Tag Archives: theology

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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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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.