Tag Archives: Grace

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Trapped

One morning last week I took two of my daughters to school and then went back home.  While driving home a friend called so I was still on the phone when I came back into our house.  I walked into the kitchen and started my morning chores (that’s code for cleaning up the tornado that blew through the house as the girls got ready for school) while I chatted on the phone.  As I loaded the dishwasher I heard a strange noise in another room.  It sounded familiar, but out-of-place so I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

I walked around the house looking for the noise, keeping my friend on the phone in case of emergency, but couldn’t find it.  After about ten minutes, I was standing in my bedroom when I turned around because I sensed something behind me and a small bird flew right towards me.  It was so strange to see something so familiar, but completely out of context.  The bird flew past my head and into the master bathroom.  About that time the gears in my brain engaged and I shut the door so he couldn’t get out.  I figured it would buy me some time until I could decide what to do.

I got off the phone and quickly got the person in charge of all critter-related emergencies when Dad is not home, my oldest daughter (read here about the deer incident).  I outlined our strategy for Operation Get-the-Bird-the-Heck-Out: she would go downstairs and open the front and back doors while I opened my bathroom door, broom in hand, and swooped the bird downstairs and out one of the two exits.  I thought giving him two options was really generous, and I was sure he was smart enough to pick one.

The moment of truth came, I flung open the bathroom door, but instead of flying out my bedroom door he flew the opposite direction and right into my bedroom window, getting himself stuck between the window and the blinds.  At this point I was clearly in over my head and in dire need of a real critter expert so I called my husband.

He told me to close our bathroom door, closet door, and bedroom door and then open our side door that leads outside onto a little deck off our bedroom.  In my defense, I didn’t think of that first because there is stuff in front of that door that keeps us from opening it.  I can’t even remember the last time one of us went out there.  I prefer to think of it simply as unusable wall space…I have come to COMPLETELY ignore the door, so naturally I didn’t think to open it for the bird.

Once I moved everything and opened the door the bird found his way out in less than sixty seconds.  Once again critter-free, I headed downstairs to get some work done and didn’t think anything else about the whole thing until after lunch.  When it came time for afternoon carpool I went back to my bathroom to brush my teeth.  I opened my bathroom door for the first time since the bird event and could not believe what I saw.  That tiny little, scared, trapped, overwhelmed bird had managed to poop all over my bathroom in the few minutes he had been in there.  It looked like everything he had eaten for a month exited his body in one panicked frenzy right in my bathroom!

When I wrote Friday about some of the ugly part of my story, I shared about reaching a place of brokenness and pain and finding myself angry at God, I was thinking about that little bird in my bathroom.  Just like him I found myself in an unfamiliar, confined, scary place and LOTS of ugly stuff came out of me.  Stuff that had been trapped in my heart for years.  I don’t really want to elaborate any further on exactly what some of that ugly stuff was, but let’s just say it was one of the few times in our twenty-six year relationship I have ever seen my husband look scared.  At one point he actually took a few steps back from me in our kitchen, I think he thought lightning was coming down from heaven.

One of the reasons I trapped that bird in the bathroom was to keep him from getting hurt (e.g. flying into things, getting stuck somewhere, the dog playing fetch with him, etc.).  When God let me get to the end of myself it was because He didn’t want me to hurt anymore.  He wanted so much for me to run to Him, to lay down my exhausting agenda and just rest in Him, cling to Him and trust Him.  He wanted me to truly know Him.

But even when I didn’t handle it well, He was still there.  When He promised to never leave me nor forsake me He meant it and no matter how ugly it got, He didn’t abandon me.  Instead He continued to gently love me, pursue me and persuade me of Who He truly is and Who He created me to be.  Eventually, grace overcame and Love won my heart.

How convinced are you of God’s amazing grace and unending love for you?  Enough to lay down your own efforts and trust Him in every area of your life?

“Father, give us the faith to trust You and rest in Who You are, to lay down our own efforts and pursuits to abide in You.”

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Some of the Ugly Part

Jeremiah 15:18 (NASB)

“Why has my pain been perpetual and my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Will You indeed be to me like a deceptive stream with water that is unreliable?”

After about thirty years of ministry this is the question Jeremiah put before God.  At the beginning of their relationship in chapter one, God called Jeremiah and told him that he was consecrated and that he was specifically appointed as a prophet to speak for Him.  For thirty years Jeremiah had faithfully proclaimed God’s truth.  Even when his own friends and family members plotted against him (see chapter 11) he turned to the Lord.

There were certainly times that he questioned God (chapter 4 for instance), but in chapter 15 Jeremiah brings his personal misery to God and moves into profound self-pity.  After all these years of ministry he is in so much pain he actually asks God if He has deceived him and if He is unreliable.  In fact, in verse 10 of the same chapter, Jeremiah regrets that he was even born, implying he regrets he was called by God.

Have you ever gotten to that place where you were so miserable and broken as a believer that you were ready to throw in the towel?  Found yourself in so much pain that you wondered why you ever said yes when Jesus called your name?

This confession might be The Ugly part of my tag line “The good, the bad and the ugly”, but in the spirit of full disclosure and being transparent, I can honestly say I have felt EXACTLY that way.  Many years ago I had a similar Jeremiah moment with the Lord (I can’t remember exactly when because I have tried to forget it, but my kids were very young because I was dressed in the frumpy-puritan-holier-than-thou-functional-mommy fashion of the  1990’s Christian scene…it said everything except God thinks I am beautiful!).

We were at church that Sunday morning, I can’t remember what Hosanna or Maranatha praise song we were singing, but something in me snapped and I sat down.  I couldn’t stand up and sing that song because the words were not true, at least in my life.  And not only were the words to the song not true, but in that moment it seemed like God was not true.  Everything in my life was upside down.  Everything was a struggle.  All the questions and all the fears in my heart were screaming in my head like a siren, “NONE OF THIS IS TRUE!”

Then it got worse…the Pastor stood up, took the microphone and said he wanted everyone to march around the sanctuary while we sang…and he was not taking “no” for an answer.  I have never felt more like a hypocrite in my life!  As I stood up (with my spiritual arm twisted behind my back – I am not proud of this, but I knew then what it meant to murder your brother in your heart!) and schlepped around that sanctuary, it was like a dam burst inside me and with every step I took I got angrier and angrier.

Inside I was yelling at heaven, “We’ve tithed and we don’t have two nickels to rub together!  We have given beyond sacrifice and You are not providing!  We have served You in every way possible and You are not taking care of us!  Why is my husband’s business failing? Why aren’t you meeting our needs?  Are You who You say You are or not?”  Translation – “We’ve DONE all the right things God and You have not rewarded us.  You are not doing Your job!”

In hind sight I realize God was trying to bring me to the end of all of my “doing” for Him.  My flesh efforts at righteousness were failing.  He was trying to bring me to a place of brokenness, to the place of allowing my flesh to die and Jesus to live His life through me.  Honestly, I missed the point of the whole event at the time.  But I did repent for being angry with God, sucked it up and kept doing Christian life the way I thought I should for many more years.  Like every other time, I believed there must be some aspect I was failing in and once I figured it out, everything would come together.  It was a long, exhausting road to grace!

But back to Jeremiah…Jeremiah too had been faithful.  Jeremiah obeyed God and up until this point, he really had done it with the right attitude (unlike me).  Here in chapter fifteen though, it just hurt too much.  He had spent thirty years giving up his life for people who didn’t care and didn’t receive him.  And it wasn’t enough!  They were still steeped in their sin and they liked it that way.  Remind you of Anyone?

At this point in the book and Jeremiah’s life, the rubber was meeting the road.  The Babylonians were at the gate so to speak, Jerusalem was under siege and it was time for the price to be paid.  Jeremiah probably knew that it really was only going to get worse from there and he couldn’t go on…in his own strength that is.

What did God want in that moment?  He wanted Jeremiah, all of him, and He wanted to be known by him.  So He did what God always does, He revealed the way back:

Jeremiah 15:19a (NASB)

“Therefore, thus says the Lord, “If you return, then I will restore you— before Me you will stand;”

No matter what our circumstances, no matter where we are in our walk with Him, God wants us to bring it all to Him – the good, the bad and the ugly.  In every area of our lives He wants us know what it means to be one with the Living God, to have Him dwell in us and to live out of the depth of that relationship instead of our own strength.  The truth is we can’t do any of it in our own strength, there are just times we are more aware of that truth than others.

Is there an area of your life that’s not working and in fact is failing?  How honest are you willing to be with God about it?  Are you willing to take the road of surrender back to Him and find out what it means to truly know Him and be one with Him?  Even if it means laying down your own agenda, your own future? Are you willing to see God’s promises come to fruition on His timetable and not yours? What is it that you really want from God?  Tell Him about it.

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Expectations

It took a lot for me to not post this right after my last piece on Jeremiah, but I did promise I would try to write about my overflow of Jeremiah thoughts on Fridays AFTER our Bible study class meets on Thursdays.  I am, however, actually writing this immediately after the last Jeremiah post because I can’t quite move on in my mind and I am still trying to unpack the wealth of treasure God placed in that first AMAZING chapter.

Going back to the first three verses from last week, God reveals some very important personal information about Jeremiah:  he was “the son of Hilkiah, of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin.”  In that sentence God tells us that Jeremiah was a priest, which means he was a Levite, the only tribe set apart by God to serve as priests.  By telling us that Jeremiah was “of the priests of Anathoth” (a city set apart for the sons of Aaron, see Joshua 21), it is also very possible that Jeremiah was an Aaronite. Aaronites were a very specific group of priests who made all the offerings to the Lord. They also took turns serving as High Priest in the Temple. Other Levites could not serve in these ways.

What has captivated my thoughts is this, Jeremiah grew up expecting to serve in the priesthood just like his father.  He expected it and his family expected it.  If he was indeed an Aaronite He probably spent time studying and learning how to be a priest and how to appropriately offer all the sacrifices God required (just read the book of Leviticus).  His future was defined in many ways simply by the fact that he was born into a certain family.  According to God’s own law Jeremiah’s occupation was predetermined for him.

But then, when he was still a youth, “the word of the Lord came” to him and his life was changed forever.  He was set apart and called to speak for God Himself as a prophet not just to his own people, but to the nations (and to us if you will).  When we explore all 52 chapters of Jeremiah, we find that he carried out his new career plan faithfully.  Faithful – that word doesn’t seem adequate to describe a man who endured death threats, beatings, imprisonment and near starvation so that God’s wayward people would hear the truth of His love – there must be a much bigger word to describe a man like that.

The question that is rolling around in my mind is, how do I respond when God’s plan doesn’t match my expectations?  Do I faithfully walk in the way He puts before me?  Or do I sulk and take myself out of the game because I don’t like the new play God’s calling?  Am I willing to lay down my own expectations, even when they seem to be godly, to be part of what God is doing or do I make it all about me?

I don’t know about you, but in a lot of ways my life looks nothing like I expected.  Honestly it’s been a lot more difficult than anything I imagined, but would I change any of it?  Absolutely not!  It’s all brought me to this place, at this time with the people I couldn’t imagine living without.  And it’s all brought me to my knees in surrender to the One who sees it all.

Is there something God’s calling you to that doesn’t match your expectations? How will you respond?

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Invited In

Last year about this time I had the privilege of spending the weekend with five of the most amazing women I know in a beautiful cabin in the mountains of NC. We spent the weekend shopping, eating (there are some fabulous cooks in this group, you should really be jealous) and laughing, at everything! To keep the weekend interesting our hostess asked each of us to bring an activity to do together. Great idea!

One of our group, my precious friend Pam, is a wonderful artist and on Saturday afternoon she invited us to walk in her shoes and taught us how to water color.

My first reaction was, “Oh no!” I have never been successful at making things with my hands (in fact, even my handwriting is horrible) and the truth is I don’t really enjoy it. I am also not a big fan of trying new things in front of others, especially if there is ANY possibility I won’t be good at it – embarrassment is one of my worst nightmares. But I put on my big girl panties, realized it wasn’t about me, took a deep breath and started laughing at myself before anyone else could. I committed to the process and gave it a really good try.

Admittedly my finished product was no surprise to me, it was pretty bad. I was, however, shocked at how many artists there were in the group. Several of the pictures were really good, and I mean frame-it-and-hang-it-on-the-wall good. Mine is hiding out in the bottom of my sock drawer.

After it was all said and done, I loved that experience. It gave me a window into who Pam is that I had never seen before. We’ve been friends for about 18 years and in all that time I had only seen the beautiful, finished product of her work. But that Saturday afternoon I felt invited into a very special part of her life. I had the opportunity to see her create art.

It was much messier than I imagined. Sometimes it looked like way too much water was on the paper, sometimes the colors weren’t quite right, but then she would work her brush and move some of the paint around, then she would add more color. At several points she had to stop and just let what was already on the paper dry before adding anything else. She so enjoyed the process of creating and teaching that I couldn’t help but enjoy it too.

Watching her create added so much more value to the end product. She wasn’t just trying to finish a task and check it off her to do list. She fully engaged in the process and invested herself in it. She wasn’t watching the clock, she wasn’t worried about following “10 Great Steps to Successful Water Coloring” or “How to Paint the Perfect Picture.” Her goal wasn’t even necessarily to just paint a pretty picture, it was to create something that expressed her. In fact, that’s what she said to us when she pulled out her supplies, “Come on girls! We’re going to create something. It’s what we were born to do!” I have to say, I think I agree.

Lord, work through me to create a life that brings glory to You. Help me to let my guard down and invite people in. Free me from living such a highly edited life that people only know about me and not the real me. I want to be truly known. Help me to share my messy life with others, not just the finished products. Perfection is way too elusive and extremely lonely.

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The Deceitfulness of Fine

I am learning to be honest (primarily with myself) about my emotions. I’ve actually been in denial most of my adult life that I even have emotions! Somewhere in my southern, Steel Magnolias upbringing I bought into the lie that we (Bible-believing, genteel, southern women) aren’t really supposed to express our true feelings. If we did it might hurt someone’s feelings or worse make someone look bad. This may actually be a chemically induced problem by all the lipstick and Aqua Net I grew up with, but that’s a whole other issue. The result is that when I am asked how I am doing most of the time my answer is, “Fine.”

F-I-N-E…a potentially deceitful four letter word. On the surface those four letters seem quite innocuous. When used appropriately they convey the correct message. According to “Webster’s 1828 Dictionary” (available free online and in my opinion the gold standard of dictionaries), fine (adjective) is defined as follows:

1. Small; thin; slender; minute; of very small diameter; as a fine thread; fine silk; a fine hair. We say also, fine sand, fine particles.
2. Subtle; thin; tenuous; as, fine spirits evaporate; a finer medium opposed to a grosser.
3. Thin; keep; smoothly sharp; as the fine edge of a razor.
4. Made of fine threads; not coarse; as fine linen or cambric.
5. Clear; pure; free from feculence or foreign matter; as fine gold or silver; wine is not good till fine.
6. Refined.

When I limit the state of my well-being to simply “fine” then I take away the full dimension of who I am. I reduce my life to small, thin, slender and minute. I give it the appearance of being clear and pure and free from foreign matter and refined.

To be honest about how I am would be to admit that there is a LOT of “foreign matter” (I think that is a polite way of saying dirt) in my life and I am not refined. It would mean that I am not perfect and in dire need of help! In fact, I am often common or worse, vulgar and rough around the edges, even though I try cover it up with lipstick and hair color.

What’s wrong with admitting we have dirt? What’s wrong with being common, rough around the edges? Absolutely nothing! Those are the things that make us human. They give dimension to our lives. They make our lives less, “small”, less “thin”, less “tenuous.” They also demonstrate our need for Christ.

When I pretend I have it all together I am telling the world and God that I can take care of myself and I don’t really need a Savior.

To admit that I have dirt in my life, that I am not always (in fact most of the time) fine invites people to see who I really am. It opens the door to relationship. Who wants to be friends with someone who always has it together, or at least appears to (because we all know they are faking, right)? Grace says it is ok to be honest. Grace says I am loved and accepted even when I am not fine. Grace invites me to freedom from the confining prison of fine.

And the next time I ask how you are, I am expecting more than fine. Wear all the lipstick you want, but answer me truthfully.

How do you respond when people ask how you are? Is there anything that keeps you from being honest? What do you expect to hear from others when you ask how they are? How do you invite others to be real with you?

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A New Man in My Life

Our Bible study class has just begun a four month journey through the book of Jeremiah.  I love the beginning of a study.  To me it is like the beginning of a new relationship.  You spend time with the person, you get to know their personality, and at some point you start to feel like you understand them.  After doing inductive Bible studies for over four years (we use Precept Ministries materials) I know that by the time this study ends I will be so attached to Jeremiah that it will feel like moving away from my best friend.  I love the daily, systematic time in God’s Word. I would probably go so far as to say that I crave it.

Because of the time it takes to study and prepare for class each week it is very likely some of my thoughts about Jeremiah (the book and the man) will leak out here in this space.  Since our class meets on Thursdays I will try to hold back my Jeremiah overflow until Fridays, but I can’t really promise anything.

I do consider the overarching theme of this blog to be about grace.  The truth about grace, how it affects me, and how it then impacts those around me.  So my partner in crime teaching partner and I have been discussing grace in the book of Jeremiah.  If you haven’t read the book, let me summarize:

“I love you.  You’ve been disobedient.  Repent or destruction is coming.”

I don’t want to minimize the importance of studying all 52 chapters of this book (I am in fact the LAST person who would minimize the importance of Bible study), but if you could boil it down this is God’s message to His people.  So why did He take 52 chapters to say it?

Consider the opening verses of Jeremiah 1:

“The words of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah, of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, 2 to whom the word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign. 3 It came also in the days of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, until the end of the eleventh year of Zedekiah the son of Josiah, king of Judah, until the exile of Jerusalem in the fifth month.”

I believe the grace of God and the reason it took 52 chapters are hidden right there in those first three verses (the one’s we usually gloss over quickly because we don’t recognize or can’t pronounce the names) and all you need are a couple of cross-references (Hint: 2 Kings 22 and 2 Chronicles 34-36) and probably a timeline to decode it.  If you translate the reigns of the three kings mentioned in the first three verses to dates in history what you find is that Jeremiah’s prophetic ministry lasted over 50 years.

The 52 chapters of Jeremiah were over a very LONG period of time.  It is God’s grace that He repeated His call to repentance over and over and over again, in many different ways.  His desire was that Israel return to Him, not that they would be taken captive.  There is also grace in the life of Jeremiah.  In many ways he laid down most of his life for a message that no one wanted to hear and openly rejected.

Today God’s message is the same, repent and return to me.  His desire is that none should perish.  Isn’t this essentially the call to follow Christ?  One question for us to consider is, “Am I willing to obey God and be a Jeremiah for the sake of others?”

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Disclaimer

I am about a week and a half into this blogging journey and I want you to know how scary this is for me. On a cold, Friday afternoon, after two extra cups of coffee, I sat on my new, big, red couch (more on this later) feeling really brave and decided to create my blog. So I did. It took me until Monday to work up the courage to write my first post. Once I had written it, it took me a couple of more hours to work up the courage to hit the Publish button. When I did hit Publish I closed my eyes and winced as if someone were yanking a band aid off of the most sensitive part of my body. (Fyi…the Publish button is bullying me around a bit. It taunts me every time I sit down to write. Staring at me from the right hand side of the screen as if daring me to touch it. You can pray for me. In fact, please do, I have no idea what I am doing technically speaking.)

My second day of blogging I figured out how to link my blog to my Facebook page. It took me several more days to actually link it and share a post there. To me that was scarier than hitting the Publish button. I had a mild panic attack afterwards. My hands were shaking, my breathing became irregular, my legs felt rubbery and I got nauseous. I felt like I had just invited the whole world (well 124 of them, Facebook friends) into my bedroom to go through my underwear drawer or worse to see me naked. In fact, my heart is racing this very minute just thinking about it again. I have issues with naked.

All that said, it is becoming more and more apparent that I struggle with letting people in. With letting them see the real me. To allow them to know me, all of me – the good, the bad and the ugly. So that’s part of what this space is about. Sharing myself, an image bearer of God, and my journey with others. Something of a personal travel journal.

For those of you who know and love me and might be concerned that I am probably working out some issues I am wrestling with right here on my blog, in public, let me just say upfront, you are probably exactly right! I think that if I am wrestling then others are too. Also, you know how frugal I am, this is free and I can do it from home. Counseling is expensive and I have to get dressed and go out for it.

I will leave you with a quote by Theodore Roosevelt that the Lord used to encourage me during my panic attack:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

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Beginning

Allow me to introduce myself, I am Kim – wife; mother of three wonderful girls (in spite of me); a former overachiever, perfectionist, and a self-sufficient rule follower with a hyper-sense of responsibility for absolutely everything.   I am a woman who has spent most of her life trying to make herself acceptable to everyone, including the only One who matters.  The One who had already accepted me completely.

Where to start?  How do you begin when you are really still in the middle?  When you want to tell your story, but you are really not quite sure where you are in it?  When you tell a story, aren’t you supposed to know how it ends first?

I guess I will begin in the middle because I really didn’t have a story to tell until I realized I was coming apart, unglued, UNRAVELED.  Everything I had tried to knit together in order to cover mySELF (my shame, embarrassment, fear, unworthiness, insecurity) began to come apart exposing all the ugly, naked truth about me.  The sad part was that for quite a while I kept trying to hold it all together.  I figured if I just worked harder at it I could keep myself covered.  It was exhausting and ridiculous! 

Actually, looking back, I think it bordered on insane, which is how I got here.  My life motto had become, “Suck it up and keep moving.”  No matter how bad things got, I just painted on a smile, fixed my hair and kept going.  That is until the One who loves me without limits and without conditions said, “Enough!”  It may as well have been a voice from heaven that sent me spiraling.  I am not entirely sure exactly what triggered “the episode” (I vaguely remember it had something to do with cupcakes and budgets), but whatever it was landed me in bed for days, crying uncontrollably, medicated and wondering if my mind was ever going to function properly again. 

The truth was my mind was probably functioning more properly at that moment than it had in a long time.  I had managed to completely overload all of my circuits and it had the good sense to shut itself off.  I could barely put two words together, which is actually a good thing when the last thing you should be doing is talking.

We rarely recognize life changing moments as they happen.  Often we need to see them from a different perspective, after time has passed (and after sanity has returned) to appreciate them for what they are.  Otherwise, how could I call those few days some of the most important in my life?  Earth shattering and life altering at the same time.  Terrifying and oddly peaceful.  Ugly and beautiful all at once.  Sometimes it takes a powerful force to cause something to change direction.  I am embarrassed to say I didn’t take the subtle hints My Father had been giving me for quite some time.   God in all of His power had to intervene to get this freight train to change course.  This is what I like to refer to as the beginning of “The Great Unraveling.”  More on this later.

It’s amazing what God can do with dust, isn’t?  He can take it and make something profoundly beautiful out of it.  It’s called grace.  I’ve been a believer since I was about eight years old when I committed my life to Christ, but somewhere along the way I completely missed grace.  And that’s why I am here in this space, unraveling the mysteries of His grace that has so unraveled me.

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Grace, the Gift

Ephesians 2:4-10

4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), 6 and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; 9 not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.
A gift. By definition a gift is not something that is earned. If it was earned it would be called compensation or a reward. A gift is given at the unction of the giver. For some reason within the giver himself.

So what prompted God to give grace? What motivated God to give the gift? God was completely motivated by His own mercy and His own love for us. There was no “benefit” for God. There was no trade-off. He simply wanted us to be alive with Christ. He wanted to show us the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness.

So why is it so hard to receive a gift? Even in human relationships when someone gives me a gift it is very difficult to receive without somehow feeling the need to reciprocate with a gift of my own. Isn’t this what we often do at Christmas? Give gifts because other people have given gifts to us. Or worse, don’t we sometimes give in order to get from others?

To receive from God seems so overwhelming to me because I know the stuff of which I am made, apart from Christ. I know what I am capable of and what I have done. I know the things I think and don’t say out loud. I am not worthy. But that’s what makes the gift so incredible…it was given when I was dead in my sin, before I ever even considered not being in sin. It wasn’t given because I somehow earned it. I hadn’t done enough good things to make me worthy of the gift. God gave the gift because of who He is, not because of who I am. And yet because of what He did I now have worth. I now have value. I am no longer dead, I am alive. I didn’t earn it, I received it.

Receiving it…ahhh…that’s the hard part, isn’t it? At least it is for me. When I received the gift of grace I immediately felt that I had a debt to repay (which I guess begs the question, did I really receive it?) and set out to work as hard as I could and to work as perfectly as I could to pay Jesus back for His sacrifice. Something was definitely wrong with that picture! The sad part is that it took me about 36 years, a lifetime of difficult relationships and a host of digestive disorders to realize I had missed a very crucial truth of the gospel…IT IS A GIFT. Period. End of story. You either receive it or you don’t.

This truth is what has brought me to this place. I had knit together a version of myself that did not function well. But slowly, surely, faithfully, relentlessly, patiently God has been unraveling me with His love. Unraveling me with the truth of His grace. It is a gift.