 

Yes, I waste a lot of my time trying to unravel the Lord in my life, wanting to trust what I'm hearing but knowing there may be very good reasons why I can't, or shouldn't, and wondering if perhaps someone is lying to me - or I am lying to myself - in the Lord's name and wishing there was just truth. Just plain and simple, honest-to-God truth. 

Thank the Lord, there is. 

Paul is known for his salutations, for the greetings that he gives when he writes his letters. If you read the ways that he introduces the Lord, you can learn a lot about who God is. 

In his letter to Titus, Paul introduces God as one who "does not lie" (1:2). That's it. God does not lie. We know God does not lie. We can hang our hats on the truth that God does not lie. 

What that means for someone like me - and I don't believe I'm the only one like me on this - is that I need to put away all my mental gymnastics, all my human woundedness, all my hesitation and simply trust God. 

Because if He does not lie, then what else would I do with His voice? 

Grown Up

The other day, I was talking with a coworker who had a child to pick up from some kind of event that the child was involved in. As I sat listening to the schedule of yet another adult in this world who has yet another child in yet another activity, I started to lament. 

The opportunities, activities, and achievements that this world offers you when you are young are incredible. Everywhere you turn, there's something to do, something to be part of, something to try, something to excel at, recognition for excellence, awards, honors, tournaments, you name it. 

As a child, I played multiple sports. As a student, I was involved in numerous activities. As a straight-A student, I excelled across every academic discipline. Soccer, basketball, softball, tennis, volleyball, swimming, student newspaper, Future Problem Solvers, drama club, marching band, jazz band, AP classes, passes to the library for sheer boredom, extracurricular projects (like the local monitoring weather station). 

As an adult, I have a job. And then, I go home where I have a dog. And if I want to do something with other folks, it requires a ton of planning, a few cancellations, reschedules, and something "adult-y." 

Some days, I miss running around a field and chasing a ball. 

Some folks are lucky - the things they learned in childhood shape their adulthood. They get to hold on in some meaningful way to the things that brought them joy (and accomplishment and recognition) as children. 

But for many of us, if not most of us, those things are in our past. And the things we accomplished as children just don't count for much in the adult world. 

I have a journalism degree, multiple school-related (state-wide) journalism awards, a couple of internships in the field, and when I tried to break into community journalism in my hometown after graduation, I was told that none of that mattered. I didn't have any "real" experience, no matter how decorated I was. 

Nobody in my adult life seems to care how many sports I played, how good I was at them, whether I can still ace a serve. It's no longer important. Maybe that's why I became a runner - it's a good way to stay active without requiring an entire structure for activity. 

It's gotten me nothing in life to have read above my grade level for my entire school career, to have taken AP Calculus, to have scored what I scored on the SAT. Not important. Nobody cares. (Except, of course, that being able to do these things does shape how I am able to engage with the world, but even that is a skill of limited value in the wrong places.) 

What I was thinking about as I listened to that coworker talk was how my young life was so full of things that felt so fulfilling and so wonderful and so accomplished - ask anyone, and they would have told you I was an accomplished young lady in the 90s) - and fast forward a couple of decades, and these are not longer accomplishments; they are simply child's play. 

And what I realized then, as I listened to my heart, is how deeply I miss both of those things - childhood and play.

So I lamented. 

Because I filled my life with what feels like a thousand good things, and I miss those things dearly. I really thought they'd be a bigger part of my grown up life. I really did. 

Then again, I guess they are, because they have shaped the good things I have now and given me the tools I need to hold onto those, so.... 

Anyone want a pick-up game of kickball in the street later? 

God Stays

I am a person who is always thinking of other persons - what they might like, how to surprise them, how to support them, how to love on them. I spend my days pouring out, then I come into my sanctuary to recharge and be poured into by the God who created me to live this way. This simply feels natural to me. 

But there are times in my life that are harder than others, and it's in these times that I've realized that God is often all I have. 

In one deeply painful season of my life, I was serving in a congregation of beautiful, wonderful brothers and sisters who expressed great thankfulness for the gifts that I shared with them. For decades, these folks were part of my life, more than just on Sunday mornings. They were my family. 

Then, my life came crashing down in ways I couldn't have predicted and certainly could not have changed, and all of a sudden, I looked around and saw...nothing. No one. Heard no voices. Not a single person in the world was reaching back for me. Barely any at all even knew I was missing. 

As time went on, a few voices started to come out of the woodwork, searching, but they all had the same message - we miss the things you did for us. We miss the things you were good at. We miss the gifts you gave of yourself. 

Eventually, it hit me - I was truly alone. No one, in this massive network of what I would have called family, was even missing me. Nobody. 

And when I most needed help, there was no one willing to help me. 

It's hard when we have seasons like this in our lives. I think most of us have them. They come through the church or through our families or through our jobs or our hometowns or our teams or all kinds of places in which we thought we were interconnected with others only to find out that really? We weren't. We were reaching out, but no one else was reaching back, and when we slipped through the cracks, no one even seemed to notice and, cutting us deep to our core, no one was coming after us. 

Paul had this experience, too. 

You remember when Paul starts listing off all the things he's been through for the Lord - the beatings, the imprisonments, the accusations, the threats. Well, at the end of his second letter to Timothy, he's doing something similar, but this time, he's lamenting that for all he's going through in his life, he's looking around and discovering he's all alone. The folks he thought would be there when he was persecuted, accused, arrested are gone. One of them even left him to face the lions alone. "Everyone deserted me," Paul said. 

"But the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength" (2 Timothy 4:17).

It sometimes feels like small comfort, especially when what we need in our lives is the physical presence of someone else in our dark space, but there's truly no greater comfort in the world than to know that God Himself is always with us. When the rest of the world turns its back on you, God...stays. In your hardest times, God is there. When you're facing the lions, God is by your side. With His strength, which is offered freely to you as grace. 

Praise the Lord.

God's Goodness

Why has God given you the things that He's given you?

Look around your life at your blessings. Your resources and your opportunities. Your encouragements. The special little things that are secret between you and God that remind you that He's talking to you. You know what I'm talking about. 

Why has God given you this? 

It's tempting to want to spiritualize it. To want to say that God has given you the things that He has so that your life can be a testimony to His goodness. So that others can look at what God has done for you and want Him to do the same for them. So that through you, others can come to know Him. 

Or maybe we say that God has given us what He's given us in order to prepare us. To set us up for whatever's coming next. Something bigger, something greater, something more meaningful than what we have now. Something that will bring Him even greater glory. 

Sometimes, we say that God can't not bless us. After all, if God is love, then goodness is just part of the package. If God wasn't pouring out blessings in our lives, then He wouldn't be God and what would be left for us to believe in? So we take His goodness for granted and simply think, "Of course!" 

But what if God actually had something in mind when He gave you all this goodness? What if there's one thing He wants for you through all these blessings more than anything else? 

There is. And it's this: 

He wants you to enjoy them (1 Timothy 6:17). 

Paul tells Timothy that God "richly" provides us with "everything" for our "enjoyment." 

Is it news to you that God wants you to be happy? 

It's news to a lot of folks, even to a lot of Christians. We can get so busy trying to do these big, grand things and make our lives massively epic for the Lord, full of glory and testimony and witness while at the same time trying not to anger Him, to lose His favor, to get smitten or cast into the streets where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth that we forget that one of the great aims of the Christian life is...joy. 

God didn't make Eden beautiful so that mankind would be miserable. He didn't paint the sky with multicolor brushes so that it wouldn't take our breath away. He didn't make the butterfly so whimsical so that we would scientifically break it down into its component parts. He didn't make food delicious as some kind of taunt. 

He wants us to enjoy our lives. He wants us to be filled with joy while we're here. He's invested in our happiness because happiness is a natural outworking of love. No one who feels truly, deeply loved the way that God truly, deeply loves us lives a miserable life. You can't do it. So like anyone in a loving relationship, God relishes doing all the little things that bring a smile to our faces. 

How would it change your life - and your relationship with God - to embrace this? To embrace the joy for which He has given you all that you have? 

God of Sinners

Paul offers a number of encouragements to the early churches and the young preachers. We often quote him when we're trying to encourage one another. He knew that our God is a God of encouragement, so he labored to reflect that. 

But perhaps the greatest encouragement is the one Paul says most bluntly, early in his first letter to Timothy: 

Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners - of whom I am the worst (1:15).

In other words, do you need a truth to hang your hat on, Timothy? Do you need one thing to cling to? One thing you ought to know by heart about God? It's this: 

God sent His Son to save sinners. 

Period. 

He didn't send Him to be a good teacher, though He was that, too. 

He didn't send Him to tear down the corrupt establishment, though He did that, too. 

He didn't send Him to establish the church, though that happened out of His life, too. 

He didn't send Him to stick it to the devil, though it's pretty well stuck at this point, too. 

He sent His Son to save sinners. 

To redeem fallen men and women. 

To bring us back to Him. 

To make it so that we could turn around and look Him in the face again and see what grace and goodness look like. 

So that sinners become saints who sing His praise in glory. 

Sinners of whom we are the worst. 

You and me. And Paul. And Timothy. And Noah. And David. And every other person who has ever dared to love God and live in the flesh at the same time. We're sinners. We're the worst of them. Because our hearts know better, but our humanity just can't seem to help itself. 

Christ Jesus came to save us. 

That is a trustworthy saying. 

Healing

Sometimes, I wonder what happened to the folks in the Bible after God healed them. 

After the blind man received his sight, after the deaf man's ears were opened to sound, after the lame man stood up on once-useless legs, after the bleeding woman stopped bleeding, after the demon-possessed child stopped having seizures, after the demoniac left the graveyard, after Lazarus walked out of the grave.... 

Most of us have some kind of brokenness in our lives that we'd love to get rid of. We have wild imaginations about what life would be like without the burden that we're carrying, without the thing that's holding us back, if only God would come and simply heal us. 

We think the blind man just starts walking around. We think the deaf man relishes every sound. We think the lame man goes and gets a job. We think the woman goes back to her family. We think the demon-possessed child goes out and plays. We think the demoniac becomes an elder of the city. We think Lazarus just picks up where he left off. 

But the truth about healing is that even after the problem is gone, the restoration requires hard work. 

A blind man has to learn how to use his eyes again. Did you know that vision is one of the three components of your balance system? Having not had to incorporate vision into his movement for a long time, it's likely that the blind man who can see again stumbles around for awhile. Maybe a long while. 

A deaf man has to learn to distinguish sound. When you've never heard anything, all things just sound like noise. The world can become a frightening place until you learn what all those sounds are. He is probably overwhelmed and scared and has to keep reminding himself what a gift his hearing is. 

A lame man's legs would be completely wasted - nothing but bone. He hasn't used those muscles in so long, they've atrophied. They're gone. Maybe he stands on bone with the euphoria of his healing, but it will be awhile before his legs are strong again. He has to keep using them to build the strength that he needs to keep using them. Some days, he'll tire out quickly. Some days, they'll ache. But every day, hopefully, they'll get a little stronger. 

The bleeding woman spent 12 years living unclean in her community. She probably still does some of the things she did as an unclean woman that she no longer needs to do. She catches herself calling out when encountering anyone on the street, then stops herself. She keeps going to the well in the hottest part of the day, to avoid contact with others, until she finally realizes she can go in the mornings. Old habits die hard. 

The demon-possessed child never knew when a seizure was coming, so it's hard to trust that one isn't coming now. How do you just go out and play, carefree, when your life has never been predictable? When you've never been able to trust your body because it hasn't been yours? 

The dead man knows he must die again... 

On one hand, I want to say that Jesus is capable of surpassing all of these problems. He can, I know for certain, give a healing that is so complete that there's no recovery necessary from the healing itself; things just work. 

At the same time, I've lived enough brokenness in my life to know that I've never had a healing like that. God has done absolutely amazing things for me, and if I ever told you all of them, we'd be here for weeks and you'd be begging me to shut up. But every time God has healed me, I have had to put in some of the work to regain the function that the brokenness took from me. As often as God has spoken into my life and made me well, He has not once spoken into my life and made me whole. 

Wholeness is an ongoing work. One that we're doing together - me and God - but a work nonetheless. 

So I wonder sometimes about the healings we read about the Bible. What happened afterward? 

There's part of broken, but healing, me that really wants to know. 

God of Encouragement

I'm the strong one. 

I'm the one who is the rock when the rest of the world is shaking. I'm the one who can buck up and get through it, no matter what it is. I'm the one who never gives up, who keeps pushing through. I'm the one who can be going through absolute Hell and you'll never be able to look at me and figure out that anything is wrong. I'm the one who can say "yes" when I'm already running on empty and pretend that everything is fine when I really just want to curl up into a ball and quit. 

Yes, I'm the strong one. It's the way God made me. 

But I still need encouragement. 

I still need someone to notice how much work I'm putting into it. I still need someone to notice the victories I'm achieving. I still need someone to notice that it's not easy. I still need someone to notice that sometimes, I'm not okay. And I still need someone to notice how strong I'm pretending to be. 

I need someone to speak truth into my heart - the truth that they see me, that they know, that they get it. The truth that everything I'm putting in is making a difference, that something good is coming out of it. That I'm making a difference. That I'm appreciated. That it matters...that I matter. 

Just because I'm the strong one doesn't mean I don't need someone to strengthen me. 

I'll tell you - speaking for all the strong ones in the world? - that kind of encouragement is hard to come by sometimes. Most of the time. When you're the strong one, the world kind of just takes you for granted. Takes it for granted that you'll be fine. That you'll get through. That you'll be okay because you are okay because you're the strong one. It doesn't look like you need anything. 

Can I tell you something else? Being the strong one is exhausting. Having to constantly find the strength, somewhere, somehow, to keep going when you've been running on empty for a long time? It's hard. There are more days than you'd think that it's almost impossible. 

But here's a third thing I want to tell you: on those days? It is God who strengthens me. It is God who encourages me. 

Really, it is God who encourages all of us (2 Thessalonians 2:16-17). It's just what He does. 

He just keeps showing up, pouring Himself into our emptiness, filling our hearts all over again. He tells us that He sees us, that He hears us, that He recognizes what we're putting in...and He gives us more to keep putting into it. He notices how strong we're pretending to be and then comes alongside us with real strength, exactly what we need to keep going. 

See, I'm the strong one, but God made me the strong one. God formed me from the dirt with the kind of character and resiliency that makes me the strong one, and He gave me the life experiences that would form and strengthen and solidify my capacity for that kind of strength, and He has come alongside me through every season to keep filling me with that strength, being for me the encouragement that the world seems to forget that I need as "the strong one," but that I desperately need and that hits my heart like drops of rain in a desert. 

God made the strong one, and He's the one who keeps making me strong. By being my constant Encourager, my ever-present Companion, and my faithful Friend. 

So that maybe I can be the strong one for you when you need it...and let my strength lead you back to His. 

God Chose You

For the unpopular kid, one of the hardest times of childhood is when we're picking teams. You stand there excited to start the game, ready to get going, eager to show off your skills and, most importantly, to be part of something, but the kids around you go off one by one to their respective sides until all that's left is you.

And then everyone's suddenly ready not to pick you, but to give you away. "You can have him." "No, you take her. I had her last time." 

There's no greater pain through the heart than the pain of being unwanted. 

We're all at some time susceptible to it. Maybe we're not the most athletic, so no one wants us on their sports team. Maybe we aren't the smartest, so they don't want us in their group project. Maybe we aren't the prettiest, so the opposite sex looks right past us. Maybe we don't have a background that's acceptable, so we get pushed off to the side. Maybe we aren't successful enough, don't drive the right car, don't live in the right neighborhood. 

It feels sometimes like the world spends our whole lives drawing lines and more often than our hearts can truly bear, we find ourselves on the wrong side of them. Everyone's been picked. Everyone's settling in. Everyone's got the good life going for them, and here we still stand, and the world's trying to give us away. 

"You can have him." 

Sometimes, we can fall into the trap of believing that God must think the same thing about us. 

That God is always picking someone else to do what we want to do, what we feel gifted to do. That God is always passing us over when He's handing out answers to prayer. That God is kind of kicking around in the dirt a little bit, trying to give us away...or reluctantly accepting us just to get the game started, even though He fully intends to put us on the bench. 

Friends, that's just not the case. 

Paul says, in the opening to his first letter to the church at Thessalonica, that he knows God has chosen them (1:4). I know, brothers and sisters, that God has chosen you. 

Brothers and sisters, do you know that He has chosen you, too? 

Do you know that He wants you on His team? Do you know that He's already been dreaming of what He's going to do with you? Do you know that He sees the strengths you don't know you even have? Do you know that God is the one voice who, even when you feel like you're standing all alone, says, "I want her"? Not "I'll take her," but "I want her." I want her on My team. I want her to be part of what I'm doing. I want her with Me. 

He wants you. He chooses you. 

Yesterday. Today. Forever. And for always. 

God Loves You

It's the greatest truth of the Christian faith...and the hardest one to believe: 

God loves you. 

Yes, you. 

Way back when the whole Jesus thing was still fairly new, Paul wrote a letter to a young church whose people were losing their way a little bit. The church was in Colossia, and sin was starting to creep its way in. 

In chapter 3, Paul gently reminds them to put away all these sins of the flesh - the things that belong to their earthly nature. Things like sexual immorality, impurity, lust, greed. Even evil desires. He tells them to stop lying to each other and being angry with one another and letting "filthy language" come from their lips. He says, "This is who you used to be, but not any more." 

Yet, the fact that Paul was even mentioning these things in his letter to them means...they were still these things. They were still engaged in these things, still doing these things. Still being hateful and malicious and angry and immoral and impure and lustful and greedy and a whole host of "evil" things. 

But in the very next sentence, he changes the whole tone of everything: 

Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience (3:12). 

And now, wait a minute. 

Because he just called them out for being persons of the flesh, for being disgusting, for not being the kind of people they should be but the kind they used to be. And then, in what feels like the very same breath, he reminds them they are "holy" and "dearly loved." 

I don't know about you, but that's a hard one for me. Put me in front of a mirror, and I'm bound to see my flesh. I'm bound to see the ways I'm not measuring up, even to my own standards, let alone God's. I'm prone to wallow in my brokenness and lament the fact that I'm still living my flesh, still living the old life, still the same old person I swore I didn't want to be any more (not that I ever wanted to be her). 

And it's easy to forget that at the very same time that I am all of those things, I am also holy and, most importantly, dearly loved. 

But such it is. That's the heart of the whole thing. God is love. And if God is love, then you are loved by Him. Nothing else could be more true. 

So if you're beating yourself up today, if you're looking in the mirror at someone who just messed up again, who just fell into an old pattern, who just made the same mistake, who just chose something you swore you'd never choose again, and you're wondering what this life you're living says about you, know this: it only says you've temporarily forgotten. 

Because the most important, the most true, the most amazing thing about you is not that you're somehow still here, somehow still pushing through, somehow still making it despite all your mistakes. No. The most important, most true, most amazing thing about you is that you are dearly loved. 

For God is love. 

And that means you. 

God of the Unseen

Believe it or not, there are folks in this world who believe in things like "coincidences," "luck," and "pure chance." Things that "just happen," completely out of the blue. 

I am not one of these folks. 

I was reading a book recently by a person who claimed to be both a scientist and a Christian, and she claimed that science believes - at this point in human history - that it can only account for about 5% of all things in the entire universe. Put another way, science is ready to confess than 95% of the stuff that's "out there," we haven't even discovered yet. 

So if you're a person who believes in science, that's 95% of stuff that's affecting your life that we don't know about, can't account for, and don't understand. 

The question, then, obviously becomes: can't faith account for it?

Can't faith in God account for what we don't understand? We confess that God is mystery. We know that we cannot fathom Him in our finite minds. We know that He is doing more in the world than we can ask or imagine, than we can possibly begin to understand. We know that even what we do understand, we don't really understand. 

We know that sound and light both can travel in waves, but we don't know why they travel in waves. We know that different colors come across different frequencies in the spectrum, but we can't explain how it is that we process them that way. We know that a seed becomes a full-fledged plant, but how a walnut becomes a giant tree, nobody really knows. DNA, we say, but okay...what? 

Then, we say there's coincidence. We say there's chance. We say there's luck. We say that the 95% of stuff we can't account for (which, by the way, is a complete guess in and of itself, for how can you know how much you don't know?) just "randomly" bumps up against itself or something else and creates opportunities and goodness and love...

...and yet, if those same things bump up against themselves or something else and create disaster, panic, illness, and pain, we wonder why God isn't good any more. Go figure. 

So whatever you want to believe, it's cool, I guess - to each their own. But the question comes back to what we can't explain, whether that's science or chance or luck or whatever you want to call it. 

For me, it's pretty easy - it's God. 

Paul says, in the opening to his letter to the Colossians, that our God is the one who created everything, including the "visible and the invisible" (1:16). 

In other words, that stuff you can't account for? Maybe it's the invisible stuff that God still created. That chance? Maybe it's divine. That luck? Maybe it's favor. That coincidence? Maybe it's blessing. 

Your life? Maybe it's love. 

In fact, I know it is. For God so loved the world...and that means you, too. 

Be Not Afraid

It's one of the most oft-repeated assurances in all the Bible: 

Be not afraid. 

When we read those words, we think it's a translation issue, some kind of throwback to the King's English that, if we were to re-translate it today, would mean something roughly like "Don't be scared." And so we spend our lives of faith trying not to be scared, telling ourselves we won't succumb to it, putting on a brave face and plastering a blind faith over every situation we face. 

I'm obviously not scared. See? I'm smiling and telling you how good God is. Can't possibly be scared right now. Not me. Nope. 

Which is great, I guess, except that underneath it all, we're still scared. If you were to peel back the layers of our lives and uncover one by one our defense mechanisms, it's not surprising to find that at the very core of us, we're still scared. 

And that means that we're failing at what we think the Bible is telling us to do. Don't be scared? How can I not be scared?

As someone who has spent what seems like an excessive amount of time in her life being scared (admittedly sometimes even for good reason), let me tell you something I've done that has changed my perspective on life: 

I put the emphasis on another syllable. 

Most of us read "Be not afraid," and we think, "Don't be scared." But these days, when I read "Be not afraid," I think "be...not afraid." Be "not afraid." 

Not afraid is a type of courage. It's the willingness to look something scary in the eye and decide...nope. Not gonna be intimidated. Not going to be afraid. It's embracing our own human frailty, knowing we might fail, knowing we might fall, and not letting that be the defining characteristic of this moment. It's looking at the life that's in front of us, knowing what can happen, and doing it anyway. 

Not because we've somehow become unafraid or "not scared," but because we're choosing something different. 

We are literally putting the emphasis on a different syllable in our life as we're living it, and when we do that, there's no place for being afraid. 

I am "not afraid." I am not not...scared. I am choosing "not afraid" as my default position. 

And being "not afraid" lets me choose something else - something like courage. Something like curiosity. Something like adventurous. It lets me choose to feel my own belovedness, the way that God has been merciful and kind to me. It lets me choose to be humbled, to recognize my own strength and depend instead upon God's strength. It lets me see grace in a new way. And healing. And power.

And love. 

What would "not afraid" open up for you in your life if you were to choose it today? What would your life look like with an emphasis on a different syllable? 

What would it take for you to look at a situation, even one in which fear might seem reasonable, and decide...nah. Not it. Not today? 

What would it mean to you to stop trying not to be scared and to simply embrace being not afraid? 

God Finishes

Have you ever been stuck in a season of waiting? 

You have prayed the prayers, you have put in the work, you continue to wake up every day and do your due diligence, but you're still waiting. You're waiting for the door to open. You're waiting on the darkness to break. You're waiting on the goodness to come. You're waiting on the promise of God to come true in your life, the promise that you're so sure of. 

I think the hardest waiting for us is something we could call "active waiting" - the kind of waiting you're doing when you're working for it. 

Seven months ago, I undertook a course of physical therapy designed to help break some chains that have fallen heavy on my shoulders. In that time, I have made a great amount of progress, but I'm still not where I want to be. My physical therapist told me that the entire process, to get me to my goals, would likely take 8-12 months. Eight. to. twelve. months. 

I have to be honest - the more progress I make, the harder it is to continue to wait. The more things I find that I am able to do that I wasn't able to do before, the easier it is for me to start believing that this is as good as it gets, that this is as far as I'm going to come. I try to keep that eight to twelve month timeline in my mind, but here I am at month seven, and...it's hard to believe it's still coming. 

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with one of my doctors about getting off one of my medications, a drug I have been taking for almost two decades. Know what he told me? It sounds like a good idea, but I won't know for eighteen months how it will really affect me. Whether it will be good or not. Whether my body will accept life without it. Eighteen months. 

What in the world am I supposed to do for eighteen months? 

These are just a couple of examples from my current life, but we could keep going. I remember the seasons when I was desperate for a job, any job...and the ones when I was aching for a job more closely related to my heart. I've been waiting on my future husband for decades, and the longing in my heart to have children of my own has not yet been fulfilled. 

I know folks who are waiting on their finances to steady out, their sense of belonging to increase, their health to stabilize, their weight to drop, their kids to grow up, their grandkids to be born, their parents to settle into a new season, their homes to be finished, their cars to be upgraded, their churches to blossom, their chains to break, their habits to form...we could go on and on. 

And in these seasons of waiting, these agonizing seasons of waiting, we really only have one truth to hold onto - a truth that has become so oft-repeated that it's almost cliche, but it truly is our lifeline: 

That the God who began a good work in us will most assuredly complete it (Philippians 1:6). 

That's it. That's all we've got. On the hard days, on the dark days, on the days that feel like the last days, when we are ready to give up, ready to give in, ready to roll over, the only thing we truly have is the deep, abiding knowledge that God loves us and...He's working on it. He's still working on it. He's putting the pieces in place one infinitesimally small piece of dust at a time and still working us toward that good thing that our hearts already know is happening...if only we can wait until it gets here. 

And so, we keep waiting. But not as those without hope, for we know that the outcome is certain - something good is coming. Because good is all that God does. Whether it looks like what we think it should look like, turns out the way we want it to, or comes in our own timeline or not, it's gonna be good. And it's gonna be finished. 

Thank you, Lord. 

God You Know

It's not what you know; it's who you know. 

There's plenty of truth to that statement floating around in our world. Some days, it can feel like we're stuck in a perpetual middle school with all of the ways that we try to divide ourselves - by color, class, gender, experience, education, economics, preferences, religion, whatever. If there's a way to draw a line and make a ladder, we'll do it - and then the folks at the top will make exceptions for the folks at the bottom based on all kinds of subjective criteria, namely, whether they like you or not. 

As an introvert, I will tell you that I owe plenty of opportunities and accomplishments in my life to extroverts who have adopted me and drawn me into places my quiet self would never get invited on my own. 

It pays to have friends.

But the greatest blessing is to be a friend of God. 

Because while we're here trying to figure out how to get to the top, how to climb the ladder, how to be noticed, how to be appreciated, how to move from one class to another, how to prove ourselves, how to be liked, God's out here already loving us and He treats every one of us exactly alike. 

In God, there is no male nor female, no slave nor free, no top nor bottom, no one with access and one trying to get in. In God, we're all the same - sinners saved by grace, broken loved by God, treasured just for who we are. 

Paul says it in his letter to the Ephesians - even masters are supposed to treat their slaves well because we're all slaves to God and in Him, "there is no favoritism" (6:9). In Him, there is no hierarchy. In Him, there is no desperate clinging and trying to climb and laboring to hold on. 

Slave or master, husband or wife, child or parent, male or female, educated or uneducated, rich or poor, it doesn't matter - there is no favoritism. There's no special "in;" we're all already in. 

And it really takes the striving away. It really takes the pressure to perform away. It really changes how we approach life, faith, love, and all the things of this world. 

Which means, there really is truth in the statement we started with, but it's not the truth we think it is. It's not the truth that says we have to know someone in power who is willing to take pity on us and drag us up a rung or two. 

It's the truth that says we're already loved by Someone in power who showers us with grace and draws us nearer to Himself. 

And if that's Who you know, you are blessed indeed. 

God of Skewed Doors

A few years ago, I had to replace the screen door on the back of my house, which seemed like a simple enough task. I'm pretty good with a hammer (and a whole host of other tools) and have done plenty of construction projects around my house and others', so I figured this would take an hour. Maybe two. 

The problem was that my house was about 75 years old at the time and what was once square...ain't square any more. Over time, the frame of the house has shifted and sunk and tilted and turned so that the new door, fresh out of the box, just didn't fit. 

It takes time to remedy a situation like this. It takes time to figure out what the best approach is - whether you should un-square the new door, re-square the frame, stuff a few shims in a few strategic places, or meet somewhere in the middle. Do it wrong, and you get a door that doesn't close at all. Or you get a door that closes, but there's a big gap somewhere. Or you get a door that hits in all the wrong places and you realize it won't be long before you're replacing the door...again. 

The whole thing ended up taking almost three times as long as I'd planned for, but eventually, I got a door. A door that closes with minimal gaps and hits in good places. 

It wasn't easy. I had to change the approach it felt like a thousand little times to get to the result that I was looking for, taking one thing that didn't work quite right and making a little tweak and then making another one and another one until that square door fit in the skewed hole. 

I think about that door quite a bit when I think about what God is doing in the world. 

It's so easy for us to think that it'll never work. We're looking at our skewed lives and thinking they can never fit into God's plan. We look at the ways that we're messed up and think we cannot be redeemed. We look at the whole project and think it's got to just be scrapped...tear it down to nothing and start over. 

But God already knows it's going to take some work. God's already working on it. 

He knows that He might have to reshape something here or there. That He might have to straighten up this edge or flatten out that rail or sharpen up that corner. He knows He might have to put a few shims in on that side, and tighten a little harder on the other.

He knows it might take a little longer than He would have wanted it to. That it will take a thousand little tweaks between doing and done. That it's going to look for a long while like it isn't working and then all of a sudden...

...it's a life. Not just a life, but a life that brings glory to God. 

Paul told the Ephesians that God makes everything work in agreement with what He wants (1:11), and that's still true today. It's still true for us. God is making it work. 

As messy, as challenging, as time-consuming, as frustrating as it can sometimes be, He's making it work until our broken, skewed, aging lives hold His plan just right - with minimal holes and hitting in good places. 

God is Not Deceived

You probably know at least one person who is really good at getting whatever they want and talking their way out of anything. You probably just shake your head and wonder how they do it. 

My dad was one of those persons. I kid you not - there was a time he was driving down the interstate and threw a banana peel out his car window. That banana peel flew down the road...right into the open window of a state trooper's car and landed on the officer's floorboard. Dad got pulled over, threatened with a ticket for littering, ended up having the cop laughing right along with him, and got away with just removing the banana peel from the officer's car and putting it back in his own. (I'm pretty sure he threw it out the window again later.) 

You, too, probably know someone who could banana peel a police car and get away with a laugh. There are some folks who are just really good at it. 

Now, don't get me wrong. I think we all try this kind of thing. Most of us, anyway. There aren't a lot of us who are immediately confessional, who just own up to our shortcomings without trying to spin them. There aren't a lot of us who aren't trying to influence the world for our own benefit when it seems possible. There aren't a lot of us who don't want to be right and don't want others on our side. 

And, I think, this is even more true of Christians than of the general population. 

We are a people who keep trying to sweet-talk God into giving us what we want. We keep trying to trick Him into turning the other way. We keep trying to convince Him that what seems like the truth isn't quite the whole truth because He just needs our perspective on it. 

We spend a lot of our Christian lives trying to talk ourselves out of Hell, as if it somehow depended upon us and not on Him. And then, when we get the tiniest little inkling of love from our Lord, we are so bold as to think that we've succeeded. He is on our side! We have won Him over! 

But God cannot be deceived. You've never done such a good job of convincing Him that you're a good person that He actually thinks that you are. 

He knows that you're broken. He knows that you're fallen. He knows that you're sinful. He knows that even right now, while you're trying to convince Him that you're good, you're being deceptive and sneaky and underhanded. He knows that you think you're in control, even when you're pretending with your words that you trust in Him. He knows you're trusting in yourself...and your ability to deceive Him. 

But He cannot be deceived, and He will not be mocked (Galatians 6:7). Which is, uhm, exactly what you're doing. 

How can you mock a love as deep at this, that while you were still a sinner, Christ died for you? Not only how can you mock it, but how can you think you're getting away with it? 

One look at those nail-pierced hands, and it all falls apart. You can't just laugh your way out of this one. You may be able to talk your way out of anything, but put one nail through the embodied flesh of the Son of God and all that talk falls silent. 

Because He's not falling for it. 

He loves you too much for that. 

The Reason Why

I saw it again this week - a well-known Christian family posting an update following a tragic family event. It was an update that started with those ever-famous words: 

We still don't know why this happened.

It's a very common sentiment, especially among those who profess belief in Christ. Especially among those whose professed belief in Christ is more public than, say, yours or mine tends to be. 

We don't know why this happened. 

It's said as though being a Christian is supposed to protect us from bad things. It's said as though there's some great big cosmic plan unfolding that we haven't uncovered yet. It's said as though everything has some massive, big, God-sized reason for happening in our lives and if we could just figure out what that reason is, we would be able to better live into it and achieve...maximum glory? Maximum testimony? 

Like we are going to be the ones, in a very Job-like fashion, to put the final nail in Satan's coffin. 

I see it all the time, but I don't really understand it. I guess it's a natural human impulse, made more acute by our faith that believes that we're all wrapped up in a story bigger than ourselves, but I don't really know what good it does. 

In fact, I think it can do more harm than good. 

I don't say this naively. I think it's safe to say that I have lived a life with more challenges than the average person. But I've never been tempted to ask why. 

I've never been tempted to believe that I uniquely don't deserve this. That's not to say that I think that I do deserve it; it's just that I recognize the nature of living in a fallen world in a broken flesh and it seems perfectly reasonable to me, then, that broken and fallen things would happen, even in my own life. There is nothing that I can look at in this world that is not a deformation of what it was intended to be. 

And so, the question is never, "Why did this happen to me?" as though bad things aren't expected to happen or at least, aren't expected to happen to me because I love God so much and try so hard to be so faithful...the question is always, "What does faith require of me here?" 

How do I respond to this fallen, broken thing? How do I bring God's glory to this situation? How do I honor Him in this space, in this season? 

It seems like a slight difference, but it changes everything. Because when we, as a people of faith, keep asking why bad things happen to us as though loving God is supposed to make us immune to such things, we turn God into a talisman...and a bad one, at that. We create the impression for a watching world that following God isn't all it's cracked up to be, all that it promised to be, because here we are and bad things are still happening to us, which implies...maybe God isn't good. Maybe He doesn't love us like we thought He did. Maybe He doesn't care whether we love Him or not or whether we're trying to live by faith or not. Maybe none of this matters. 

But if, instead, we accept that bad things happen in a fallen and broken world and shift our question just a little bit to ask what faith should look like now - without having to have a reason, without having to explain the bad things away, without having to find a justification, without having to put some grand, giant narrative story onto everything - if we ask what faith should look like now, well, then, we might just bring glory to God after all. 

Which is really what we want to do. Isn't it?