Get Rid of the Junk!

If you are a Facebook person, you know how the site will show you posts from previous years on the anniversary of the date that you first posted them.  One of mine today was a post from nine years ago that reads like this:

"Packing, sorting, organizing, yard sale planning, weeding out the junk . . . How do people stay organized when they don't move every year like I have for a while? What will I do when I actually have to stay in one place for the rest of my life???????"

Ironically, since that move, I have moved three more times. Each time there is more accumulated "stuff" that I can easily discard, sell or give away.  If I can live without it and let it leave my life so easily, why did I have it in the first place?

I've been thinking about the unnecessary things in my life.  Even though I'm not contemplating a move this time, (thank goodness), I am still spending some of my summer break from teaching to go through all my belongings and let go of the things that I really don't need or want.  I've got clothes that don't fit or that never flattered me in the first place, books and mountains of files that I'll never refer to again, kitchen gadgets that create more work that they perform, decorative objects and framed pictures that I just don't have room for, and a host of other miscellaneous items that just don't have a place in my life anymore. The phrase "less is more" really is true. When the useless is moved away, it is much easier to find, use and enjoy those things that are beautiful and useful in your home.

Just like the physical items in our lives, there are spiritual, mental and emotional things that we need to release as well.  That old resentment against someone in your past?  You don't need it.  While it is hurting you, they probably haven't even had a thought about you in years.  Throw it out.  The self-critical attitude you have about yourself?  Dump it.  God created you to be an amazing piece of work with potential that you cannot begin to comprehend.  Fears about the future?  Who needs them?  God says to "fear not" and to trust your steps to Him.  When you discard those old, damaging thoughts and attitudes, it's much easier to find, use and enjoy those things that are beautiful and useful in your life.

Hebrews 12:1 says, "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us...."

An Olympic runner can't race while carrying heavy suitcases and we can't run our race bogged down by thinking that doesn't align itself with the Word of God.  Let's let go of all those "weights" in our lives so we can reach the finish line in our lives in victory.

It's Rustic!

I've heard that in some Eastern and Native American religions, artisans deliberately put flaws in their rugs or blankets, believing that only God could make something perfect.  Trust me - I can make an imperfect project without even trying! No deliberate imperfection necessary. 

Take the pictures above for instance.  We had a boring brown outbuilding on our property when we bought our house a couple of years ago.  Little by little, we made improvements to it – a little paint – a few decorative tools to display – and finally, we got to “THE DOOR PROJECT”.  I had this all figured out.  I saw a picture online of a barn style door made with old tin roofing and some barn board.  It was a much better look than an old beige trailer door.  However, in the execution, mistakes were made.  My husband and I had measured the area for the tin in the center to make sure we had the dimensions right vertically but forgot to cut the section to be centered horizontally.  Now, I can’t take any credit for the actual execution of this project.  My husband and son spent three hours in the hot June sun on Saturday making my vision come to life.  It wasn’t until we had the tin fastened in place on the existing door that we realized that we hadn’t cut it to be centered. My son said, “Hey, it looks rustic!” and said that he uses the word rustic to cover the flaws in anything he builds.  We decided to go with it and just kept on going with the door – imperfections and all.  It’s rustic, y’all!

It’s June now.  How many of you have kept all your New Year’s resolutions?  I’ll bet many of you have already messed up - ate too much, smoked a cigarette, skipped a day of exercise, cursed, lost your temper - and have given up because you have been imperfect in keeping your promise to yourself.

Why not treat those mistakes as deliberate imperfections?  Keep yourself humble - but keep striving for your goal.  We will never get it perfectly right - but we can make permanent improvements in our lives.

I used to work with middle school teachers as an instructional coach.  In a discussion with a group of teachers, I talked about using deliberate errors in our own work to see if students can catch the mistakes.  One teacher said that when she makes an accidental mistake - she just pretends that she made it on purpose to see if her students were paying attention!  Works for me!

It's time to accept your imperfections in life and to work with them.  Your house will never be perfectly organized or decorated or cleaned.  Your body will never look exactly the way you envision it.  Your marriage will still be a union between two imperfect people.  Your children will never be Stepford kids.  Your job will always have challenges.  Your friends and family members will always be flawed people.  All that is ok!  Bless people with your gifts and talents - imperfectly.  It is still a blessing!

God doesn't expect perfection. He provided perfection for us in Jesus.  We're only responsible to go after Him and His purpose for our lives.  Think about the little craft projects your babies made for you for special occasions.  They were far from perfect, but the love and effort that your child displayed by creating them for you was a delight to your heart.  In the same way, God is delighted by our attempts to bless Him and to do His work. You'll never be a perfect Christian, but at least be one that is doing something, however "rustic" it may be.

21,703 Days

Sometimes the topic of my weekly blog post comes quite easily.  A little event during the week or an overheard phrase becomes an analogy to some spiritual lesson. There are other times that I sit down to write and have no idea what’s going to end up being posted online.  I must dig a little deeper for inspiration on those evenings and tonight was a time for digging.

Then I thought about our associate pastor’s message from this morning.  His title was “These are the Days of our Lives” – and no – he wasn’t referencing the soap opera.  His message was about the different lives we all lead – public, private, and secret and how we need to let God be the Lord of all those “lives”. 

My mind took a different direction on that title this evening as I thought about the days of my life. I found an online calculator that told me that as of today, I have lived 21,703 days on this earth. Then I thought about how little I actually remember about each individual day in my life.  Of course, I have vivid memories of my wedding and the births of my children.  I remember the day we discovered that our beautiful granddaughter was going to be joining our family.  There are scattered mental snapshots of moments on vacation, a few holidays, some painful events, and some profound moments in my relationship with God.  For the most part, life goes by in lots of ordinary, non-eventful days where I get up, go to work, and come home in a seemingly never-ending cycle.  As a teacher, I also have a line-up of boring, quiet summer days every year.

I’ve never been able to keep up the discipline of an everyday diary.  However, I do have a little journal, given to me by a good friend, where I have tried to record the major events in my life.  All told, there are probably less than a hundred days recorded in that slim volume but reading over those entries reminds me of some very precious moments and many lessons learned.  Much of what I am able to convey in writing now is because of how I have learned to hear God in the situations of my life like the ones recorded there.

Not all of it is joyful.  Some of the events were things that I thought would break me at the time but running through all of it is the faithfulness of God.  He has been in the middle of every circumstance of my life, using all things “for my good” even when it didn’t feel so good at the time.  

So much of our lives will be a blur as we move through our daily routines, but every moment is a gift.  I encourage you to start a little notebook of your own.  Don’t put yourself under the bondage of writing something every day but begin to record the blessings in your life.  Write about the funny things your child or grandchild does and says.  Record the statement in your pastor’s sermon that really touched your heart.  Pour out your own frustrations about a situation and then write down the outcome that comes after a time of prayer and trusting God.  If you aren’t much of a writer, at least jot down a word or a phrase or draw a picture that will remind you of the event. Write the date to help you place that moment in time. Think about how the events of the people of the Bible – both tragic and triumphant – serve to teach and inspire us today.  Somebody wrote it down.

Ten years of my life are in this little book I’ve been using, and I’ve just filled it. When I get discouraged, I sometimes just sit and read about the “roller-coaster” of the last few years and remember what God has done. There’s another book in my home office waiting to receive new memories, thoughts and answered prayers.  Let’s not let all those “days of our lives” slip through our minds like those “sands through the hourglass”.  Let’s allow the past to give us hope for the future.

Cleaning House

I finally realized why I hate cleaning my house so much.  It’s not the actual work involved.  It’s not even gathering up all the materials I need or moving objects out of the way so I can get to all the surfaces that I need to sweep or mop or dust or scrub.  It’s the fact that no matter how hard I work to get each area clean, I can never get it perfectly spotless.

This major revelation came to me yesterday as I was doing my “you’re on summer vacation from school so you have no excuse” cleaning. I had swept and mopped a floor and still, I kept finding small blades of grass and bits of dust in corners and next to baseboards and thresholds.  No matter how many fancy cleaning tools and products I buy, my house will never, ever, be perfectly clean.

Our lives are like houses.  We want to “straighten up” our lives – for them to be beautiful and clean. We make promises to ourselves to start doing certain things or stop doing others, but our willpower isn’t enough to make all those necessary changes in our lives.  The sin that is in our lives is like those pesky blades of grass and dust bunnies.  No matter how hard we try, we can’t seem to eradicate all of them.  The good news is that God knows that we don’t have the power to be perfect and He has made provision to wash our sin away through the blood of Jesus. We all know that our own righteousness is “as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6) and we are thankful for a Savior who gave His all to make us clean.

I’m thankful for that as well, but this “clean house/clean life” analogy got me thinking.  Just because I can never clean this house to perfection doesn’t mean that I should put down the brooms and mops and dust rags and just declare defeat.  Not having the ability to make my home spotless does not give me a license to just let the filth pile up around me.  I am responsible to do what I can, to the best of my ability, to care for this house that God has given me – to make it a clean, attractive, and healthy place for my family to spend time together.

In the same way, we should not just throw up our hands at the state of our lives and say, “I can never be perfect in this life, so I’ll just live any way I want because Jesus is the one that makes my life clean anyway”.  We are responsible to live lives that are pleasing to God to the best of our ability – to make our “house” a place where His love and life are shown to others. I know there are two extremes of doctrine in the Christian world.  One says, “anything goes because grace covers sin” and the other says “one little slip and God will send you straight to hell”.  I believe it’s a balance.  We don’t have to walk around constantly in fear that we are on the edge of slipping up, but we need to go after God in such a way that our moral lives reflect who we are serving.  Living lives free of sin is not a matter of picking up tools to clean up after ourselves but is a natural outgrowth of letting God change us from the inside out.

Lessons from a Baby #5: Learning the Language

Bella, my 16 month old granddaughter, is learning language the way we all do.  We talk to her all the time and many simple daily things are repeated - eat, bath, night-night, bye-bye, hi, etc.  She is beginning to repeat many words and is constantly adding to her vocabulary.

She has Ma-ma and Da-da down pat.  Next came Papaw (or PaulPaul - since my husband's name is Paul). Her maternal grandfather is Pappy. However,  I have no earthly idea who I am.  She has not yet settled on a name for me.  We've used the name "Gran" for me - short for "Granny", which is what I called my grandmother, but evidently that's a much harder sound to produce.  We're trying Mimi and Nana and Mamaw to see what sticks, but for now, I am "she who must not be named"!

She really does know and love me.  She reaches for me, hugs me, gives me an occasional kiss.  I have kept her in my home many times while her parents were busy with other things.  We have a relationship, but she is just not too sure of what to call me.  I dearly love her, in spite of the fact that she hasn't yet mastered this concept.

We learn the language of the kingdom the same way.  Words, thoughts and principles that are part of our daily spiritual lives are repeated often by our Christian friends, our pastor, our daily Bible reading, songs we enjoy and writers we follow.  Still, in spite of that daily repetition, there are some concepts we still don't acquire easily.  A common theme that you'll see in my blog posts is maintaining communication with God in prayer and Bible study.  That theme isn't repeating because I am so accomplished at keeping it a priority; it's repeating because I struggle so much with being consistent with it myself.  Without letting myself off the hook for this discipline, I do realize that God dearly loves me, even when I am not mastering the lessons that He keeps trying to teach.

Bella can only learn what we can teach her.  If she was put in a situation where she had no human contact and no more exposure to language, her language learning would cease.  If we live in an environment where the Word is not spoken, where people are not sharing what God is leading them to say, where all the media we take in is focused on the things of the world, we won't learn any more kingdom language ourselves. We as adult Christians have control of what language we are learning.  Let's make sure that we are learning it from the right source.

"In" and "Amen"

Sometimes, when I’m not in serious Bible study, I just flip through the pages of my Bible, looking at words or verses I have highlighted or underlined in the past.  I was doing that the other night when I thought about the fact that the Old and New Testament are one continuous story of the love of God and His plan to reach us and bring us into relationship with Himself.

As I thought more along those lines, I considered beginnings and endings.  I knew the first word of Genesis 1:1 was “In”, but I wasn’t sure about the last word of Revelation.  I looked up Revelation 22:21 and confirmed that it was “Amen”!

 I am quite aware that there are 66 books in the Bible and that 2 Timothy 3:16 says, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.”  I am in no way saying that we shouldn’t read and learn from every word, but really, the first word and the last word sum up the whole theme of the Bible.

Throughout the Old Testament, God was trying to establish relationship with His people – to be IN their midst, for them to live IN His ways and according to His laws.  That system of the law showed men how impossible it was to live in holiness in their own strength – how much they needed a Savior.  The New Testament reveals the sacrifice of Jesus which made a way for us to be IN Him and He IN us.  His Holy Spirit lives and works IN us.  From “IN the beginning” to the Holy Spirit IN us – that was the plan of God.

“Amen” means “so be it”. 2 Corinthians 1:20 says, “For all the promises of God in Him are Yes, and in Him Amen, to the glory of God through us.” That final Amen in Revelation 22:21 goes like this, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.”

The grace that John is referring to there is that same grace that causes us to be IN Him. Acts 17:28 says that, “For in him we live, and move, and have our being…..”  The most important decision we will ever make is choosing to be in Him.  Everything else in our lives flows from our relationship with Jesus.  What about it?  Are you IN? Amen!

78 and 29

I recently attended a wedding shower where one of the party games was to guess the number of candies in a jar. I have been historically terrible with this activity, always underestimating the number by quite a bit.  So, attempting to apply that experience to my guess this time, I estimated as usual, then added about 20 more to my guess and chose a number that was not a multiple of 5, thinking that whoever filled the jar probably wanted to make it trickier. My educated guess was 78. To my amazement, the bride-to-be announced that the winner, who had guessed the number exactly, was me! The prize for this feat was to take home the jar of candy.

At home later, I told the story to my husband, but I did not divulge the number or any hint of the amount.  He walked by the jar, barely taking a glance, and said, very nonchalantly, “78”.  My jaw dropped!  Not only had I done the practically impossible by guessing the exact amount, but he had just matched my answer without even taking time to examine the jar! What in the world????

Then, just yesterday, we visited a large flea market in search of an elusive item we needed for a project. We had walked through all the buildings by the upper parking lot and walked down a set of concrete stairs to the rest of the buildings.  After a fruitless search of those buildings, we headed back to our van by way of those same concrete steps.  We walked side by side up the steps with no conversation, but when we reached the top, we both spontaneously looked at each other and said, “29!”  That was the number of steps on the staircase. We had both been mentally counting, for whatever reason, and decided at the same moment to make that big announcement.

What is my point? When people have been married for a long time, it is said they can finish each other’s sentences.  How does that happen?  It’s not because they once stood at an altar and made promises to each other.  It’s because they have talked together day after day, year after year. They have seen each other react to many situations.  They have listened to each other tell the same stories to other people over and over.  A serious investment of time together makes it possible for two to become one. The knowing is in the life together – not in the vows.

I believe it’s like that in our relationship with God.  We begin to talk the way He talks, know His heart, and think like He thinks only when we spend time with Him.   It doesn’t happen automatically the day we go to an altar and repeat a prayer, vowing to follow Him.  The knowing is in the life together – not in the vows.