Hello all!

This week’s entry will be pretty short, as I rush to prepare for the work of this weekend. It’s going to be a special time for me, and something I’ve always wanted to do. Though I’ve done missionary work, and gone to retreats, I have never had a time where I just went somewhere with God, for the specific purpose of just being with Him. I have weekends away with my husband sometimes, and I’ve gotten away with good friends. But I’ve never gotten away for a weekend with just Jesus. And why not? He’s real, He speaks, He’s so awesome to be around… When someone asks me about my plans for the weekend, I find it so hard to explain. How do you make someone understand that you’ve gone to spend time with someone they can’t see? But I know He’s real. It’s like a marriage to me; it takes upkeep, it takes time alone together. It’s romantic in a way words fail me to explain. But I ask for everyone’s prayers. No matter how many times I meet with God, there’s a part of me always scared to death to get close to Him, and it takes a lot to get past that. It has taken many, many hours of many weeks of many years of reassurance from God to learn that it is safe to go up and eat from His hand, the way a wild animal can ultimately be tamed by the hand of a kind person. When I give my heart to God, and we really connect, sometimes my heart feels like a raw egg broken open, running every way; yet, somehow, God keeps it all from leaving His hands, sorting it gently, putting it back together. There are parts of my soul – once many, now few, that resent His tampering, and it takes all that’s in me to bring these parts out of the shadows and into the light of His presence, to let Him deal with them. When I try to explain it in words, it sounds like God is being cruel, taking sore wounds that are healing incorrectly and ripping them back open so they can heal without infection. But there’s freedom in His touch, and a healing in His Presence; I could almost stay there forever, and someday I will. For now, I’ll cherish the brief glimpses of His love for me and the few unbroken times we are together.

God bless you, and have a good weekend.

SCRIPTURES:
John 3:20-21a, Mark 6:46-47, Luke 6:12, Matthew 14:23, Matthew 14:13, Matthew 11:28-30, Phil 4:6-7 (For those without a Bible, I recommend the free Bibles on Biblegateway.com [not affiliated with this site].)

We had a bit of technical difficulty last week. I hope no one exhausted themselves trying to figure out what “Zzz fggggh” meant, because that’s all I could get the site to publish. Anyway…

Many of you who know me well already know this story. In 2004, I worked as a Summer camp counselor in upstate New York. It was also the year that actress Gwenyth Paltrow had her first child, whom she named “Apple”.

Reading about it in a Tabloid we’d picked up in town, another counselor and I laughed and made jokes about the name.

Suddenly a 10-year-old girl stood up, crying, and said, “why are you making fun of my aunt? She’s such a nice person!”

It wasn’t a joke. Out of the 7 Billion people on Earth, one of the 30 campers in the room happened to be the young niece of Paltrow. And we made her cry.

We felt like absolute dirt. Never in a million years did it occur to us that commenting on a magazine could impact someone in the room.

Space does not affect morality. Neither does anonymity. The Bible says that “What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs” (Luke 12:3). Every time you see a candid photo of a hilariously-badly-dressed person in some anonymous internet pic, and add your funny/mean comments, there really is someone, somewhere being shamed. Every time you express an opinion about someone in the comments section of a website, even if it’s a famous person, you’re still passing judgement. And if every word whispered in secret is weighed by God, how much more the words that are written for thousands to see! “Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body. “In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold. Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” (Ephesians 4:25-27, 29-32)

God bless y’all, and have a good weekend.

Hello all!

Lately you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been lagging seriously behind on my original “weekly” commitment to blogging. The reason is: it’s hard! When I wrote secular pieces, I could shoot off any opinion I felt like: What president should you vote for? What’s the weirdest flavor of jelly? (After looking at the Smuckers website, it’s a tie between Guava and Mint Apple.)  No matter what I wrote, I knew it was honest, because I was only claiming to state the current opinion that I personally had on that subject.

Fast forward to when I started doing writings about Jesus, and it got harder. First of all, I have to ask myself: does this agree not only with my own opinion but with God’s opinion? I often include scriptural references for anyone who wants to look further into a subject, but the references are as much for me as for my readers. It takes a lot of fact-checking to make sure that nothing I’m saying comes from a misremembered scripture, or something I assumed was in the Bible but wasn’t, or something I’ve thought of that’s just flat out wrong. In the book of Genesis, Satan tricks Eve into sinning by subtly misquoting God to Eve (Gen 3:1-5). This led to doubts about the real intent of God, even though the source of doubt was something that God didn’t even say. This is still the most common way that Satan hooks me, and it’s probably one of the most common ways He hooks other people, too. Let’s imagine we see a TV show where something terrible happens to a character. In the show, that character prays, but his prayers aren’t answered. It’s subtle, but after we watch the show, our faith is a little weakened. But why? Because God failed to answer the imaginary prayer of an imaginary person in an imaginary universe? Did God ever claim that was His job? Think through it, and you can probably think of a hundred places in books, movies, or Facebook memes, where Jesus or Christians or Christianity are presented as a failure, a weakness, a thing to be hated.

Before I get too dark, though, take heart. Jesus has faced this kind of opposition from the very beginning (John 1:10, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, Isaiah 53:3). He has placed Himself from the very beginning in a place where He knew He would be ridiculed and shamed (Psalm 22:6-8) and exposed to violence (Psalm 22). As His followers, we should expect no less (John 15:18-20). Only, let us tend to the precious fire inside ourselves, shielding it from the often raging winds of the outside world.

After all, it’s worth it.

In the coming weeks, I hope to come up with a fitting ending to the “God with a Regular Day Job” Series. It’s been something I’ve wanted to write about for years, but I underestimated seriously what a can of worms it would open for me. I’m leading up to the crucifixion and there are so many things in my mind now that I’ve never realized or ever thought about. It’s deeply shaken my faith, but in a good way, forcing me to go back to the very beginning and check my opinions, always checking, “did God actually say that?“