Beautiful

“I was in a big accident, an earthquake. Don’t be upset at God. He always provides for his children even in hard times. I’m still praying that God will get me out, but he may not. But even so he will always take care of you.”

This song is unrelated to this post, but I like to throw in an oldie sometimes.

Read Full Post »

I was driving to my apartment tonight, it was late and dark and lightly raining. Nighttime mixed with driving does something to me and it draws me into thought. I’m not sure what it is, maybe in the past I’ve had some good thought sessions while driving around in the dark and now my subconscious relates the two and makes it easy to slip into that mode, but I enjoy it.. most of the time.

Something inside of me tonight was crying for help. I feel like I’m walking around empty. It’s like I have nothing inside of me to hold onto, but even feeling that way, I feel broken inside. It’s like those bubble mailers that are used to protect fragile content. The package doesn’t look torn up or anything, but the inside could be shattered without anyone knowing.

I feel locked in. Sometimes I know that I should get some help, even just finding someone at the church I’m a part of to talk with, but everything is so complicated and it doesn’t make sense.

Read Full Post »

radical depravity or how man reflects satan more than God, really?

I was washing a Paul Washer video on Youtube, because I really like PW, and he was talking passionately about radical depravity. The phrases he was using, “mankind is evil” “we are born and hate God”, I just really don’t see it. I don’t think that man is born in favor of God, but I don’t see them as without a doubt completely evil. I think that we’re bent toward sin and without a question guilty of sin and deserving of hell, but I don’t think God views us as evil. When I say us I’m not talking about including myself in a Christian ‘us’, but rather a mankind ‘us’. I think we’re born with a sinful nature into a broken and hurting world. As people live I think that they can get to a place of hating God, because of brokenness and hurt, not because of their inherent evil. That doesn’t in any way excuse them from their sin or the action of rejecting God. I don’t know. It kind of makes me sick thinking that God might view people that way.

Read Full Post »

Life must go on.

I’m gonna be really honest. I can do that because I haven’t told anyone about this blog and I don’t know anyone who reads it. Occasionally, thank God it’s now fewer and far between, but still occasionally a night comes along where the earth opens up and swallows me alive. Last night it happened. I’m not sure what set it off, usually there is a trigger, but something happened and ten minutes later I was paralyzed. I don’t know what happens, but it feels like I’m losing my mind. There is nothing you can do, I just crawled into bed and closed my eyes and writhed in pain. I feel so stupid in the midst of it and afterward as well because there is no explanation and there is seemingly no way out. Last night I was thinking, I need to get help, I want to tell someone, but there is nothing to tell. I’ve talked to one of my friends that left the group and he told me that he has similar times, which as bad as it sounds, is comforting to me.

I can’t think about it or else tonight will be hell. Telling someone (even if it’s the internet) makes me feel slightly better.

Read Full Post »

An illistration by Yours Truly

Read Full Post »

How does a person know that he/she is walking in truth? I was considering this today, considering the various “truths” I once held versus those beliefs from the past that are actually still with me today. What is a key difference between the not-actually-truths and the things that turned out, as far as I can tell, to be just as true now as they were then? I remembered the words of Christ about truth, and nodded my head. Truth and freedom really do go together.

One common denominator in my experience in fundamentalism/legalism was the shrinking down of the world, the tightening of the borders, the closing in of the box. Sure, there were a lot of vocabulary words that indicated freedom, but in actual practice, it was a lot more like hiding behind a little wall, fearful, shaking, waiting for this world to be over with already. Choices? Questions? Not okay, except for those that fit into the prescribed grid. Have others had a different experience in fundamentalist/legalist/conservative circles? Probably so. But this was mine.

One common denominator in my (forced? chosen?) exodus from that tight safe-feeling place has been the sense of liberation, the feeling of stepping into a wide world, a world full of options, full of choices, a world full of opportunities.

I recently heard someone (Where? Anyone else here this and remember who said it?) quote a new study revealing that human beings, if forced to choose between pain or the unknown, will almost always choose pain. With pain, at least we know what to expect. With the unknown, that’s just the point—we don’t. So, according to the research, if you’ll give me the choice between pain and the unknown, you can know ahead of time which one I’ll pick: let me have the pain I know. Is this the reason so many stay? Is this the reason that leaving what we know is so hard, because leaving the known pain means facing the unknown?

These last four or five years have had two huge paradigm-shifting crashes for me. The first was my spiritual world. That was a slow but steady turning over of everything, until critical mass was reached and I realized I no longer fit within the walls of the conservative evangelical/fundamentalist world. There was not a lot of joy in that crash. I remember much fear, pain, panic. ”Where will I go from here? Where is here, to begin with?”

So when it came crashing down, helped by painful circumstances that were a little more painful than the paradigm was capable of bearing, it was a blow I wasn’t sure I could recover from.

And as I was still scratching my head and figuring out which way was up, slowly trying to make sense of the big wide new world I found myself in, the second crash began, born of the earlier mentioned painful circumstances that helped, in part, to cause the first one.

The first crash was mostly philosophical/theological. The second was very practical, very earthy. It involved losing a part of my most precious possession in all the world: my hopes and dreams, family-wise, for my wacky wiggly beyond-loved children. When the vision of what-might-be finally gasped its last, no doubt kept alive for so long only by my valiant and often humiliating attempts to Make It Work (It Has To Work!), it was no different from a death. It felt no different from a death. In many ways, I think it always will.

So two huge life-changing things happened, like a huge steam roller crushing its way along The Way Things Are, and that is why I nodded my head when I heard the research that says we prefer pain over the unknown. The pain of what I know is something that I might not like, sure, but at least I know how to survive it (and, besides, it might stop soon, right?). The unknown is something else entirely. I had to, pretty much, be forced out into it.

I am not really sure I am up for anymore paradigm shifts. I think I’ve maxed out. Stepping into freedom has been one of the most beautiful and horrifying things I’ve experienced. Many of you who read and comment here, each in your own unique way, know exactly what I’m talking about.

But some what I found in the unknown was a beautiful Unknown… and I continue to find Him. And what with all the bright light, it was a lot easier to see things, to gain clarity, to get new perspectives on things that I’d only read about before in a textbook, never actually seen with my own eyes. Much of what I observed was that some of my precious old “truths” had been nothing more than planks in a little box, nailed shut. There was a lot to rejoice about. It didn’t make the mourning any easier. There is no such thing as an easy paradigm shift. These things only come with the hard pains of transition-stage labor and blood and afterbirth.

But, still, there it was. Freedom.

I still don’t know which end is up, on so many fronts. Personally, I hold tight to the Nicene and the Apostles Creeds, but beyond that, what? I don’t know. But I do know that I have grown to not only love this sense of freedom, but to look for it, to nurture it, to enjoy those things that encourage its growth. And like an ex-con going back into prison, the sight of the thick jail house door is enough to make me sweat.

I hope this means I may now have an instinctual sense for recognizing the confines of the old way, because I didn’t have that before, and I think it would be valuable. But when instinct fails to reveal truth, there are always carefully observed ways of determining what a thing is, what it isn’t. This is why one of my new questions is, “Does it bring freedom?”

Not, “Does it promise freedom,” because there are all sorts of things and people and organizations that will promise all sorts of things. No, I’m talking about standing back and observing and watching what actually happens. Where there are captives being set free, chances are pretty high that something Good is afoot”

– Adventures in Mercy

Read Full Post »

Jenny Lynn by Katie Herzig

All the ones your city crumbles like Babylon

Leaving the gardens you’ve been hangin’ on

Disappear before your eyes

Take your time, let the words sink in before you say your mind

Heaven knows we all get lost sometimes

You will find your way back

Wounded, you let your guard down and feel stupid

You wish you never would have trusted

Your heart in someone else’s hands

But it’s all ok

I think you may have made the best mistake

I think we’re made to give ourselves away

Cause there’s no other way to live

Jenny Lynn, I wish that I had your thin skin

I wish that I could let the love right in

Maybe I’d rather feel the pain

Cause freedom is a naked heart that always dares to give

A willingness to let the tenderness be taken as it may

Read Full Post »

“You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you….”

I miss being in love with Jesus. Tonight at the last gathering of The Way I was struck during praise and worship with the lack of emotion that I experienced in regards to Jesus and all things spiritual. At one point I had to detach myself emotionally from God and the things of God for a few reasons. 1) It was really painful trying to walk with God and on an emotional level I just couldn’t handle it. 2)I’d experienced a sect of Christian where emotions were so interconnected to what was going on in the spiritual that I just needed a break to step back and examine things and think about things without every wind of emotion effecting that. At that point it was easy to disconnect God and emotion for me. You sit through a teaching and you think about it and analyze it and you decipher in your mind what that means for your life. It was easy to talk about God. You take what you see in the Word and you spit out the black and the white. The part that was difficult was relating to real Christians. Their words were like arrows that were getting shot straight into my heart. The testimonies and encouragement that should have spurred me on in my Faith were the things that made me want to hide away in darkness. Those were the things that brought emotion back into the realm of Christianity for me and the emotion didn’t feel good, it hurt. Most people run away from pain, but if you want to follow Jesus and it happens to be painful, you can’t let the pain make you run, you just have to walk through it.
That pain was caused by the awareness that my love for Jesus was gone and there was no hope in sight. There was a massive chasm in my life and it happened to fall between Jesus and myself. It was easy to ignore it mentally, but I missed Him.
I missed running to Him.
I missed His sweet voice.
I missed knowing without a doubt that His thoughts toward me were good.
I missed feeling Him.
I just missed Him.
That time was a real defining point in this journey. I knew, from past history, that if I invested myself in believing that God was this idea that I wanted Him to be, that I could believe it. I could devote myself to this thought and eventually it would become reality to me.. but I couldn’t let myself do it. Just months prior, my realities and truths were shattered and I couldn’t let myself do that again. So I just walked in a state of not knowing. Praise and worship was particularly hard. Most of the time I’d start to sing, out of reverence and make myself choose to believe the goodness of God, but I couldn’t make it for long. There was no excitement, no love in my expression of praise. It hurt me because I knew that it hurt Him. At points I’d feel so stubborn for not trying harder, but I knew in my heart that he understood and walked with me through it, allowing my heart to heal while He gently held me. It was as if He knew that I wanted and needed Him, but it was too hard to try and reach out for Him. That’s where I’ve been. It’s hard for me to be emotional during praise and worship because that is the place that my two worlds collide.. the world of pain and confusion and the place where I know that God is holding me and won’t let go, even if I just can’t muster up the strength to hold Him back. Day by day, the trust comes back. It’s funny to me that He’s so patient. He didn’t hurt me and didn’t provide any opportunity to lose my trust, but it happened. He lost my trust, for no cause of His own, but He’s trying to earn it back. That, my friends, is what makes Jesus stand apart from humanity and religion. That is the gospel of power. He came to seek and to save that which was lost, even though He had no part in losing it. A prideful God would make humanity seek Him out, but the Humble King of kings redeems the broken and seeks out the lost, just because he loves us. It blows my mind.

Read Full Post »

Selling Their Souls With The Purpose Of Losing It All

I was at my sister’s graduation about a year ago and in one of the speeches one of the students said something akin to, “We all walk around thinking about our lives with ourselves as the center of the universe completely unaware that everyone else is walking around doing the same thing.” That fascinates me to no end. I catch myself sometimes and make myself aware of how much my thought life is consumed with my own being. I’m blown away by how narcissistic I am. The only way I can seek comfort from that thought is by acknowledging that everyone else is in the same boat.
The problem with my empty comfort is that acknowledging a problem doesn’t equate to solving a problem. I’ve deceived myself into thinking that just because the way I live and think reflects that of how everyone else does life, that somehow it’s okay. WRONG!
I feel like my thinking is probably reflective of the pharisees. Isn’t that how they brought comfort to their souls? Instead of looking heavenward toward God, they look at their fellow brethren and in doing that they puff themselves up. The problem with that way of thinking is that it doesn’t allow for the idea that their is something higher to attain to. I have to get this pharasitical(is that a word? :/) way of approaching the world out of my mind so that Christ can reign in and through me. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Prior to knowing Jesus the thing that kept me from it was comparing myself to my fellow man. It wasn’t a judgmental thing, but rather there wasn’t anything higher to seek after because I had known nothing better. In the midst of the group, that thought processs transformed from looking at man to looking toward God.. but in reality it meant looking to the leaders to see appropriate Christian behavior.
So what does that leave me with now? I have the Word of God. I don’t really know the character of God, which is what has guided me in the past. Whatever I perceived the character of God to be, it would be infused into a situation and then the answer would come. Well….. the understanding I used to have of God was whacked out and so now I’m left seeking, grasping for something higher, without having a picture of it. The Word has been trampled and distorted to the point that it’s hard to pull from it who God is without falling into a frenzy of events of the past. There is baggage attached to it that I just can’t seem to shake off at this point. That is where I’m left squirming when I try and think through my issues within Christianity and with God himself (as I’ve known Him to be). I want some man to come and tell me what to think and believe and how I should live as a Christian. Seeing as how that’s worked out so well in the past.. on second thought I don’t want that. It’s a complicated thing, what I want I don’t want… but what I don’t want, I secretly want. If only I was as cool as Paul that would sound philisophical and not just silly. The stats for ex-cult members are really horrible as far as joining another extreme group, like 1 in 5 or something. You’d think people would learn, but again, after writing that statement above it makes me quit wondering.

I don’t think that I stayed to what I was trying to write in this entry, but that’s how my brain works, wandering from one dot to another until the larger picture is outlined. Sometimes I go from 1-12-17-then back to 2, but hey… who needs a clear picture?

Read Full Post »

“And the hungry soul He has filled with what is good.”

This year is a year that I want to be defined with thankfulness. The last year was filled with mourning and searching and seeking and some finding, but it lacked in the thanksgiving that God deserves.
In the midst of darkness is when I want to be found thankful. Without darkness God couldn’t be defined as light and because of that, one thing that has been on my heart is to rejoice in the light and in the darkness.

I think that thankfulness has to be rooted in care. Without care for a subject, where can you begin to be thankful? So before I develop a habit of thankfulness I need to be able to say that I care about God and the things that He cares about. The only way that I know how to care about these things is to immerse myself in them, in the Word and seeking His heart in prayer. I have to be surrounded by who He is so that I can see who I am. In doing that I think my heart response will be thankfulness.

Read Full Post »