Gifts from Jesus

If stress is an odor, then this week reeked of it. My emotions were out of whack, the mountain of laundry loomed ever larger, and my job felt like I was trying to juggle 200lb dumbells. Wearing a blindfold. And rollarskates.

It's interesting: Jesus didn't take away the situation. I still have a to-do list longer than the Amazon. Instead, he reached down into it, purposely, thoughtfully, and left me some beautiful gifts as if to say, "I am still here. I still love you. You are known and treasured by Me. Trust me."

Gift #1: Check out the picture! I opened the mailbox earlier this week to find an envelope from my parents. Inside, was a gift card to Wally World for twenty smackeroos and instructions to buy plants for my garden. My heart craves fragrant, green, growing things, and Jesus knows it.

Gift #2: I found a beautiful $40 sweater marked down to $10. Once I used the $9.47 gift card that I had saved from Christmas, I bought it for only fifty-three cents! Jesus knows that I love to feel beautiful while saving $$.

Gift #3: It stopped raining this morning just as I mounted my bike to ride to class. Jesus cares about the fact that I forgot an umbrella.

Gift #4: My sweet husband folded clothes for me the other night. Aww....

Gift #5. My boss called to tell me that one huge source of work stress is NOT due today, as I had feared, but at the end of March! At that news, I could almost feel my nerves unknotting themselves. Jesus is my Shepherd. He gives me rest.

A season of weddings

"There is a time for everything and a season for every purpose under heaven."

So true. And it just so happens that the season through which I'm trekking is chock full of weddings. I like this season, partly because I am a hopeless romantic who will never get over that Moment when the bride comes into view on her father's arm. I take a genuine delight in observing the groom's facial expressions because I always get a little glimpse of the joy Jesus must take in us, His bride. (And of course, I also love the fact that there is cake!)

Tonight, my own (still very new) husband and I attended the nuptial celebration for a dear friend we have known for almost four years. She was like a sunrise, so vibrant and glowing and full of excitement that your heart melted to look at her. Only seven and a half months past my own wedding, I know what she must have been feeling: the sense of momentousness, of joy and disbelief, and of the rich meaning attached to every part of the day. You just want time to pause, so you can drink the joy fully and enshrine the moment in memory forever.

This year, I will stand with two-possibly three-brides as they covenant with their loves to be faithful until death.

I read a Proverb yesterday that asked "...a faithful man, who can find?" I love my husband, and can't imagine ever leaving him, but unfaithfulness is not always so drastic. Sometimes it looks like emotional distance, or a subtle shift in allegiance to some other person or even an occupation. In the words of the pastor at the ceremony today, it can be "anything that obstructs your ability to love your spouse the way Christ loves the church." I am totally capable of that, and I won't be so naive as to think that I could never have an even worse fall.

Without Christ helping me, I can't be faithful. But with the Faithful One, all things are possible.

A New Outlet

Blue watercolor flowers, 1/24/12

Who knew dabbing color onto paper could be so much fun!? A few inexpensive paints and supplies with Christmas money, a Pinterest picture of someone else's artwork to inspire me, and voila: pretty art to make people smile.

I feel like I am discovering a new friend.  Hello, watercolor.  I like you. :-)

Is the church healthy?

This is the provocative question on the poster for this semester's AMCF rally. Catchy, huh?  But instead of focusing on a complicated and potentially divisive issue like whether or not the global Church is doing a good job, the real crux of what we'll be talking about is found in the brackets below it:

 "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but the lost." (Jesus)

I have to be honest; when I first read the verse in brackets, I felt a little let-down. A good discussion about whether the church was healthy or not could be interesting! I was already hoping that they would make a good defense to show that for all its little foibles, Protestant Christianity was doing ok, on the whole.

But the more I thought about it, I realized that the point is not to prove that we are ok, but to admit that we are not.

There were plenty of "good", religious people in Jesus' day.  They knew the law backwards and forwards, and they followed it as well as the next guy--or better. One night, a lot of them went to a dinner party with this new teacher named Jesus.  The religious man who hosted the party might have felt proud to have such a famous person at his house. I can also guess that he may have been hoping for some kind of blessing, or some kind of recognition for being such a decent guy.  I don't know, but I can surmise.
But I don't have to guess what his reaction was when she showed up. Who let her in? Such an immoral woman--in my house!  He was disgusted, outraged, and apalled. And then, horrified, he saw that she was going strait for the guest of honor, kneeling down, and making a scene with a showy bottle of perfume and her hair all over his feet. Ugh.

Jesus, however, saw her heart. He saw that she, out of all the people in that self-righteous gathering, was the only one who knew she was sick, in need of a Savior, a Healer.

The Beginning of the End

I'm making myself laugh because there is something ironic about giving my first blog post a title like, "The Beginning of the End." No, I'm not having a mid-life crisis, and I'm not a goofy doomsday prophet. But when I was trying to capture my feelings about starting my last semester of college, it just seemed to fit. This was the first week of the last semester, and I'll never have a first week like that again. I'll have other firsts, but not a first day of school first, and it's nostalgic and bittersweet to think about it.

I have only three classes: Political Communication, American Lit Post-WWII, and Spanish 202.  Even though one of them is writing-intensive, so far, none of them threaten to eat my life. In fact, I was telling Jordan just yesterday that it feels...a little too easy?  Wow, I'm almost afraid to write that, as if I'm tempting them to become the hardest classes of my life! But really, I feel something like a baby bird who is almost too big for its shell. I'm 24 and married, but the students sitting around me in class have barely left their teen years. College has grown me and challenged me, but the assignments that would have felt like a two-ton weight when I was 21 no longer seem weighty at all. Maybe God wants to stretch me in other areas than academics this semester.  :) 

He's been doing that a lot lately, and to tell the truth, school is easier than this type of inner confrontation!  I entered the Christmas break with a big wad of anxiety in my gut about my future. To grad school or not to grad school? To do ministry or not? To strike out and get a job in my field or not? With graduation looming and profs nudging me toward a master's degree, it felt like an internal mandate to get my life figured out.

A month later, however, my heart is content to rest in Jesus and just wait for him to lead. And this is NOT my own doing; it's Jesus, showing me my crud-ugly pride in my own accomplishments and ability to do things on my own, showing me his power to direct and guide me, and gently but firmly bringing me to my knees.
 Here is the bald truth that I now recognize: I can't make myself a "success".  If I try, I will constantly be looking sideways, measuring myself by the women of God around me. I'll be my own harshest critic--and believe me, I'm brutal when it comes to me.

But our God is so gentle with me. He is so gentle with us.  He loves us too much to leave us to ourselves, and He knows that the things I cling to--pride, people's approval, achievements--are really poisonous to the beautiful things He wants to do in me.

Please be praying for my heart to be soft.