The Journey That Has Brought Me Here...

I am just beginning my journey.

I realize, as I sit here a month away from 27, that I’m no spring chicken. I look young, but I have an old soul. There have been times when I felt much older than my age and times when age was as foreign a concept as time itself.

I have been called out on saying that age is just a number by people who just don’t get it—but for me, it really is. I have found, the older I have gotten, the more I can relate to just about anyone. The women I hung out with a year ago when I was working as a first grade teacher were all older women: I enjoyed their wisdom, but most of all I loved their spunky, hilarious personalities and the ways we could laugh through anything. Currently, most of my closest friends are my age—but it’s only because they’re the ones I went to college with. In this last season all my friends were younger than me, sometimes by eight years. Two of my best friends from that time, more like sisters, were eighteen when we started. I could have cared less how old they were—I loved being with them! We had fun!

It doesn’t matter. It’s never mattered!

I find that experience—what we’ve been through—and the heart—how we let our experiences shape, change and develop us and what we choose to care for—are all much more important indicators of who a person is. I know—beyond a doubt—that God gave me more years before I started stepping into this crazy life called missions because I had a lot to work through: things that would have been ugly on the mission field. He kept me back—even though I longed to and even fought to move forward. He was faithful to block me, even when it caused me pain, from those things that were not right at the present time, in order to give me something grand at the right time. It was right in me to have that desire, but without the timing…you have nothing. He’s taught me that, over and over, in so many areas of my life.

It’s this thing called ‘holiness’ isn’t it? I have become quite obsessed—no, it’s just come more and more to the forefront for me, just how important this little word is, with all its implications. Holiness invites you to believe in the other, to see the world through another’s lens and believe that what He says is true and good for you. Holiness holds within itself an element of timing: of doing things fittingly, in the right time and place. In trusting the timing of another, holiness invites you beyond yourself into the unknown, the other, to trust what you cannot see so that you can move forward fully. To believe and walk in holiness means to abdicate all other gods who would take the throne of your heart so that you may see clearly and move forward when the Father calls you.

It’s easy to let go of holiness. I was so close to doing it this last season, only seconds and words barely unspoken away from pushing into what was not mine yet. I had to abdicate—and the loss felt just like that, such a loss—but I can see clearly now.

I see where I am headed and the work that the Lord has done to get me here—to this Promised Land. All of my broken, trying years created this refining and hope in me that go beyond human expectation. They created in me resilience, an ability to look beyond present pain into what is coming, the gift of the future. I know how to endure loss, criticism and judgment from others in a way that honors those around me and keeps me moving forward. In the middle of the arena, with the fight going on all around, I have learned to stand still and hear my Father’s voice—to live and move from that perspective and not what my natural ears and eyes perceive.  I have learned, especially in this last season, that love is made to be audible, shared, and that the love of the Father makes all worthy. I have learned to let love grow in me, so that others may be known and seen and comforted. I have learned to speak when it may be unpopular and that my voice is worth being known and heard.

And in all this, I am very much still learning and in process—but He sees gold in me. He put it there. This last season was the last of digging out the choking weeds and dust of death so that life, true life from the Father of life, could be found in me. I am becoming—always in process—a piece of heaven on earth, where the dwelling place of God has been made with man.

Heaven on earth…

It’s strange, to live in the yet and the not yet: we spent a whole year while I was in college talking through this concept in my school’s chapel. Our campus pastor, Travis Osborne, took apart the Kingdom of God, its implications and all that Jesus and the rest of the Bible said about it—and in the end, we were left with “it’s-here-but-not-yet”. Tension…

Tension…

We all live in the tension, in many ways. So much of it is earthly, full of unfulfilled longing: “I want healing…, I want a child…, I want a new Mercedes…, I want that perfect job…,” You can be centered on your earthly tensions for the rest of your life and find that nothing else matters, because you can’t even think of anything else anymore: you’re so consumed with what you don’t have. It’s a fruitless pursuit: letting earthly tension take you over.

The Kingdom of God is not like that. It’s the place of tension, but it’s the best kind, the kind that brings life. When your life is centered around this Kingdom, all the rest comes to you as a matter of course, just part of the ride as you gaze at Him. Kingdom living—which is others centered—accidentally on purpose propels you forward into all you ever dreamed of because you have chosen to live for the King and He has chosen—and is now able to, because of your relinquishment—to take care of all that concerns you. You live with such a different hope and focus from this place: you know that the Lord is coming and your life is about building into His kingdom, even if you can’t see it yet. It’s a tension that gives life!

Here’s how it works: as you become more and more obsessed with this Kingdom, giving up more and more of what you thought was your real life to be a part of it (and this could look different in every life, as each of us has different struggles and dreams that we must relinquish control of) as you make this choice, it changes you. The further in you get, the more it will cost you: but, if you let it, the refining will bring you further into all He created you to be. Sure, you lost your car and you’re still single, but wowie! do you know how to love on and connect with people who you thought were so different from you! As He asks for more of who you are and who you thought you would be—often a very painful process--you are able to walk forward fully into all He has for you. In all your choices to trust His holiness and timing, you have created a place where you are able to behold Him truly and in that place, you see yourself truly and recognize that nothing holds you back from fully walking out the life He promised you. As you encountered the tension—and let it change you—all of a sudden it created in you what He had wanted there all along—and isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it great to be one of His own?

Tension is a part of life. We will never escape it: but when we choose to embrace the Kingdom of God as our own, the tension allows beauty to be found in us. A musical instrument will not function without tension. Any good story must have its share of tension to be worth being told. All the good love stories, dramas, thrillers—all accept and are able to move forward because of and in tension. You can run from it—or embrace it, allowing it to do the work in you.

I love the tension of knowing that my King is coming and yet not being able to see Him yet. I love—although I also feel the pain of—the various places in my life that are living in tension: marriage, ministry to Haiti, going back to Ireland. It is in the tension that life is created and holiness is felt: because at the right time, with the right amount of disappointment and hope, beauty and pain, suffering and glory, our lives on earth are being built. And yet, we are more: we are part of a Kingdom that goes on eternally. This life—the one you’re living—matters more than you have ever given it credit for. And you, who you are right now, the choices you are making, affect generations to come. So though you may have tension—hurts and worries that won’t leave you alone, struggles that seem to go on and on—know that these are part of a beautiful story that, if you chose to let your Creator in to co-create with you, will show Him and His glory off in the end.

1 Peter 1:6-9 says it best: “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ, whom having not seen you love. Though you do not see Him, yet believing, you rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, receiving the end of your faith—the salvation of your souls.”

No matter what state your life is in, I guarantee He wants it—to show off Himself. And I guarantee that when you are fully given over to Him, He will make beauty out of your pain and allow your story of redemption and hope—Jesus in His Kingdom at work—to shatter the lies of the enemy in other people. He loves to take what the enemy meant for evil and fill it to overflowing with good—and He’s powerful enough to do it, every time. You are not beyond redeeming, beyond Hope because we all know: Resurrection is here. It’s not a concept to be grasped, but a life to be lived, fully out of Him, in whatever broken places you have to offer.

The Kingdom has come—and is coming. Enjoy that tension with Him. It’s a beautiful story.

As for me, my journey, just beginning, is leading me to Northern Ireland for the next few years. A grace to my parents (sending out your single daughter isn't easy) and a delight to me: I will be working with students just like me as well as locals, bringing all forward into deeper encounters with the Lord and His radiant Kingdom. The people who were missionaries all over the world now need missionaries of their own: and I am delighted to be part of their journey! Pray for me!

The Shape of Loss

I used to believe that pain was mutually exclusive—unable to be shared because of its breadth and width and length. Like an earthquake: the magnitude exponentially increased and at the same rate, so did its ability to be understood and shared with another. So the bigger the loss, the further beyond explanation, reasoning and ability to share it went—until at some point the one who was feeling the pain (call them the paine—haha) could not share at all what was happening inside them, only suffer the loss in silence while others looked on—or even worse, at some point others around them would have no idea that they were in pain and therefore wouldn’t try to connect with them.

That was how I lived…so I reasoned it must be the same, that this rule I had created in my head about my pain was how everyone lived: bottled up, growing more and more unhappy, searching for answers but beyond able to believe they were out there. A hell of my own making. It’s how I lived through loving Haiti and various other challenges in my life.

Until it became true—the pain was so excruciating around my heart that I was locked into silence. Radio silence. Inside a screaming wall, urging to be released but with a mindset that had me believing: “No one can understand this. I have to face this alone—they can’t understand it. This is my burden to bear.”

Until it became too much and the floodgates (thank God!) opened as I learned that others around me are capable of and knowledgeable about pain—the situations are so different (true) but the same God is in the midst, teaching us how to have joy in Him, how to see His face in the middle of the world breaking (thinking of the Haiti earthquake) and choosing to love us through.

Pain—it is not mutually exclusive—it is universal. It is not for ignoring and numbing into silence…the Lord God who created the earth and every hair on my head sees my pain…and He has made this world for FULLY LIVING—in the joy, the death, the hope, the resurrection. Not pushing down and visualizing outside of our pain as some religions teach, but entering in, with Him, feeling the shape of it, the depth and width and breadth and the tang and smell and hope in it…the way it moves us toward to a better country, helps us see that we are not alone: there are a lot of people right here with us too. As His followers, I believe we are called to be the ones who live present tense before those who do not yet know His name: showing the grace of God and the agony of life in the way we walk out every painful circumstance in our life that they may not only learn to mourn with us and enter in, but they may also see: life is hard, just because you have Christ, that does not end. But life is worth living and worth fully living because when (not if, but when) you start hitting that pain, you also start hitting that joy: the joy of knowing that there is a Saviour who goes before you, to clear the nails and grit out of the way and show you His love, even in the middle of the worst circumstances. When you lose your job…when your children betray you…when your hope seems lost—the one thing you kept near and dear in your heart is finally heartbreakingly free…The world will see how you deal with your pain—they’ll see the shape of your loss before their eyes—and when the grace of God comes in and overwhelms you with its goodness, it’ll overwhelm them too.

So let the shape of your loss be seen, live out your pain, in grace, in the middle of your life and those watching—they will never be the same.

Because they’ll see Him there, carrying it for you on a cross, and they’ll want the same.

This is indeed the Deepest Hunger…

Letting Go Love

My life has been crazy for the last few months...

Have you ever noticed that you have to step back from a situation/problem to really realize how it has affected you and what it has done deep down in your soul? Yeah, that was this weekend for me.

I lost my faith these last few months. Faith in the little God who liked to sprinkle fairy dust through the air and trip alongside us singing...but that faith was replaced by a Faith in a God who knows us to the core of who we are and still desperately longs to let us be known and to know Him. He will stop at nothing to get at your heart (even deep pain) and exists solely in your life to breathe on your dreams and shape you into them--and that will take a lot of gasping, enormous breaths and groaning as we emerge through the storm (wind, rain and tears) with only the Promise that He will be there and we have nothing to fear.

And we have nothing to fear.

To be our best selves, our most complete selves, our true selves comes out of a deep, aching vulnerability. A facing of all your worst fears with the ability to move forward out of them unscathed. It's a completely bizarre and intensely rewarding process that God only blesses His warriors with. If you were made for the battle, you will go into training.

That's where I've been the past few months. Continuing to take orders and follow His commands in the middle of miserly, dire circumstances where hope should (and often was on the verge of) being snuffed out. But we kept pressing forward, He and I, every once in a while coming clear into the light, able to see each other's smiles and He'd laugh and say, "We're not through it yet."

At moments I hated the "We're not through it yet." It seemed a soggy waste to go on when there was no progress--but that wasn't the point. The point is never how many people you find to love and hug on you back--its to learn the letting go love, the love that Jesus showed us for the first time on the cross, where He gave everything He had in a loving, desperate act and then stepped back and let us figure it out. How would we react to this strange giving of all He had? Would we choose to believe that He had indeed opened a way for us to be a part of a mystical "here" and "not-yet-here" kingdom? Would we love Him back?

The choice is everything, but the choice is never forced. It is simply offered, to believe trust and fall into or to walk away from. I have seen many of both and in my loving, in my giving of my best over and over again for His glory I have seen some love me desperately back (you know who you are, the ones who give me long hugs and pray with me until we get kicked out of church and talk with me as I mourn what could have been) and there have been others who crushed me and my dreams and sang as they walked away. And I have continued to love both.

Because my example is Jesus. always will be (O Perfection!) and He reminds me that I love them because He first loved me. Joy will come as I keep looking to Him in hope, holding my empty hands out again to be filled with His love and then spread it everywhere He deigns it wonderful for me to be. They can do as they like, the love will never stop and thus the throwing out His love every place I encounter will, by the same token, never have its end.

And I am grateful.

These last few months have been wonderful scary and hopelessly dramatically full of His love. I love the work He is doing, despite the pain, and I will continue to follow His course as many days as I have breath.

Join me.

Is Victory Yours Today...?

Just wanted to put something out here...

Have you ever had a dream/vision that God kept speaking to and pouring Himself into and reminding you of, to the point where you were always writing about it and praying about it and discussing it with Him and others? (Of course! haha) Then one little twitchy lie comes along and because you're a "righteous" person and you only want what's "best" for God and the world you agree with the lie?

Yiyksies!!! This was me today!

I know God has me headed in a certain direction and has been earnestly preparing me for something and it's close. Just over the horizon (days? months? years? His timing! said with a joyful shout!) I will see the fulfillment of all the joyous work of praying, seeking and hoping that has been my heart for a few years now. It will be a time of healing, hope and a declaration of a good God who remains faithful and sees us through some of our toughest times.

This is not without The Fight. Those things which God breathes most on will also be most hunted down by the enemy of our souls. Take heart! He has no victory as long as we are looking to Jesus and held by His love--but always be on the lookout.

This is a call to be aware of your heart, open to the voice of your God and sensitive to the messages broadcasting through your mind. There is a war going on for your very soul and it wages at all times. We can rest in our Father's loving arms, but we need to be aware of the battle and stand firm when temptations come. Whether the temptation is to make a false move which could cost you your very life (emotionally, physically or spiritually), the temptation to believe the lie that may be spoken to you over and over from various vicinities or the the temptation to just check out from the game, don't give in! Head up, heart strong, planted firmly in His Word, march on!

The best way I know of to keep my heart safe and be aware of the forces at work in my life is threefold:

1) Journaling: when I start to write my thoughts out, I can discern them more clearly, identifying lies I have believed and looking to Him for truth. Father often speaks through me as I write and as I read back over entries, His truth becomes clear. For the lie that was spoken today--I did give in, but then rescinded when I read the words of my journal and remembered so clearly that what I was putting my effort, joy and hope into was something He had promised me--it had been going on for so long and so consistently that this other small lie had no place in the face of His faithfulness. I could recognize the work of the enemy by seeing clearly the faithfulness, joy and prosperity God had put on this dream that I must keep chasing afetr!

2) His Word: God often speaks loudest and clearest as we stare into the pages of His Word. He wants to give us wisdom and courage in our great battles (and the battle you wage today may look like nothing from the outside, but He knows what they cost you and the importance of the victory for you and He is always willing and able to help us fight!), His Word is the way He musters up courage and wages war. In a lot of cases, consistently putting God's Word in your heart, soul and mind will keep the lies of the enemy out: we will be so saturated in the Word that when a lie tries to reach inside us, we recognize it immeadiately and banish the thought. This is a call to arms--I too need to more consistently dive in His Word to be armed for battle.

3) Solid Friendships/Community--there is no greater treasure (beyond salvation) than the gift of fellowship, in other words having other believers who know you and can diligently and on a regualr basis speak into your life. I was fortunate in my college years to live in a drom and become close friends with several other young women who were drawing close to the Lord as I was. We were consistently in one anothers lives and often helped see each other through some tough battles (ex. best roommate in the world Justina praying my stage fright right out of me). Then I moved off campus and spent a few years living with other godly roommates, some of whom saw me through the nightmare that student teaching can be (thanks to them no junior highers were harmed in the making of this teacher). Over and over again my sisters (and a few brothers) have been essential in seeing me through my trials and helping me see what I have gained as I summit the mountaintops of life. Find significant, godly friends who will be a light to you and speak truth in their conversations with you.

Yup, those are my thoughts! Keep waging war and may Your eyes be ever focused on Your King--He is Waging War for you and your eyes will see the Victory!