A New Light

So I'm moving away from Wisconsin in about 2.5 months, and there a lot of things I'll miss. Let's just lump "boyfriend/friends/people" into one and put that at the top. Other than that, in no particular order, are things like my job, the weather (honestly!), my favorite restaurants, the beautiful country, and tons of other small things I probably haven't thought of yet. I will also miss being close to Concordia, for various reasons. I love being there for my friends at concerts. I love going to campus and seeing familiar faces. I love going back to church there sometimes. I'm THAT postgrad, it happens. But most of all, I will miss the bluff.

Man, that space is powerful.

Maybe it sounds a little silly, and I'm not saying this because it's pretty and makes for nice pictures. I'm saying it's a powerful place because some of the biggest things in my life have happened there, and I have had the very best conversations with God on that beach. I remember one night of angry prayer, when the wind was howling to match my heart When I had finally spewed out all of my frustration, the wind became calm, and I felt a peace that cannot be described. I have gone out in the rain to feel washed and renewed. When I know I'm in distress, and I cannot seem to hear God's voice, I go to the rocks and listen to the water, feeling (as much as I know faith isn't always a feeling) the strong embrace of my Savior. Last night was a night like that. As I sat there almost in tears from the stress of all my new schoolwork and all the other things in my life I worry over, God put a verse into my mind that I have read dozens of times.

"Many are asking, 'Who can show us any good?' Let the light of Your face shine upon us, O Lord. You have filled my heart with greater joy than when their grain and new wine abound. I will lie down and sleep in peace, for You alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety." (Psalm 4:6-8)

This verse is highlighted in bright green in my trusty Bible. Countless times I've read it before I sleep, to remind myself that I can sleep in peace. I've marveled at how poetic that second sentence is. It's beautiful, isn't it? Until last night though, I don't think I ever really realized what it meant. In that exact moment I saw the middle of that passage in a brand new light.

For months I thought if I could just get into gradate school, I would feel less restless. I needed a purpose, and to feel like I was going somewhere in life. Now I'm in the program I wanted. It's hard, but I believe it's worth it. 
I still feel restless, and lack direction.
I thought maybe if I just didn't hate my job so much I'd feel a little less bitter. Now I have so much school work to do that I left the job that frustrated me. I'm only working at the job I love.
I still feel restless, and I still have days of bitter despair.
I've wondered if maybe I just need to see people more. Hang out with friends and talk to people who care. But seeing my friends still leaves me feeling tired, and yet wanting more.
I still feel restless, and impossibly lonely sometimes.

I believed that peace and fulfillment was just around the corner, when my next dream could come true. And yeah, maybe it would be easier to feel content if I was not in such constant transition. But as I remembered those verses last night I finally understood the truth, that looking to God yields joy that is greater than that of all those people I envy who seem to have such abundant blessings. There is no such thing as having it all. Unless, of course, God is your all. 
Now, I can't tell you I'll be cheerful always. It will take constant mindfulness to remember to be grateful where I am with what I have. But the reminder was much needed, and for a while I felt the joy that is able to fill a heart and not leave one bit empty. He calls it peace.

Not All Verbs Are Created Equal

It's really no secret that my year hasn't exactly gone according to plan. You know that phrase, the one about us making plans and God having himself a good laugh? That has been ringing true for the last 14 months. Even when I can lay out every detail of what's "going to" happen, and I think I know for sure exactly what I want, there's about a 99.847% chance that I'm wrong about some or all of it. I'm notorious for making swift decisions and changing direction at dizzying speeds. It's a necessity considering the life I've had and the world I live in. In the last year I've made so many of those sharp turns that I hardly recognize myself. Not that it's a bad thing. The Lord works for my good, and I've grown so much. I'm headed for great things, and I've trusted my gut and my conscience and the voice of God, even when it seemed to me that I was being led in an absolutely mad direction.

But every once in a while I get stubborn about something. I push and pull and exhaust myself trying to make something happen because I'm so sure that it's exactly what I want and absolutely nothing else will do. 
And I can confidently say that I will spend my entire life begging God's forgiveness for being so arrogant. 
I'm a passionate person. I feel things deeply. So now and then I have trouble distinguishing between "this just feels right" and "I just feel strongly about this". Here, at the corner of "I want" and "I should", is where I run into trouble. Sometimes I spend months just sitting at that corner, because I want something so deeply. For pity's sake, I'm me, right? So obviously I know what's best for me, better than anyone else, even God! 

This, my dear friends, is the biggest lie we tell ourselves.

"'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' declares the Lord. 'As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.'" (Isaiah 55:8-9)

Waiting is hard. Especially for me. To wait is to not know. To wait is to put out your efforts and hope you get results. Yet, it's tempting to stretch out the waiting when an answer becomes clear, it's not what you thought, and the next step is to trust. Because while waiting is hard, trusting is even worse.  Waiting is holding on. Trusting is letting go. They are both verbs. But one just seems to involve more control than the other. To trust is to give up control. To trust is to admit you were wrong. To trust is to jump into the great unknown believing that your plans, with all their glittery happiness, were somehow not the best for you. It still isn't easy for me. I don't think it will ever be easy for me. With the decisions I'm currently facing I have already had several crying tantrums. But when I've cried myself out I look back to all the times I've done exactly hat I didn't want to do and was more blessed than I ever could have imagined, and I know that God, as always, knows what he's doing.

"When I am afraid, I will trust in you." (Psalm 56:3)

Turning Around

It's been a rough couple of months.
Now that I think about it, my last post talked about how distant I had grown from my Savior. I wish I could tell you that this one isn't similar, but unfortunately I can't. This time it was worse. Until this last Sunday I was in an even worse spot than I was in the spring. I could not bring myself to pray. I never thought about God except to ask why he had abandoned me (in my flawed opinion). When I did think about my faith all it did was bring tears to my eyes, so naturally I ran away from that idea. The issue with that plan is that everything else brought tears to my eyes anyway. So that kinda backfired. The simplest explanation for my lack of faith is this: depression. 
It comes back every few years. Sometimes every few months. Not that I'm raising the white flag or anything, but I have come to terms with the fact that I will never be fully free. The intensity varies. This fall was probably the worst outbreak I have ever had. And the worst thing about depression is that it has a knack for robbing me of all the things that might heal me. It's hard to reach out to the people that love me. Some of the people that love me hardly even want to reach out to me because I'm not myself. Most importantly, since faith is an abstract concept and abstract things are typically just out of my reach when I'm in the depths of the disease, I can hardly access faith at all. 
Several things over the past few weeks have helped me turn around, and I've begun the struggle back up the hill. Sometimes I slide back, but I have slowly begun to regain my footing with more assurance. And finally, last Sunday, I found my faith again. 

Or rather, my faith found me.

The church I have gone to during this time of wandering since graduation has been a constant blessing. Somehow here, more than anywhere else I've worshiped in my lifetime, I hear God's voice speaking directly to me, often with exactly the thing I need to hear most. This past Sunday was no exception. It was, in fact, the most potent example. It's not too often that a pastor preaches on the Old Testament reading for the day, but that day it was the passage about God's role as a potter, with me as the clay (Isaiah 64:8-9). To summarize it neatly, I was reminded not only that I am a work in constant progress, but also that making pottery is not easy. Sometimes to make a strong pot a potter uses less water (typically used to make the clay more malleable) and has to use a heavier hand. Even though I already knew it, I needed that reminder that God has never promised to be gentle, at least not in the way I would perceive it. I, much like clay, am resistant. I don't often cooperate. But what truly hit me, and made me stop in my tracks, is that no matter how much I resist or how awful or useless or worthless I think I am, God has promised to work on me until I am complete. He has saved me for a reason, and he loves me enough to keep at it.

Yesterday I was reading a Nicholas Sparks book (it turned out pretty lame, which I expected, but it was entertaining at least). Unless you live under a rock, you probably know that Mr. Sparks frequently writes incredibly sappy love stories. The kind that they make into tragic movies that leave your girlfriend/wife/mom/sister crying, probably because somebody dies or (crying doesn't always make sense) because everything works out really well. However engaging and nice his books may be, I've never looked to Nicholas Sparks for any great wisdom. Imagine my surprise then, when I found a quote yesterday that was actually incredibly deep, and really made me think. Are you ready? Here it is: 
"Love, after all, always said more about those who felt it than it did about the ones they loved."
Although it seems odd to apply a Sparks quote to my awesome God, in this case it seemed fitting. The fact that God loves me says little about me. I am still broken and my sinful nature still fights against God's love every day. God's love says everything about how wonderful He is. In the Concordance in the back of my Bible, there are almost three pages of tiny print pointing to passages that use some form of "love". In the past, when I would try to find a verse or passage, I sometimes found that fact annoying. I was on a mission, and I didn't want to skim through all those entries to find what I needed. Today, once again, I found myself searching through that section. To be honest, I never found the exact verse I was looking for. Instead I kept getting "distracted" looking at the multitude of passages that have aided and consoled me across the years. Verses and chapters that speak of the depth and nature God's love, and the example it should be for our love to each other. It finally hit me how completely awe-inspiring it is that "love" is one of the biggest sections of the Concordance. I have heard the phrase "God is love" so many times, and never truly grasped what that meant. Love comes from and leads back to God. The truest, deepest, and most unconditional love we will ever have is that which is given to us freely and abundantly by God. A love so strong that he stands by us in all our trials, no matter how much we tell him we don't need him. A love that bears the insult of every sin and every slight, and still accepts us with joy when we realize how wrong we were. A love so deep that he gave up His Son, extending His own self to us and holding nothing back. 

"Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." (1 John 4:7-11)

This is my fairytale love. The love the stretches across all boundaries and all time and comes to me in big miracles and small whispers. My prayer is for the strength to accept it and give it to others.

Follow the Leader

Hello again friends! 

I would find it awkward to jump right back into writing a post without acknowledging the fact that it has been well over a year since I wrote anything in this blog. I've toyed with the idea many times, and never sat down to actually write anything. Also, in complete honesty, my well of faith had been very shallow for much of that year. Recently I've begun to look toward God again. I can't say that I necessarily "strayed from the path" during my long silence, but for a long time I've been going through the motions while my heart was in turmoil. I'd like to touch on that struggle a little bit in this post. 

This year has been absolutely full of changes, as the end of college usually is. I could fill paragraphs with the details of my story - what caused me to distance myself from God, and the lessons I've learned - but that's not really the point. If you'd like to hear my story let's meet for coffee some time. If you don't know me well enough in real life to meet for coffee, you probably shouldn't be that curious anyway. 

Anyway, the summary of the issue is that I filled my life with other things to distract myself, and stopped communicating with God. A few months ago I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I had stopped to pray on my own. I've always been someone who can fill a quiet moment with thoughts of prayer, but it had been a very long time since I had one of those silent conversations with my Father. In fact, when life took some rough turns and people in my life told me to pray about it, I felt awkward and uncomfortable with the idea. One day in church I realized that I was angry at God. I was so ashamed of myself! I had never understood people who got angry at God! After the service was over I went to my car and wept. For months I had been ignoring the emptiness in my heart where I used to feel the love of Christ. Now that the main thing I had used to replace Him was gone, I was angry. I had been sure that I was following God's will for my life and interpreting the signs and finding encouragement like I was supposed to. Now I couldn't bring myself to pray, and I didn't trust my ability to interpret God's will, and I was expressing that as anger towards God. 

Friends, it has taken months to heal, but that day was a turning point in my journey. 

Shortly after realizing how angry I was, I found myself sitting on the bluff of Lake Michigan late at night and whispering prayers out loud. I confessed all my guilt and anger, and spoke to my Father about the pain and doubt in my heart. As my emotions emptied and I felt I had no more to say, the wind that been strong up until that point died down to a gentle breeze. Rarely have I felt God's presence so strongly, and the peace that filled my heart is not something I can express in words. That was the moment I began to really heal. God has put people in my life, as He always does, to lead me back to Him. He shows His love to me every day through them. 

Despite being encouraged in my faith, I've continued to have many struggles in the past months. God never promised me an easy path. Here I sit, a college graduate, looking forward with terror and doubt. My path is set before me: I'm enrolled in graduate school that will last another three years. After that, with the profession I've chosen, it should be relatively easy to find a job. The problem is that I'm not sure it's really what I want. As I approached graduation I felt pessimistic. The sense of accomplishment that should accompany a college graduation was markedly absent. Slowly I've come to appreciate the importance of this step, but the endlessness of my path still has me discouraged. Most days the idea of more school makes me want to run and hide, and I'm not sure if it's just the prospect of more school or specifically the subject I'm planning on studying that has me more scared. Like I said, I've lost a lot of faith in my ability to interpret God's will. Here's what I realized the other day though:

Whether I interpret it perfectly or not, God's will still prevails.

When I look at the positive side of the events of the last year, the lesson I learn is that God blesses us through what might seem like the worst of times. Even things that seem so dark and confused and messy are being used to accomplish God's plan. 

My bachelor's degree is in psychology. My biggest lesson in getting that degree, and the philosophy I have about life after studying psychology for 2 years, is that there is no right answer. Nobody has it all figured out! For someone like me that's a scary thought. Having a well-defined plan is pretty important to my sense of well-being. It's something I've had to get over as life becomes increasingly unpredictable. A few weeks ago God spoke to me, as he often does, through music. A friend had composed a choral piece and needed a small choir to perform it for his conducting class. The song was based on Psalm 139, and the repeated idea was verses 23-24:

"Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. 

See if there is any evil within me, and lead me in the way everlasting."

After running from God for so long and trying to hide the doubts and fears in my heart, the first part of that passage hit me like a ton of bricks. Finally I felt willing to open myself back up to God, even admitting the ugly anxious thoughts that are so shameful to me. My Father is full of love and grace, and forgives my unbelief, though I am stubborn and undeserving. The second half of the passage is also extremely important. When we open up to God and ask him to speak to us and search our hearts, he guides us in the way we should go. Right now what I need most is guidance, and I am so thankful that God has brought me back to Him and continues to gently guide my steps. I still don't have the right answer, and likely never will, but I can once again see how I have been guided through the good and bad so far, and trust that His guidance will lead me to wherever I'm supposed to be next.

Eternal

This weekend the Women's Ministry on campus is having a Valentine's Dinner. Dozens of women will gather to be served food by our brothers in Christ and spend some quality time together. I've been involved with planning this dinner, and spent some time last week making gifts for all the ladies who are attending. On each of the small gifts, I wrote our theme verse, 2 Corinthians 4:18, "So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."
Perhaps, like me, you think that verse is a bit of an odd choice for a Valentine's event. As I wrote it out 15 times though, I had an opportunity to think about what it means and how it pertains to love. In the end I discovered that it's actually quite relevant. 
Today, February 14th, is a day that causes a lot of heartache for a lot of people. I myself could write a ridiculous amount of words dissecting how I feel about Valentine's Day. Typically I subscribe to the idea that the day is a highly distorted, misinterpreted minor Saint Day that somehow went mainstream. But the fact of the matter is that it has gone mainstream, and it's very hard to escape the effects of the expectations it now raises. For those who are single, the pain is very evident. Yes, the pure spirit of the holiday should simply be a celebration of all love - friends and family included. In truth, our focus almost always shifts to romance, so the day makes loneliness feel much more lonely. People in a relationship, however, don't escape the hurt feelings involved with Valentine's Day. It can be awkward to determine how to celebrate. Going "all out" comes off as cheesy or insincere. Doing nothing makes us feel left out of the love fest. 
So how does a verse about looking past the things of this world pertain to Valentine's Day? Perfectly, if you ask me! The holiday has become so focused on material expressions of earthly love that we forget how meaningful true love is. The verse directs our gaze to the eternal life we have in God. This also includes eternal love! Let's face it, no love that we experience here in the world is perfect and eternal. Even if we are committed to someone, or "stuck with" our family, our love is tainted by sin, and sometimes we decide to stop making the effort that love requires. Only with God is this not so. He sees the deepest flaws of our hearts, and still chooses us. He feels the rejection when we stray from his embrace and hide from him, and waits patiently, welcoming us back as if we'd never wronged him. He gives us every good thing, and is a constant partner through every part of our lives. 
God's love is amazing!
God's love is eternal. 

 

Don't hold back.

"Pessimism is my insurance policy," I said, "If I don't expect it to go well then I'll be pleasantly surprised if it does, and I'll be prepared if it goes how I predicted."
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the biggest lie I've ever told myself. And I've spent years telling it.  
Preparation is great. If it's raining, I wear my rain coat. If the paper is due on Wednesday, I have a rough draft by at least Monday. If the choir concert is next week, I'm drinking tea and staying hydrated every day. These are all things of certainty. Real events and tangible deadlines. How can we handle those times when the outcome is distant and clouded? What happens when the variables are human beings, who are so changeable? Obviously I thought I had the answer - Expect the worst from everyone. Protect yourself carefully by putting up walls of logic and apathy. 
This is not the way we were meant to live. Which is why it never works.
Unless the situation in question is something that honestly has little effect on me, I cannot help but get emotionally involved and desire certain outcomes. For a long time I was ashamed of this, but I've realised that humans were created to be passionate beings. God has given us minds that are capable of well-placed confidence (faith), forward thinking (hope), and attachment (love). His plan for us is the only insurance we need. James 5:13 says, "Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise." It's okay to get caught up in joy! Because when our preparations fall through and trouble comes, we can turn to God and trust that he has everything under control. 
A couple of weeks ago I read an awesome article (found here) that speaks out against the idea of "guarding your heart". It's an idea that has been innocently circulated among young Christians who want to remain pure. Secular culture has also mirrored the sentiment (or lack thereof). It's said that we should be careful about who we love and how we let them know, to keep ourselves from getting hurt and to make sure we have enough love to give to the right person. Is love a limited quantity? The world today makes a huge deal out of saying the words "I love you". Why is it so hard to acknowledge how important someone is to us? Love is both the easiest and the hardest thing to give. It's something we desire, but it also leaves us vulnerable. That's why trust is so important in relationships. A trusting and self-sacrificing love is sometimes hard for non-Christians to understand.
For those in Christian culture, withholding love goes too far when we take God's law of saving sex for marriage and extend it to ban most kinds of physical affection and deep emotional attachment. Some well-meaning mentors would have us believe that if we allow ourselves to love another person completely, then we're distracted from loving God with our whole heart. On the contrary, God opens our hearts, and our love for each other is fulfilled by God and feeds our faith! One of the best places that helps us to understand love is in 1 John 4, (here I quote verse 8 and 11-12) "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love...Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us." 
In the end, no amount of preparation or protection can keep us from being hurt when something important goes awry. Our foundation and happiness lies with Christ, who gave his life to protect us, and still holds us close today. When we have learned to trust in his secure love, we can share that love with the people in our lives. Many times I've noted that relationships with my fellow Christians are deeper and more fulfilling. Perhaps this is because I can show them unrestrained love modeled by Christ, and receive the same in return. 
Our compassion is a continuation of the love we've been given freely, which will never fail us. 

  

Save Your Energy

Before anything I must say how deeply I feel compassion for the families of the people lost in Newtown, CT this morning. All we can really do is pray for comfort and healing. No time is a good time to lose someone you love, but to lose a child at Christmas must be the deepest of pains. May the peace of Christmas fill the hearts of these parents and the families of the adults killed. 

Perhaps for some of you your feelings about this tragedy go along with what I was going to write about. Today I wanted to share some thoughts on anger. Everyone experiences anger at some point, probably even every day. Most of the time we feel mild frustration which we can deal with easily. Have you ever been so angry about something that it interferes with your daily life?
This kind of anger has plagued me before. At the end of high school several things in my life didn't go as I expected. Frankly, life was going very poorly. My reaction was to be very angry. For months I let myself wallow in fury. I couldn't see a way out. The truth is that I didn't want to stop. Anger seemed the appropriate response at the time. Suddenly I had been betrayed and cast off by something I thought I could count on, and it only seemed right to be angry. What good did it do me? None at all. I spent the last part of my senior year pushing away the people who genuinely cared. The anger I felt only served to drain me of my energy and make me someone who was truly ugly inside. I only felt better after I acknowledged that I was actually hurt deep inside and confronted the person who I felt was mostly responsible for my wounds. At that point their response didn't even matter. It just felt better to know that I was being honest with them and with myself. 
Recently I was talking with a friend who had been hurt in a relationship. When it happened her friends urged her to be angry, because "it's easier than being hurt". Fortunately she understood that, although it's easier perhaps in the short term to be frustrated and ignore the underlying issue, it's healthier to face your true feelings and address them. Ephesians 4:25-27 speaks on this, saying, "Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his 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." 
When anger is in your heart, so many other things can follow. Whether or not you physically harm someone, you are more likely to harm them emotionally with words. Anger makes you reckless. It blocks compassion and reason. Why spend your energy on resentment when you could be showing love? Many people don't even realize how many pleasant things they're missing out on because of the poisonous weed of malice that is suffocating their soul. Untangling yourself form all that rage is a painful task, but I cannot condone anyone missing out on the peace that comes from reconciliation.
Conflict can be difficult, but it is one of our duties as Christians. In one of my classes this semester we went over the Ted Kober's model for conflict resolution. I would strongly encourage you to follow the link and read this article. The goal in this approach is to be at peace with those around us by glorifying God and reconciling our differences. It's a pretty long process for a simple disagreement like missing an appointment. But when feelings have been deeply hurt, the conflict is spiraling out of control, and a relationship lies completely broken, I cannot see any better way to resolve the issue besides using Kober's guidelines.
Anger is something we cannot avoid, whether we are the one who is upset or someone else is angry at us. The key to living a peaceful life is to bring up our grievances with those who have caused them, and let go of our anger before it can take a hold. 
If I don't write again for a while, I pray that your Christmas is filled with God's abundant blessings. May you feel his peace and pass it on to others.