Growing Pains

I meet weekly with some good friends in my living room to talk about books that we are reading. They are Christian non-fiction books by Francis Chan, Craig Groeschel, Chip Ingram, etc. We have amazing discussions and are able to share struggles and encourage each other in our walks with Christ and in being wives and mothers. I love these nights and I love these ladies.

I have been thinking a lot about something that seems to come up periodically in our talks. Many of these authors really challenge us to be “all in” for God. The bar is high and the examples of radical discipleship are real challenges and often far from where we live our everyday lives. Our response is often “That is awesome but I don’t even come close to that.” Or “I sometimes question if I am really a follower based on what I am reading.” Or just basically “I suck.”

Some thoughts have come to my mind as I try to process and respond to that.

• It’s a process. The examples in the books and the standards that God sets are really high. I can’t imagine living that way 100% right after being saved. I often feel led to look back and self-evaluate. Am I doing better than I was a year ago? Am I moving towards looking more and more like Christ or am I basically standing still?

• Would we really want it to be easy? Saying yes to God at the beginning is not necessarily hard. Turning every aspect of your life over to Him and submitting ALL is hard. To live every day with Him as the Lord of your finances and your time and your parenting and your marriage and your decisions is not natural. But if it was just a switch we could throw, we wouldn’t learn to depend on Him. We wouldn’t fully appreciate the process and the growth. We wouldn’t fully appreciate his grace when we turn things over to him and then take them back and then turn them back over to him, etc. etc. etc.

• More sin awareness. More grace awareness. The more I grow in my faith, the more I become aware of my sin. I am able to see it more clearly and I am more disgusted with how far short I fall from God’s mark. Sometimes I think that is why the statements above come out. We are growing and we see just how crappy we can be. BUT....the good part is that the more we see our shortcomings and our sin, the more we are thankful for God’s grace! When we are feeling really good about ourselves and our Christian life, what do we need God for? If I read books that perfectly described me and what my walk looked like, what would be the point? My Grace Group just finished a study and one of my takeaways from it was “The bigger my awarenes of my sin is, the bigger my view of the power of the cross will be in my life.”

Books and speakers and friends who challenge me to live more fully devoted to God are my favorite. If I had a choice between a sermon that made me feel all warm and fuzzy or a sermon that showed me what I am not doing well and taught me to do better....I would choose the 2^nd one every time. I love when a little seed is planted deep in my soul and I am convicted to repent or stretch myself or change or speak up.

My prayer for my friends in my living room is that they come away feeling more conviction than they do comdemnation.

Dear Teen-age Me......

As I watch my teen-age daughters go through life and become the adults they will one day be, I can’t help but think that there are lessons that I wish I could have learned back when I was a teen-ager. Sure I have tried to teach these lessons, just as I’m sure my parents tried to teach me. But you don’t listen. You have to learn for yourself through the trials and challenges of life. My kids don’t believe me when I tell them things...they think I am old fashioned or just saying things a mom should say in order to get them to behave in a certain way. But if I could have ‘gotten’ certain things way back then, I have to wonder if my life would have unfolded differently. I will write about more of these things in future blogs, but here are some that are on my heart right now.

“If God is the main thing, everything else will fall into place.”

God was part of my life when I was growing up, but I didn’t have a personal relationship with him until I was an adult. Church/Christianity was just one of the activities in my life amongst things like marching band and yearbook staff. I can’t help but think how things would have been different if my life was defined by God. If what my God thought of my everyday choices mattered more than what my friends thought. If I loved Him more than some kid I had a crush on. If getting spiritual things right was more important than grades or winning. If I was more concerned with telling people about Jesus than worrying that they thought I was cool. Am I getting all these things correctly now? No, but I am trying to live that way and I think I am improving.

“Don’t worry so much about stuff that doesn’t really matter.”

Things seem so big and daunting when you are in the middle of them, but in the big scheme of life, they aren’t. Think of things that you lost sleep worrying about, cried tears over, thought your world was going to fall apart. They don’t matter any more, do they? In fact they probably didn’t really matter a month later. Whether it was about a relationship, a big test, how you look, whatever.....it goes back to my first point...if God is the main thing, everything else will fall into place. And worry is nothing more than not trusting God. Am I getting this one right now? Nope. Still worry about things. But I think my perspective is different. I try to pray about those things rather than worry and fret. I also try to keep everything in it’s place. I think I have more wisdom about what are big things and what are little insignificant things. Worry is still worry and still wrong...but again, I am getting better.

“Sin is sin and there are consequences.”

Young people in their teens and twenties have a messed up view of their mortality. They honestly don’t think anything really bad can happen to them. Kids think dabbling in things is not dangerous. “That won’t happen to ME.” “There are plenty of people doing worse things.” But sin ALWAYS has consequences in God’s economy. Maybe you won’t die, maybe there won’t be serious physical consequences, but there will be baggage. The standard needs to stop being “just not as bad as so-and-so.” The standard is Jesus! You are not going to reach perfection, but that should be Who you imitate and strive for. I promise you that your friends will have more respect for your “no” than if you go along with whatever it is. They may not say that, and your circle of friends might shrink a little, but I don’t think you will ever regret making a right choice.

My list could go on and on....and I will revisit this in another blog.....

I'm SOOOO Bored!

“I’m bored.” I can’t tell you how often I hear these words from my kids and see it posted on their walls and hear it in their tweets. It can be less than 24 hours into summer break and they are bored. Maybe I was the same at their age...I can’t really remember. If I was the same, is it something we outgrow or when exactly did I change? I can’t remember a recent time when I was truly bored, especially to the point of complaining about it.

Maybe I am too busy to be bored. Although not as hectic as many I know, my schedule moves along at a pretty good clip. And when I do get down time, I am more than happy to read a good book, play a game on the internet, watch a movie, or simply think or pray. So possibly I don’t have the time to get bored.

Maybe I’m just weird and I’m okay with being alone in my thoughts. I don’t need to have friends around me all the time. Many a personality test have told me that I am an introvert...I get more energy from being alone than I do from surrounding myself with people.

Maybe it is a generational thing. Our kids have grown up with non-stop stimulation. Media, cell phones, computers. They have learned how to multi-task in ways that amaze me! When those things slow down or become silent, they don’t know what to do. I can’t believe I have raised 3 girls who won’t read a book unless they absolutely have to!

So all of this to say I often feel helpless in helping my kids “solve” their boredom issue. I can make suggestions until the cows come home, but nothing appeals to them.

What was the point of this blog?? Not sure.....just thinking. (all alone, but not bored!)

Happy Holidays...and other Christmas reflections.

I’ve been thinking about Christmas a bunch lately. Here are a few of my thoughts.

My friend Shannon recently posted on Facebook about Christians who get all worked up when people replace “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays.” I have always inwardly cringed at the people who proclaim “Keep the Christ in Christmas,” and “Jesus is the reason for the season,” but I wasn’t always sure why. Shannon stated this so well, it is easier for me to just copy and paste her thoughts:

“Hey Christians involved in the great "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" debate, please stop it. The Christmas season gives us an opportunity to love people. Christ didn't come to earth to give us a holiday. He came to teach us how to love (dare I say love people who don't celebrate Christmas). And ultimately, to die for our sin (like the sin that causes us to argue about words like Christmas and Holidays). Please don't miss the opportunity to love people this Christmas. That's something that Jesus actually cared about.”

It just seems almost hypocritical to me. Why must these people supposedly fight for Jesus in this one situation, yet hardly give Him a second thought the other 11 months of the year?

This brings me to my next big thought. I don’t recall any place in the Bible that we are told to remember and celebrate annually our savior’s birthday. Communion -- definitely commanded. But a big birthday party every year that is often loosely (at best) connected to a baby in a manger? Let alone, how many people truly grasp what Jesus becoming a human really means? Do people really think that God’s intention was that we choose an arbitrary date on the calendar and each year we chop down trees and drag them into our houses, put hundreds of lights all over our houses, eat twice as much food as we need to, and spend BILLIONS of dollars that most of us can’t afford on giving gifts to people who really don’t need anything? Sometimes I just look around at it all and try to see it through God’s eyes. It really gives you a different perspective, and it is a sad one in my opinion.

Please don’t view me as just another Ebenezer Scrooge. I have lots of great Christmas memories both as a child and then with my own children. There are parts of Christmas that I still look forward to. But each year I seem to find myself stepping outside of all the merriment a little further and thinking about all of it and what it has become in our society.

In response, I try my hardest to keep my personal focus on what it means that God put skin on and came to earth in anticipation of me some day being born and needing to be rescued from my sin so that I could spend forever with Him. THAT is why I celebrate.

Bring on a burden!

It seems that so many of our prayers are requests for our lives to be easier. Prayers for material things, prayers for better jobs, prayers for our health, prayers for people in our life to be happy. Basically we want to make our little corner of the world as comfortable as we possibly can. I’m not going to get into whether these are the things we should be praying for today, although I have an opinion. My point is actually to consider praying for something entirely different. I was really challenged with this thought when I read Craig Groeschel’s book Weird.

I have begun praying for a burden. Not like so many prayers I have had in the past to have God remove some kind of burden. Instead, I am asking him to give me a burden! How crazy is that??

Here is what my man Craig says...

“Most of us feel good when we avoid burdens, after all isn’t life hard enough? Why ask God for more trials, trauma, and tears? It’s normal to want to avoid pain - human even. But God didn’t put us here on earth just to feel good and enjoy ourselves. He doesn’t give us our lives so we can master techniques in avoiding pain. He puts us here to make an eternal difference. He puts us here to show everyone around us how much he loves them. He puts us here to be his hands and feet, his body and his heart.”

He then goes on to have you ponder some questions. What breaks your heart? What makes you angry? What do you care about more than most people?

I care that people don’t know God and will eventually be eternally separated from Him. But “care” is not always enough to drive me to action. To the questions above... I am praying that my heart is broken for people who are not saved. I want to get fired up that people don’t know the truth and no one is telling them! And I want to care SO, SO deeply that I have no choice but to respond and take action.

Basically I want to tip the scales. On one side is my absolute faith and knowledge that God is real and awesome and Jesus is the only way to God. On the other side of the scale are all my fears and insecurites...the parts of me that stay quiet because people might think less of me if I share my faith. Too often the scales lean the wrong direction and my weaknesses win out. But I believe that through prayer and an ever increasing love for God, the scales will pull the other direction. I think a burden will be the difference.

I want to see people the way God sees them. With such love that I can’t bear the thought of them going through this life as an enemy of God, and eventually eternity in hell. I can say that I agree with these words, but maybe if I truly believed them and had an actual burden, I would get out there, open my mouth, and just maybe make a difference.

A letter to 3 young men....

Dear Son-In-Law,

I (probably) haven’t met you yet. Yet you have been in my heart and in my prayers for a whole lot of years. All the years I have been doing what I can to raise a daughter who loves God, I have been praying that you are on that same path.

I pray that you are part of a family that is modeling what a strong healthy family should be. Parents shape us in a way that no one else can. I pray that your father modeled what it means to cherish his wife. I hope he was the spiritual leader of your home and that you have a healthier view of your heavenly Father, because you had a godly earthly father. I pray that your mom taught you that there are qualities and values far more important than any sport you ever played or any grade on a report card. And that you learned the valuable lesson of unconditional love from her.

If you happen to come from a broken or unhealthy home, my hope is that you learned what you DON’T want a family life to look like. I pray that you had people in your life to model strong relationships and that you believe with your whole heart that marriage is meant to be ‘til death do you part.’

This next sentence will make you do a double take. I want you to be totally and completely in love with someone MORE than you are with my daughter. I want your first love, above and beyond your wife and your kids, to be for Jesus! God cannot simply be an ingredient in your life together or an activity you do together on Sunday mornings. Rather than an ingredient, he should be the bowl that holds all the other ingredients (your finances, your children, your careers, your social life, etc.) together. If you are both chasing Him with all that you are and keeping Him as the center, all other things will fall into place. When couples start letting their spouse (or anything else for that matter) be their number one thing, you are building on sand and treading on dangerous ground. Allow God to be enough. Everything else are the good gifts He has given you.

I have also prayed for my relationship with you. Someday I am going to be handing over one of the most precious things in my life. She will go from being a primary part of my family to starting a new one with you. I don’t mean to make it sound like she is a possession, but I have a lot of history with this girl. Her priority, after God, is now you and your new family. I want to be the best mother-in-law I can be. I want to be a support and a prayer warrior for you, but never OVERLY involved in your lives.

Your new wife is an amazing woman. She has made me proud to the point of tears many times. She has tried my patience and pushed my buttons, as I’m sure she will with you. I know she loves Jesus and I can’t wait to see where He leads the two of you together.

Until we meet, I will continue to pray for you.

Love,

Your Mother-In-Law

He is jealous for me

Sometimes I like to just think about one of God’s attributes. For some reason, today, the fact that God is jealous has been sitting in my head and I have been pondering exactly what that means.

The first place my thoughts go is to the kind of jealousy we usually talk about. “I am so jealous of how she looks in that dress.” “I am jealous of the way she can sing.” Obviously these sound like they fall under the category of coveting. Those things don’t rightfully belong to me, so being jealous is actually a sin. I also think this type of jealousy is a sign of weakness. If I am jealous, I am not happy with what I have. And it seems like such an uncontrollable, emotional response.

Sooooo, how on earth, based on these thoughts, can God be jealous? He can’t covet because He doesn’t sin. There is nothing that doesn’t rightfully belong to Him anyway. And the hardest part for me is how can God have what I kind of view as a weak uncontrollable, emotional response?

I decided to go look at a bunch of verses that deal with jealousy. Most of them relating to God’s jealousy occur in the Old Testament. I was reminded that we can’t view God’s attributes through our own experiences. God’s jealousy for us is something different altogether.

“For the LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.” Deut 4:24.

“You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God am a jealous God.” Exodus 20:5

All of our worship (our time, our devotion, our praise, our everything) belongs to God and only God. It is rightfully His. Jealousy therefore becomes an acceptable response when our worship goes to something else.

If I accept the idea that jealousy is the appropriate response to my actions (and who am I to say how God should respond anyway?), then I start to be extremely thankful that a God who knows all about all the crap in my life...all my faults and thoughts and screw-ups....is still jealous when I turn to things or people other than Him. How cool is THAT!?! Even in the midst of me being consumed with material things or a pan of brownies or any other thing that is not Him, his reaction is still one of love and care and never giving up! He is jealous for me!

HE is jealous for me. (God....the creator of everything!)

He IS jealous for me. (Right now!)

He is JEALOUS for me. (He cares and loves me THAT much!)

He is jealous for ME. (Beth....who sins every hour of every day)

Read that sentence and emphasize and think about each word separately. This is such an amazing concept and I don’t think I fully appreciate it. God was SO jealous, that he was willing to sacrifice his Son, to bring us back to Himself! That is crazy jealous.

And to think there are so many other attributes of God to study and ponder. And I am betting that each and every one will lead to the same response. Pure worship of the One and Only.