Grace Upon Grace

For from His fullness we have all received grace upon grace.  For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.  John 1:16-17

Grace on top of grace

Floods my life,

Hides around the corner

Sent from Jesus.

Lord, here's my crusty lens

Suspecting that Your grace is exhausted,

That I've hit my limit of bad things.

I don't just have Moses, I have You!

You've given me beautiful instructions to live by

And then grace, and then grace again

And then truth to plant deep in me.

I'm utterly taken care of, 

Completely cherished,

With a wild and wonderful future ahead

Where only truth will grow bigger

And our love will take shape.

Please help me Lord 

To clear out the foxes in my vineyard

Robbing me of the fruit You're growing.

May my soil be rich,

Cool and ready for Your seeds.

Here I am, all of me:

Today a friend, coworker, daughter, and fiancé.

May I give and find Your grace upon grace

In my thoughts, motives and words,

And may We be closer tonight than we are this morning.

May I feel You smiling at me today.

Please steady my mind to be infatuated with You

So that everyone can see that You are my Rock, my Deliverer and my Joy.

Path to Peace

Me: "I've been trying to channel my inner-Rhonda as I've been wedding planning the past couple of weeks.  You always kept your cool in an amazing way." 

Rhonda: "Oh, but I wasn't actually calm even if I looked like I was.  I can't tell you how many times I repeated this to myself: 'Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.'

Jesus, my heart is troubled.  I'm worried and anxious.  Thanks for the reminder that You want me to surrender that to You.  I feel the rightness in that.  Thanks for creating us so that we're not designed to carry burdens.  Here they are Lord.  They're petty and small and they're robbing me of joy and peace.  Please take them Lord.  

Marriage Advice from Two Saints

I ran into a couple yesterday whom I hadn't seen since I got engaged and they had some nuggets of wisdom to share about how their marriage has flourished.  Here's what they said:

1. Read 1 Corinthians 13 about every week and examine how you doing loving your spouse  compared to those instructions.
2. When difficult times come, turn to each other not away from each other. 
3. Fill yourself with trust and respect for your spouse.
4. At the end of the day, it's just you and them.  What other people think only matters to a certain extent.  It's far more important what your spouse thinks.

1 Corinthians 13 for my day today 

If I succeed in all my lofty goals in changing the world, excelling in my job, weighing a certain amount, or following God, but if I don't have love, I'm nothing.  If I surrender my life to God's work and become a martyr, but don't have love, I'm blown away chaff.

Love is: patient, kind, rejoices with the truth; bears, believes, hopes and endures all things.

Love isn't: envious or boastful, arrogant or rude, insisting on its own way, irritable or resentful, rejoicing at wrongdoing.

Love is eternal.  Prophecies, languages, knowledge, so much of the world we know will pass away once Perfection appears.  We will grow up and become men and women and so much that we know right now are childish ways that will pass away.  Faith, hope and love will remain with us, and the greatest is love.

Chairos: A Moment of Glory

"Why does God make Himself shine in certain ordinary or tragic moments and not in others?  I don't know.  All I know is that God intrudes into my daily story in extraordinary ways.  The ancient Greeks knew two kinds of time: chronos and chairos.  Chronos is clock time--the grind of daily routine.  Chairos is a moment of glory--an epiphany when God shows up and begins a new epoch, a new life."  Dan Allender in The Healing Path

Why does God make Himself shine in some moments but not others?  Or are we just missing Him in our smallness and He's actually there?

My favorite moment in a classical song is hearing the violins rise above the rest and wander through their melody.  But were I then to say that the best song then would be all violins all the time, I'd not be a mature listener.  The rest of the instruments create drama and tell their own stories to weave into the bigger story.  The violins are the cream, but we need the rest of the ingredients to make a whole meal.

God is the Conductor and Author of every story played out in my life.  In that sense, He's in every millisecond of my life on a thousand levels.  But chairos time is rare for me--my violin time where I see God clearly and I'm moved to freshly discover and enjoy Him.  My life sounds mostly like chronos time, the gentle thrumming of the flutes and the rise and fall of the piano.  The violins are playing, but they don't often hush the rest for a solo.

In Heaven it will be all chairos time when we get to experience God clearly from all 5 (or however many we have by that point) senses.  That will sprout us into something entirely different and incredible.  In the meantime, today my role is to enjoy the whole orchestra while it plays.  It was written and planned up by our King and He's excited to show it to us.  It's ok for me to lean forward itching to hear the violins, but the whole piece is the masterpiece, not just the chairos time.

Joseph's Tears

(Italicized Scripture is Genesis 45:1-8 in the NLT)

The tension grew strong enough to break something inside Joseph.  The tears that were on their way disintegrated his sloppy pretend game as he looked at his fearful, confused brothers.  Joseph could stand it no longer.  There were many people in the room, and he said to his attendants, "Out, all of you!"  So he was alone with his brothers when he told them who he was.  The moment he'd pined for as a slave for 22 years had finally come.  Then he broke down and wept.  He wept so loudly the Egyptians could hear him, and word of it quickly carried to Pharaoh's palace.  All at once his mind used tears to hammer out the pain of slavery, the deeper pain he saw in his brothers' guilt, the goodness of God to hurt him so deeply, and the surrender to that good God who hurts to save.  Tears brought to outward hysteria but inward healing.

"I am Joseph!" he said to his brothers, feeling the foreign familiarity of his Hebrew name.  "Is my father still alive?  He looked around at these men.  Before their faces showed the fear of impending slavery, now he'd struck the harder blow by revealing their 22-year-old covered up sin.  With one sentence he'd forced a light on the chain in their darkest place, and they were undone.  But his brothers were speechless!  They were stunned to realize that Joseph was standing there in front of them.  Joseph's compassion grew warm for these brothers and his tears shallowed enough for him to speak.

"Please come closer," he said to them, growing even stronger in his love for these men.  So they came closer, bewildered and without any walls left inside.  And he said again, "I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into slavery in Egypt.  But don't be upset, and don't be angry with yourselves for selling me to this place.  It was God who sent me here ahead of you to preserve your lives.  This famine that has ravaged the land for two years will last give more years, and there will be neither plowing nor harvesting.  God has sent me ahead of you to keep you and your families alive and to preserve many survivors.  So it was God who sent me here, not you!  And He is the one who made me an adviser to Pharaoh--the manager of his entire palace and the governor of all Egypt.  That day Joseph finally got to communicate the work of forgiveness and perspective that God had been forging in him for decades.  Now the Lord was turning to the brothers to begin his healing work, first by saving them from the famine, and then by being gracious enough to shine His light on the sin that held them captive for so long.  Would they respond by walking blinkingly into the blinding light or by running from it?  How would you have responded?

Take a Moment to Remember

I'm in a season where my mind is so full that it tends to stop whatever I want it to think about to replay a recent memory or to remind me of something I need to do soon.  That's made it difficult to focus in my times with the Lord and reading the Bible has been tricky.

I'm quick to want to condemn this season as one where I'm wandering away from the Lord, but when I think about it from a bigger picture view, I'm not sure that reasoning holds up.  A week's worth of life has been crammed into the last three days.  My birthday, my roommate's bachelorette party, two weddings, being a bridesmaid, having family in town, getting time with my fiancé--the Lord has put all of this into a short little jaunt of a weekend.  And yesterday marked only 2 more months till our wedding.  My brain is overloaded with remembering the past with delight, thinking forward to our wedding with anticipation and jitters, and trying to get a handle on what my to do list looks like.  Were I the sinless version of myself, I don't think those events happening on the same weekend would have changed.  But the way I reacted to each part would definitely have been way better.

As I've been fighting to stay focused on the Lord this morning, I remembered this line from a song I like:  "Take a moment to remember who God is and who I am.  There You go, lifting my load again." 

Who God is: King, never forgets anything (except our forgiven sin), the Architect of time, my Savior, the One who's for me, the ultimate fulfillment of all my desires, the Lord of heaven and of earth, brought Jeff and me together, can do anything He wants, delights in us, hates sin, Poet, most important, the Center of my story, wants to take our burdens

Who I am: sheep, led by the Lord, the Lord's daughter, part of the Bride of Christ, in the 'already but not yet' part of the story, not superman, not invincible, not able to do more than I'm able, tired, nervous, excited, not the center of my life, not built to carry burdens

Lord, I need Your help to stay afloat these next two months.  Here's the wedding and all the plans tied in.  I surrender them to You.  Please help me to listen well to how You want me to live and plan and delegate and dream and remember.  Please quiet me down so I can hear You.  Thank You for the wedding that You gave to David and Britt last night and James and Kristin the night before.  Thank You for letting us be a part of that.  You're so good to us Lord!  May we find You today and stay close.

Assertiveness

I recently read this little book called Speak Up: Christian Assertiveness and it's redefined my entire thinking for how to behave in front of people.  Today I need to relearn some of the truths, so hopefully we can all be learning together.  Here are some of the treasures I've picked up from it.  Hopefully they bless you even a hint of how much they've blessed me.

• Assertiveness is acting based on weighing your thoughts and wants and the other person's equally.  It walks the perfect line between being passive and being aggressive. 
• Jesus was very assertive.  It's not a mark of righteousness to be passive.  Doormats aren't Christlike.
• When you don't talk about something that bothers you, most of the time you're unknowingly hurting whoever's affected even when you're trying to protect them.  Oftentimes you start to punish them by behaving in a confusing way that both you and them aren't controlling.
• Being pressured into saying yes is oftentimes worse for the other person too.
• Life happens in the hard stuff.  Those who don't share about their lives on a deep level with people are like players who sit on the bench.  Ultimately bench sitters don't play the game. 
• Aggressiveness is acting based on your own feelings alone, and that's never the goal.  Subtle aggression expresses anger unclearly or in a backhanded way to someone.  That's never the goal.  I shouldn't have ulterior motives in what I say beyond the obvious.
• Assertiveness is a risk of faith. 
• Sometimes it's hard to decipher what my thoughts and feelings are, and it's more confusing still when I know that my feelings don't seem right.  Oftentimes that's because there's a flaw in my self-talk (the arguments I make to myself about anything).  We improve our relationships, behavior and future when we closely monitor the logic our self-talk.  Good self-talk keeps God in the picture and solves problems creatively and hopefully. 
• Our body gives stress signals (clenched hands, tense shoulders, crying, etc.) pointing to an emotion that clue us in that something's wrong.  Everyone's signals are different and it's helpful to be watching for them.
• This sentence is the bread and butter for jumping from passiveness to assertiveness:  "When ___, I feel ____.  I'd like ____."   What an effective tool to bring someone else into our heart and mind.
• Having trouble asking for help at an appropriate time is a mark that I'm not behaving assertively.  A correct request is concise, direct and pleasant, fully giving the other person the freedom to say yes or no.
• Escape is a terrible conflict method.  
• Solve problems by 1. looking inward to see how I add to the problem, 2. using 'I messages' where the statements are subjected around me, 3. summarizing the problem, 4. brainstorming potential solutions, and then 5. evaluating and implementing. 

I am growing to love these truths because I see how they've already directly blessed me again and again.  May they be the same for you :).