A Lesson Overcoming Intimidation

In certain contexts do you struggle with being intimidated like me?

The Lord has been training me in a new way, away from codependancy and into an unshakable knowledge of my identity.  I want to be watching and following God like Lucy learns to track Aslan in Prince Caspian.  Do you remember?  Lucy gets a lesson in who her Authority is and how essential it is that she follows, whether her path is understood and others follow or not.

Gianna Jessen gets it.  (Check out the last post. Learn.  Mark. and Inwardly Digest.)

1.  She's straightforward, not apologizing, not afraid of being hated (My Jesus was hated and I expect to be hated too.)  There's nothing codependant about her!!!

2.  Her obvious love of the audience does not make her soften the truth.

3.  Her warmth, smile, and crinkly eyes.  She doesn't keep her emotions at the anger level.  She shows complex warmth.  Very 1 Corinthians 13.  Her heart is engaged.

4.  Her comfort within her very visible cerebral palsey weakness.  She even calls it a gift.  Can we do that with our weaknesses?  Christ is our overcomer...and if something else is overcoming us instead, this is an affirmation of the need for healing.  Pursue healing actively!  It is one of the necessities for a victorious life.

5.  She does not allow the obvious powerful make up of her audience or the formality of the setting intimidate her.

6.  The pain of her story has become the power behind her ministry.  She has mined the riches stored in dark places!Isaiah 45:3


6.  She knows who and Whose she is, solid in her true identity!  Her identity is not on the periphery but central to her message.  "I am God's girl."  This can only come, I believe, through scripture/truth memorization.  The answer has to be God-breathed.  Listen to what God has to say about you.  Memorize it.  The truth has to replace all the voices rooted in your mind, past and present. Memorize it again and watch His internal surgery take place.

Thank you Gianna!

Contentment Exercise: Simple. extremely simple thanksgivings

I love lists. I'm not always good at looking at the list after I've made it...but it is so much fun to write down all the things I hope to accomplish. This list is different, but is so much more satisfying! Its about thanking God for the little things.


True joy is not bound by our circumstances. This is one of those truths that I am bound and determined to get through my thick skull. My circumstances are going to be good some days and bad some days but I so want to live like the people in Psalm 84 who in their pilgrimage go from strength to strength.


This spiritual exercise from www.aholyexperience.com is one of those ways to lift our minds from the distortion of self-focus to the Giver of all good things.


Join me in journaling your own simple thanksgivings.


Xavier slathered with banana, shirt, face, hair


Xavier in the bath giggling, getting banana swabbed off


Caedmon and Andrew identifying with the iphone app the songs of the birds they were hearing outside the bedroom window


"What hero are they singing about?" Caed asked about a song on Pandora this morning, "Jesus, Caed."  "Oh," he said.  "I was wondering because I don't even have my sword and shield on me."


a quiet moment with morning tea before cleaning, baby napping


God's continued teaching.  He will accomplish that which He set out to do. 


Answers to prayer.  We've been fasting on Thursdays and God has been more than faithful.


Intercessory prayer: leaving it all at His feet.


Italy in less than a week, family, vineyards, Florence


Betty Jo, our favorite baby whisperer is going with us!

Thanksgiving as an Act of the Will

Wow.  I love her focus and honesty.  Ann Voskamp (with a great deal of poetic storytelling) reminds us that perfectionism is a sickness that can bring on depression and challenges us to lives of obedient thankfulness.  If you click on this button above, you will be able to read her story.

I love that after she grumbles, her husband asks, "You just fallen sick with perfectionism again?”
What a great reminder.  So, I'll join her gratitude community with these afternoon thanksgivings:
1. I'm thankful for three, beautiful, healthy children.  Each too smart for their and my own good.
2. I'm thankful for a husband "who's crazy as me" as Allison Kraus sings
3. I'm thankful that God comforts, challenges, and transforms all through a book I can hold in my hand, always accessible.
4. I'm thankful for health.  It wasn't long ago that I rode a sugar roller coaster, not sure why.  I'm thankful for my insilin stabilizer.  My husband is thankful too.
5. I'm thankful for daffadils with orange centers, swaying in my backyard.
6. I'm thankful for a nap today.  Baby woke up way too early.
7. I'm thankful for Pandora radio stations.  I love Sara Groves in the morning and Louis Armstrong to start us dancing around the dinner-making time, when we are all dragging.
8. I'm thankful for Tuesday Sabbath and a babysitter who adores my children.
9. I'm thankful to be a part of intercessors in South Haven who will meet tonight at the Assemblies of God.
10. I'm thankful for Andrew and my parents who gave our children amazing gifts of quality time last week, and through that, infusions of the DNA of their spirits.  I'm always so sad that we don't live closer. 

Now, back to trying to clean with three children bounding around like Tiggers.  This time, I will approach our hardwood floors without the perfectionism.

Do Your Life With Courage

So girlfriends, I brushed Madeline's hair into pigtails this morning (the best way to deal with the tangles in her hair this week) and watched her and Caedmon walk outside to preschool, backpacks on, holding onto each of Daddy's hands.  Then I quickly grabbed the high chair, positioned it in front of the tv with favorite finger snacks, slid Xavier into the seat and got my little stairmaster machine out from beside the futon.  I clicked the TV on to Life Today and I'm exercising next to Xavier and the further Beth Moore gets into her talk, the faster I'm working my little machine.  By the end of her prayer, I'm breaking a sweat, hands are raised and I'm crying out, "Thank you, Jesus," like a good Pentecostal.  Anglicans can recognize the Spirit too!


I have been listening to this one talk of hers from the archives for a week and they ran it again today!  I don't care what you think about her accent, past teachings, even her gender, if you listen to this talk, You Will Be Encouraged, Changed, Strengthened by God and Transformed!


She said, and I'm paraphrasing now: "Live your life with confidence.  Do your life with courage.  The Spirit of Christ is within you.  He has enough courage for everything you are going through."


The powerful, fruit-filled, Spirit-filled life of the early church apostles is available to us today!   Our God has not changed!  The Spirit is not less powerful than He was 2000 years ago! 


Romans 8:11 (New International Version)



11And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.


Seriously?  The same Spirit who (Ephesians 1:19-20) raised Christ from the dead is within us?  If we are attached to the Vine, abiding in Him, and are being continuously filled with the Spirit, His lifeblood is flowing within us. 


Boy, some days I feel and act like the opposite.  Some days I'm walking with the Spirit in strength, listening, hungry for the Scripture and being transformed.  Other days I'm walking eyes down, defeated, muttering while I clean my house.)  What I forget is how close the Creator of the Universe is!  He is here. Present in my home.  Even within me! 


This is the truth.  If Christ's Spirit is within me, His wisdom, strength, healing power, joy, AND PARENTING ABILITIES are right here for me to call upon, for Him to work into me.  Once you have tasted a life, Practicing the Presence of God (like Brother Lawrence), filled with the Spirit, empowered by Him for your everyday life.  I promise you, you are not going to want to go back! You will know that the Kingdom of God is upon you and you will be the mother you were created by God to be.


(If you want to hear more about this, listen to my sermon on the left, "Epicenters of the Kingdom." And if you do anything today,  you must get yourself over to http://www.lifetoday.org/ You can watch or listen by pressing going to the left hand side and clicking under Beth Moore's picture on flash/quicktime to watch or MP3 to listen.  She's always on LifeToday on Wednesdays and there are archives of each of her talks over the last year.  Almost all of them are worth your time.  I promise you.)

He is Fierce for Our Freedom

An Eastern Starling flew down our chimney sometime in the night and started fluttering around our firebox, enclosed by the brick in the back and a glass front .  She kept fluttering around, getting herself stuck around bricks and trying to fly back up the black Alice in Wonderland hole where she came from.  I couldn't take it any longer.  I was having a birthday brunch for a friend in about an hour and I just couldn't imagine enjoying ourselves with a bird in captivity clanging around in the room adjacent.  Or at least, that's what I told myself.


I could tell that Andrew didn't care.  He was ok with the bird dying in the flue and then carrying his dead body out to the ravine to a "resting place" once he was at peace.  Andrew came from a hunting family and I've gotten very comfortable with that lifestyle.  I was quickly assimilated after seeing newly shot, skinned rabbits in the sink on my first morning sleeping over at my in-laws.  Even my children are fairly comfortable with the death of animals, watching what we call "circle of life" nature shows on the Discovery Channel.  Somehow, I could not bear the thought of this bird dying in my house, I dared to beg a very exhausted pastor husband who was Monday-morning-tired.


He came to my rescue.


Andrew got out his largest salmon/steelhead catching fishing net, opened the glass front and positioned the net over the front.  The bird walked in and then, unconvinced her freedom came in the form of black plastic netting, she promptly walked back into the firebox. 


Hmmmm. Time for a new plan of attack.


A few minutes later, the bird herself flew out from around the net and into the office/playroom, furiously beating her wings on the windows.  Over and over, Andrew kept flushing her out of corners where she would get herself stuck.  After that, she flew behind the huge computer cabinet and then into the corner behind the fish tank.  Stuck again.  I ran to get the broom and tried the help flush her out.  Again she kept flying from corner to corner.  We were adamant she had to go before the brunch...and then the kids would come home from preschool.  I wanted this bird to get out alive! 


The entire time, I'm getting seriously emotional...(and I am not even pregnant, a clear indication something else was going on here. )


I remember saving a songbird from the mouth of the neighbor's cat and making her comfortable in a shoebox until our friends' vetrinarian dad could come home from work and diagnose the problem.  More weapiness.  (I swear I'm not usually such a drama queen!)


The bird flew across the small room into a bookcase and got stuck there.  What now?  Do we reach in?  "I'll get some gloves for you," I said.  Plastic, too thin.  "My canvas ones are out in the garage," Andrew said.  I'm nearly crying by now.  OK. I got the gloves and brought them to him.  Protected, Andrew reached into the bookcase, brought out the starling and carefully carried him out the backdoor, saying to the bird as he released him, "Be free!"  I dissolved into weeping.


Oh.  That's what this was about.  A bird being freed is the theme of my sister's healing...and Freedom has been the theme of my Lent.  "It is for freedom that Christ has set you free." Galatians 5:1  It is an immediate sign that God has a word for me.  It's been happening constantly for six weeks. 

Then it hit me.  This is just a tiny picture of the kindness and fierceness that Christ has for our freedom.  He wants us to be healed of the gangrenous deadness in our spirits and be resurrected new creations.  He wants to fiercely show our other lovers (as the Old Testament prophet Hosea teaches) the door, kick them out for good, afraid to slink back into our lives when we're vulnerable.


My sister wrote about her healing in a memoir in which she talked about a word that I've always had trouble with: "wrath."  She wrote that she once gave God permission to send his wrath against everything that was standing in the way between herself and God.  Wow, now that's gutsy.  I looked inside myself, do I have that kind of guts?  Am I fierce like the Living God for my own freedom...or do I kinda wanna be free. 


If Andrew and I had kinda wanted the bird free, she would still have been fluttering around in windows that looked like the way out but were new dead ends, albeit pretty, sunshiny ones.  We had to be fiercely focused on the end goal.


I'm thankful our God is fierce for us, fierce for our freedom and for the women He made us to be.   I can't imagine not growing, not getting mature.  How depressing!  How depressing to still be dealing with the same STUFF thirty years from now.  I never want to leave my learning empty-handed.  God, thank You for loving me enough to be fierce for my freedom.  Help me to become fierce too.

Luminous ones, becoming more luminous all the time, what is it that our God wants to free you of?

Surrender to the cocoon

Here's a quote for today:

"Whatever else is going on in your life, God always has his eye on your transformation.

This is good news, by the way. All of the other things we long for in life--love and friendship, freedom and wholeness, clarity of purpose, all the joy we long for--it all depends on our restoration [read: holiness, sanctification, redemption, the Kingdom of God within you (all words for the same thing)]. You can't find or keep good friends while you are still an irritating person to be around. And there is no way love can flourish while you are still controlling. You can't find your real purpose in life while you're still slavishly serving other people's expectations of you. You can't find peace while you're ruled by fear. You can't enjoy what you have while you're ruled by fear. You can't enjoy what you have while you're envying what the other guy has. On and on it goes."

Friends, I've been spending the last two weeks in this book and I love this quote by John Eldredge in his book, Walking with God. The whole book has gems of wisdom surrounded by lots and lots of ordinary life. But, that's what we need, right? How do we, like Brother Lawrence, in Practice the Presence of God while we do the dishes. I admit between filling the dishwasher over and over, I haven't figured that out yet.

God knows who we were meant to be. God knows who we can be! What joy! He is the Kingdom Dream-Keeper, the Creator and ReCreator, the Holy Editor, the Lover of our Souls. We can trust that He has our best interest at heart...He is good. All the time.

We just need to ask God to form within us a teachable heart.

Future butterflies, don't be afraid to climb into that cocoon and give God the authority over your life to recreate you.