Scaling Mountains

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away, and look, new things have come.” 2 Cor. 5:17

I am so blessed that I ordered the wrong item when searching for a Bible Study! Annie Downs’s book, Looking for Lovely goes much deeper in the details of her life than the Bible Study. The words that I am left with from my reading this morning are words that sound so heroic on paper…courage and bravery. But to be described by these words are not for the faint of heart.

A friend of mine came to mind this morning when considering these words who has been through so much in an 8-year period. I call her a heart friend because we have only spent limited time together twice but have texted through heartbreaking times throughout the past 6 years. I know she feels anything but brave but her face comes to my mind when I hear these words. Sometimes courage just means getting out of bed in the morning and putting one foot in front of the other. Annie Downs writes of the call to courage that God placed deep inside all of us. ‘We were never meant for a wimpy life…Just as God made you uniquely, your call to courage is unique as well…You are called to face whatever dragons come into your life and scale the mountains that show up in your view…And you must walk it bravely…So be brave, try the thing, trust that if you are pursuing God, and going after a brave life, He can fix and sweep up and help you’ p.44-45.

My heart friend used to always say that she didn’t feel brave when I would tell her how courageous she was. But that’s the thing about courage when pursuing God. We can be brave because our courage comes from Him. Just as we watch and wait for the sunrise to break through the darkness, we must watch and wait for the beauty that overflows from our bravery, and show up each and every day no matter our circumstances. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…beauty is what YOU see, what sticks out to you, the unique moments God gives you to collect up and hold and draw strength from. I needed to find beauty if I was going to hang in there. I need it in my life. I need it in my heart. I need it in the bank of my soul to withdraw when things feel hard. So, I decided to start looking’ p. 50

Look around and find your unique beautiful moments. God is creating something new and we will arrive at our ‘future beautiful’ when we string together moments of our ‘daily beautiful.’ 

Dust to Dust

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” Genesis 2:7a

The heavens and earth had barely been created before God tenderly bent down and got His hands dusty by forming man and creating life with His breath. Think about that for a minute…we could have been formed with any element that God thought up but He chose dust. I can’t think of a less exciting starting point for creation than the tiny particles that I am constantly trying to eliminate. Dust makes my eyes itch…dust makes me sneeze…dust hides the beauty of my furniture. Yet God chose it to create new out of old…people out of particles…'in His image' out of nothingness. Dust becomes paramount because God chose it to create something beautiful out of a million separate pieces.

God is the ultimate Potter and knows the importance of dust when making our lives beautiful when we have been shattered. Did you know that a wise potter uses the dust from a perfectly broken vessel to create new pottery? It turns out that the dust from a broken piece actually strengthens the new vessel when added to the fresh clay. This stronger clay can endure hotter fires and when glazed, these pieces have greater beauty because of the presence of dust.

God uses this process continually as He sees our brokenness when life leaves us shattered. He gently bends down and choses the perfect pieces of dust that surrounds us and incorporates it into our pain. He discards those elements that serve no benefit to our spirit and begins creating stronger faith and greater purpose from our suffering. We cannot be the same person we were before we were shattered for God is pressing us into a new creation using the beauty of our past and the contents of our pain.

‘A potsherd is a broken piece of pottery. A broken potsherd can lie on the ground and be nothing more than a constant reminder of brokenness. Or the Master Potter can be entrusted to take that broken potsherd, shatter it just right, and then use it in remolding us to make us stronger and even more beautiful.’ Seeing Beautiful Again, Lysa TerKeurst, p. 24-25.

Peace Matters

“Peace, I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” John 14:27

I’ve decided to do one of my Bible Studies over again and I ‘accidently’ ordered the book instead of the study. I was disappointed at first because I rarely read an accompanying book with my study. But I decided to include the extra resource and I’m glad I did. The book and study are called Looking for Lovely, by Annie Downs. Since I lacked the bible study which provides Scripture inclusion and questions to ponder, I grabbed the one I had used back in 2018. One of the questions was ‘What are you afraid of right now?’ My 2018 answers included 3 fears I had at the time. It was a blessing to see that despite the fact that one fear had come to pass, we were fine because God was faithful. Two of the other fears of which I wrote never came to pass. In fact, one of them took an opposite route and ended up 100 times better than where it was 3 years ago. I immediately was blessed that I was forced to open up this book and ‘find my lovely’ for today. As I turned the page of my Bible study I found a piece of paper with Scripture that I had written for my dad the first day of radiation for his cancer. He carried it in his wallet for a few years and my mom found it after he died. Yesterday, was Father's Day and the little piece of paper was my lovely. My lovely for the day was the peace that note left in my heart…peace that even if our biggest fear becomes our reality that we are going to be fine because God is going to be faithful. I have peace that some of the fears that loom large in my mind live right there…in my mind instead of my reality.

PEACE MATTERS! Even if we grab it for merely a moment it releases all of the ‘unlovelies’ of our mind for a time. ‘It is not about your outside circumstances…It’s actually about your heart. It’s about being in a trusting position, a restful position, even when your world seems to be spinning’ Looking for Lovely, p. 14. In a world full of troubles, we need to search for peace… lasting peace…sustaining peace…peace not from this world but from Jesus.

Annie shares that those moments of God’s peace are moments that probably won’t change our circumstances but will change our hearts. Lovely moments that we collect and build upon give us strength for the next lovely moment and a desire to find it. But until the next one, we must hold on tightly to the one we find today. Peace matters! It reminds us that we have a choice to fight our fears and despair with peace, instead of allowing the chaos to define our lives.

Hearing Wind Chimes

“Heaven cannot contain the Holy Spirit, yet He finds a home within the hearts of His servants…If He is like the wind, we will be like wind chimes; if He is like dew, we will bloom with flowers; if He is a flame, we will glow with ardor. In whatever way He moves within us, we will be responsive to His voice.” Charles H Spurgeon, The Power in Praising God, p. 31

I continue to enjoy my study on The Holy Spirit authored by John Bevere. God and Jesus prominently enjoy top billing in Christianity, but it is the Spirit in us who manifests their power. As believers, we are privileged to carry their Holy Spirit within us, who was given to us because of our position in Christ. With any position comes power and authority to move within that role. The endwelling of the Spirit creates in each of us a response to that power. I love how Spurgeon captures these responses metaphorically through creation. I began picturing each of the descriptive responses to the work of the Spirit.

Will we be like wind chimes today, responding gently and melodiously to the breeze of the Spirit? Will we bloom today as we awaken to the fresh dew of the Spirit in the cool of the morning? Will we reflect the glowing embers and passion of the Spirit’s movement in our life today? The power is always there within our hearts and we determine our responses. The key to this Holy power that each of us is positioned to receive is intimacy and fellowship. Living within the rhythms of the Spirit ensures creative and spiritual responses to His movement. What a remarkable honor to have our position in Christ and continual access to His Spirit.

Truth Made Visible

“For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty…a voice came to Him from the Excellent Glory: ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’” 2 Peter 1:16-17

From the moment I took my first breath to this morning, I have been eyewitness to the manner in which my parents lived out their lives. I can share story after story from 60 years of watching choices they made…love they shared…the character and integrity in which they lived. People who had limited contact with my parents might have known of them through stories and limited interaction, but they didn’t know them through continual experiences with them. I know the truths of their lives instead of just stories I have heard from others.

Peter played a pivotal role in testifying to the grace and ministry of Jesus after His death and resurrection. Three years prior he was fishing for a living when this stranger approached him and invited him to join His cause. There was something about that man named Jesus that was worth leaving everything behind. He walked with Him, ate with Him, laughed with Him, and watched the interaction of Jesus with the sick, the lost, and the sinful. Peter didn’t just hear stories of Jesus, he witnessed them. It is no doubt that when he wrote the communications to the churches that he was shepherding, he reminded them of this. His message was rooted in the truth of Jesus as it was not only taught by Jesus but exemplified by His walk while on earth. I’m confident God was fully aware that we needed something visible to take hold of if we wanted to truly walk in righteousness.

So many of our prayers are for God to show us His will for our lives, when in reality He already has…He showed us through the expression of Jesus. What pleases God are the things that were walked out on earth by the feet of Christ. God knew that without the Spirit of Jesus we would fall short so He shared that precious Holy Spirit with you and with me. We now have the same message and knowledge of Jesus within us to bear witness of His majesty. It is remarkable that the Excellent Glory loved us enough to give us the visible teaching of Christ. We can intimately know Jesus instead of just knowing of Him.