Noah’s faith, and mine
Just now my son whined about how long it was taking for his frozen peach to thaw, so he could eat it.
And it just about made me want to throw up.
Seriously. Sometimes the impatience and immaturity in these kids …
Wait.
That’s me.
Sometimes the impatience and immaturity in me is just too much to handle. Sometimes I take a long hard look at my own spirituality, and I realize that the source of my agitation and unrest is simply that I have embraced a perspective on life that isn’t Christianity.
Yesterday I read the quote below. You know what? This is me on paper. Sometimes something just levels you, and this leveled me. I desperately need the Father to strengthen me, His daughter. I am His beloved, I am chosen and cherished and profoundly loved … but I can also become a spoiled, entitled, flabby, whiny child who desperately needs a dose of discipline. Anyone else?
I say this in LOVE:
We will never be happy living less than His best for our lives. True joy, true satisfaction, true life is found in embracing the cross, embracing the gospel, and following Jesus into the resurrected life that comes through death to self. So here, I share these words with you, in case they touch something in you as well. The author is expounding on Noah’s tremendous faith, to labor in building the Ark in the face of incredible opposition. He compares Noah’s faith to ours:
“Ours is a generation of quick fixes, no waits, and instant communication … And many Christians have subconsciously embraced this mind-set. We expect immediate deliverance from our problems and grow spiritually weak when they linger on. We expect quick fixes to marital struggles, even if it took years for us to get into the perilous predicament we’re in. We seek short-cuts to Bible knowledge, maturity, and expertise that took others decades to learn. Pastors want growth and maturity in their churches but fail to make the huge investment of time to actually make disciples. In our personal growth too we expect spiritual muscles without spiritual exercise. We feel it’s our right to succeed or to be given success, promoting ourselves from little league to the bit leagues.
If we could get maturity and discipleship from a drive-through window, Christians would line up for miles. Then even that would take too long, and we’d demand a phone app. We get out of breath when asked to run the long distances of faith. We’re often content to settle for the appearance of spiritual knowledge, maturity, and strength. We desire all the benefits but none of the struggles. We want the perks without the pain. Progress without perseverance. Success without suffering. We want to look good spiritually and have great faith, but we don’t want to saw and sweat, hammer and hurt. Not for long, anyway. We just want a big boat and a story to tell about how it was a “God thing.” We’re weak and out of shape. And that’s why it doesn’t take much suffering to bury the average Christian under a pile of defeat and depression. We’re spiritually lazy, proven by the fact that most believers go for years or even decades without sharing their faith. I wonder how much real persecution it would take to crush the Western church? What would it take to cause us to fold under pressure?
Honestly, we just want a pre-fab, awesome-looking Ark to impress our friends and post on Facebook, and to do it all without blisters and inconvenience. But that’s not Christianity. And that kind of faith is found nowhere in the Bible. When we visit God’s Hall of Faith (Heb. 11) we encounter heroes with real, raw faith. There we find suffering, sacrifice, obedience, and men and women living like strangers in a strange land. We meet some whose promise from God wasn’t fulfilled in their lifetime. Men who passed over pleasure to endure pain with God’s people. … God says they were people of whom this world was not worthy.
Friends, with all that is in me I want to be a woman of great faith. Without faith it is impossible to please God, and I want to please my Father.
I desperately need God to pry my fingers off my picture-perfect life and loosen my grip on my own understanding; to help me cling fast to HIM and fall freely into His good and perfect will, by faith.
He who loses His life will find it. That’s a promise.
{May we grow in faith this week. Thank you for reading.}
A Weekend to Remember
It already felt like trudging through invisible mud, just to get there.
Last fall I’d sat with a long-time friend, and was surprised when she mentioned it: A Weekend to Remember? It sounded like more mushy marriage motivational mumbo jumbo. Was she really recommending a canned commercialized Christian couples’ retreat? Why yes, she was. Quite enthusiastically, in fact.
And, she added, it’s free for pastors. (She knows the secret word to pique my interest!)
I made a note to self. I even checked our calendar to see about the next available conference, but alas–I had a retreat already scheduled that weekend. Oh well.
But a few months later, that retreat was mysteriously cancelled. Hmm… I now had one free weekend between January and Memorial Day and it happened to be the weekend of the conference.
Jeff signed us up. Nana was more than willing to do kid duty, and our dear church fam covered all the bases to free us up to go.
Now, to GET there.
I got sick the week before. Sweet. Nothing like a sneezy-snotty-sleepless start to our special weekend away. Hey baby, wanna come blow my nose?
*sigh*
And on the drive over, JUST as I’m reflecting on how hard marriage is and how it’s the hardest thing in the world just to get away to even WORK on your marriage (let alone how hard you have to work once you get there), and I’m gazing out at the mountains, looking for hope in the grandeur of God’s creation, this lovely billboard blocks my view:
And I just want to cry. Really? When love is already so hard, do we need BILLBOARDS coaxing us to quit? Really? When was the last time you saw a sign that read: “Quit working out! Quit exercising! Just quit! Quit dreaming! Quit trying! Don’t go after your dreams! Don’t work hard! Just quit!” Of course not.
We’re never encouraged to give up on ourselves, only on each other.
Finally we got the kids settled at Nana’s and I realized I’d forgotten a swimsuit. (The place we were staying had a pool/spa.) No problem, Jeff says, we’ll just go get you one. Now, we’d left early in the morn so I figured I’d just wear sweats for the long drive to Bend and then shower and get cute when we arrived (Read: I’m a greasy-haired, sweats-wearing, no-makeup, nose-blowing mess).
I figure Old Navy was the cheapest option so we swing by.
Now, what could be BETTER than trying on a dozen teeny-bopper bikinis apparently made for MANNEQUINS, in the middle of WINTER under the most horrific fluorescent lights?? Each one is worse than the last. It’s like a bad joke. There must be cameras hidden somewhere.
I’m a hot mess by the end and I want to take all the blasted bundle of lycra and shake it in the face of the fitting room attendant, “Who WEARS this stuff?! Certainly not WOMEN, who have GIVEN BIRTH to children, who have LIVED more than 15 years of life?” I come out spitting mad and swear to Jeff that the gravitational pull on our planet must be WAY stronger now than it was ten years ago. There’s no other explanation for how far south everything has drifted.
ANYWAY.
You can see I was in rare form by the time we arrived at the conference. Weekend to Remember? That’s for sure! I sent a venting text to my best friend and she managed to help me laugh my way back to sanity and I was even smiling by the time we sat down for the first session. We made it!
The first session topic? There are thousands of threats to our marriages. Constantly. There are forces at work against us that we have no idea about. We looked at the 5 main threats and it was eye-opening to say the least. I saw threats at work from the inside and from the outside. It was just scary enough to be fabulous. Nothing has impacted our marriage, for good, as much as this weekend away. And while I won’t give away all the fabulous content of Family Life’s Weekend to Remember, I would say RUN, don’t walk, and sign up for whatever one they offer next. [NOV 20-22 in Portland, OR here!] It’s life-changing, marriage-changing. Your marriage is worth every cent, every effort, every ridiculous obstacle you meet along the way.
But save yourself some grief: don’t forget to pack your swimsuit.
Thanks for reading.
*From March 2014, but CLICK HERE FOR A CURRENT SCHEDULE
When you feel like God has hacked you all to pieces…
I looked up at the tree, struck by this: Cultivating and killing sure look similar sometimes.
I remember the day they showed up. It had surprised me. Scared me, actually. I’d forgotten about the appointment, so when three scruffy looking men pounded on my door, I told the kids to hide and dialed Jeff,
“Babe, there are three weirdos here–can you come?”
He shot in from the office like a hero but smiled at me — “tree trimmers, Love!” — as he breezed past me to open the front door.
We watched the whole bloody business from the porch.
They hacked up that tree til I was tempted to cover the kids’ eyes. Have mercy.
The thought did cross my mind,
“Why don’t you just chop the whole darn thing down, seeing as how you’re just hacking it to pieces limb by limb?? At least do the tree a favor and put it out of its misery!”
It seemed to me this was nothing more than death by pruning.
The chipper–a lighthearted name for that monstrous machine they hauled behind their truck–ate all the limbs with its grinding teeth, the deafening roar overwhelming the neighborhood. Every time they fed another trunk-sized tree branch into its massive mouth I shuddered just a little: All this destruction just to make our apple tree healthy?
Finally, mercifully, it ended.
Pruning always does.
And the poor pitiful tree stood shorn, small. Sad.
Shamed? Somehow stripped of its glory.
Ridiculously, I wished I could somehow cover it up. When King David’s men were shamed and shorn by enemies, he told them to wait until their beards had grown before they returned to Jerusalem. He compassionately kept them from shame. I wished I could do that somehow.
And then I came to my senses: Kari, it’s a TREE.
But brutal nonetheless is this commonplace practice of pruning. It’s necessary. Needful. And Oh! do the blossoms bloom just a few months later when the sun sweetly shines and all the nutrients are concentrated in the few branches left and bring glorious goodness and FRUIT–Oh the fruit!–when summer comes.
Pruning takes place in the bitterness of winter. It seems almost unbearable that such a painful process should take place in the most merciless of months. No solace of sunshine–just cold, dark days and bare nubs of branches cut brutally short. And that poor tree, doesn’t even know it’s coming. We never do.
But this is how God makes us grow.
Jesus said,
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. (John 15:1-2 ESV)
Strangely enough, the apple tree was the only plant on our property that we valued enough to have professionally pruned.The others we either ignored or trimmed ourselves. Only the apple tree–our best tree–had the honor of being thoroughly massacred. And we paid a pretty penny for it. Why?
We value that apple tree a lot. Its fruit is delicious. We want it to last forever. We want to do all we can to make sure that tree is as healthy as can be, as productive as can be, as happy as can be. *smile*
Recently, God did some pruning of me as well. Inside I felt hacked to pieces, stripped, shorn.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” I told Him through tears. “I just want to run away and hide.”
But deep down I knew He was pruning, because He loves me.
Because I’m valuable to Him.
And so are you.
Cultivating and killing may see a lot alike, but the Professional Pruner, the Heavenly Husbandman, knows exactly how to hack bits off for optimum health, blessing, fruit, joy…
Trust Him in this.
{Oh praying this brings hope to you today. Thanks for reading.}
Freedom from the toxic comparison game
“I just find the greatest joy and freedom when I hold up my life and compare it to someone else’s.”
“It helped me feel content in my heart when I started really focusing on the faults of others and how I measure up.”
“I became a great mom by comparing my children with other kids around us.”
“I find such peace when I keep my eyes on the victories and failures of those around me.”
“When I’m discouraged I find the best long-lasting remedy is imagining the ways that others are probably not measuring up either.”
SAID NO ONE EVER.
Right?
This past weekend I had the joy of gathering with women to learn about ONENESS, about Christlike unity in our relationships that provides a powerful witness to the love of God.
And hearing the comments, the feedback, the stories, I’ve just been floored all over again by how much toxic comparison we women willingly do on a regular basis.
It’s never helpful.
Let’s look for a moment at what is helpful:
Learning from others.
For example, I always enjoy posts that Jamie Martin shares on Simple Homeschool. Although I have never met her in person, I love Jamie. She’s been an informal friend and mentor over the years, and I know I can ask her advice. She puts her family first. She earnestly wants to help me and other moms. She’s spoken truth to me on more than one occasion when I really needed her perspective. Now, when I read through her posts, I’m inspired. I jot down ideas. I love her recommendations. I decide to try a few of her suggestions.
I learn.
I’m not beating myself up because her kids do way more chores than mine. I’m not discouraged because she has 5 acres and I have a city lot. I’m not puffed up by the fact that I wake up earlier than she does. The same is true of friends in person. I’m constantly learning from my lifelong friend Janae. I’ve followed her example in many things.
This is healthy!
Jesus Himself said to follow His example. Paul said to follow His example. The reason we have stories of godly men and women in Scripture is so that we can learn from their example. And that, of necessity, must include some form of healthy comparison. Right?
So how to do we engage in helpful comparison (learning from others) without the toxic game of competition?
Remove pride.
Healthy, helpful, godly comparison becomes toxic, debilitating competition when you insert the element of pride.
Without pride, comparisons are just data. They are the study of life in order to gain wisdom. They are objective ways of determining the wisest course of action at any given time.
The difference between a learner and a competitor is humility.
One is trying to grow, the other is trying to win.
CS Lewis says this:
Pride is essentially competitive – is competitive by its very nature … Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man … Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.
When we are discouraged, what we need most is not the assurance that everyone else is discouraged too. We need humility. We need Jesus.We need to surround ourselves with those who will help us turn our eyes to Jesus, learn from godly examples, and set the wisest course for the future.
The secret to freedom from the toxic comparison game: Humility.
Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit,
but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Phil. 2:3
{Thanks for reading.}