The Picture

So, "Healer" by Hillsong came on this morning.

The song emphasizes how God is our healer, that we can trust Him, and that nothing is impossible for Him. He holds our world in His hand. But a few of the lyrics beat some meaning into me: "You're more than enough for me...Jesus, you're all I need."

We hear that all the time, right? At church, in our circles of friends…I probably write it in every entry.

Do we truly mean that?

I mean, what do we want? What do we really want?

You can answer that by looking at how you spend the majority of your free time, what you think about, what you put your life into. Motives, too. Not just what you want, but why do you want it?

I was reminded of a picture I'd had about a year ago. It wasn't a vision really, just a scene in my mind's eye. But it had stopped me from whatever I'd been doing and crashed into my mind. I couldn't scribble it into my journal fast enough.

In the picture I’m sitting on my bed in my room. (My room is like my sanctuary or haven. Even my sister knows not to come into it without knocking and getting permission.) So in the picture, I knew it represented my heart. Suddenly the door opens without a knock, and a bunch of people come in. They’ve got guitars and cameras and all kinds of stuff. They don’t acknowledge me; they just come in and sit in my chair, get on my computer, start playing music and taking pictures, talking and joking around with each other, making themselves at home. Still no one looks at me.

The room is now crowded. At this point I know who they are; I recognize each person as one I’d put my hope in, put in the place where only the Lord should be in my life. I’d looked to them to satisfy me, to meet needs that God alone can fill. It’s an assortment of people, friends, family members, guys…

I sit there watching them, heartbroken at the number of them, still holding onto a few hurts because they’d never been able to fill those places in me. I’m not saying that we don’t need people in our lives; we certainly do. But I’d given importance and priority to them in various areas, places which should’ve only belonged to God.

Then Jesus shows up in the doorway, and he’s looking straight at me. This may sound cheesy or cliché or whatever, but I don’t know how else to describe it… Sitting on my bed and looking at him looking at me, I knew that he was all I wanted. All I’d ever wanted. More than I’d ever wanted, more than I knew I was ever capable of wanting.

He turns to go, but he looks over his shoulder and says quietly, yet I hear it over the noise of the room, “You coming?”

I don’t even think. I jump down from my bed and shove my way through the people and sprint out the door after him. And I don’t look back.

I was thinking about what people want, what we look for. It’s not hard to come up with an answer. Look at people’s lives. Look at the movies that sell. Look at the news.

I want, too. But you know what I want more than those things? I want to be able to say, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” with absolute honesty. I want to know, truly know, that He’s enough. I want to be ok with being single for the rest of my life, as long as I have the intimacy with God I was made for. I want to be ok with never traveling again, as long as I know he’s got my world in his hands.

I'm not advocating killing our desires; I know God puts certain ones in us for a reason. I'm simply realizing that we have this mindset where we don't trust Jesus to come through, that we don't believe he really can meet our every need.

“You’re more than enough for me.” I want to know what that means, what that looks like lived out. I want it to be true of me.

Up the Sunbeam

Self-pity is a trap, a downward spiral. And it's such a LIE. I've caught myself lately entertaining thoughts that should have no place in my life, thoughts focusing on the negative things going on. And although there's nothing wrong with taking our burdens to the Lord and being honest with Him, it's a problem when it becomes a whining party of complaint and woe-is-me.

So again with my list-making.

For That Which I am Thankful:

relationship with God

family that loves me

friends

health

bed

shelter

clean water

enough food

showers

living in a place where I can freely worship God

use of my senses

ability to walk

breath in my lungs

education and the chance to further it

people's prayers

truth

church

books

opportunities to travel

memories/experiences

ability to speak

my own room

May this list grow every single day of my life.

"Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise." Psalm 100:4

I read this verse and I picture thanksgiving as a literal key that opens His gates. So think about what's at stake here: experiencing the presence and peace of God. We can't enter his presence with an ungrateful attitude or while we're wallowing in self-pity. Is our pity-party worth such a loss?

"Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever." Psalm 118:1

If only we could come to a place where we could sincerely say with gratitude that no matter our circumstances, God has not changed; he is good and he always will be. I'm grateful that the Lord is not corrupt, cruel, egotistical, a liar... He is GOOD.

These blessings God graces our lives with are not just to make us happy. Gratitude is an opportunity to praise God for who He is. In his Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer, C.S. Lewis wrote, "I have tried...to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don't mean simply by giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I meant something different... Gratitude exclaims, very properly, 'How good of God to give me this.'  Adoration says, "What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations (sudden, striking displays of brilliance) are like this!'  One's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun..."

I pray this encourages you to thank God for the blessings you've received and to wonder at the type of Being He is to have created them. Don't fall into the trap of self-pity. Cling to the truth of who God is, and thank him for it.

Making Plans

Jeremiah 29:11. "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

I'm going to be really blunt in this post. I have had the hardest time with that verse for as long as I can remember. I hear it and I have cynical, skeptical thoughts. I criticize the one who quotes it, saying "They're taking it out of context. That verse was written to exiles in Babylon; it was meant for a specific people at a specific time."

I read it last night and those thoughts started again. "It's so overused, it's lost its meaning, and frankly, it doesn't seem true." I was pretty honest with God, telling Him that I just can't believe it. I thought about the hard things I've gone through. I thought about the devastations some of my family and friends have endured. Their loved ones dying at a young age. Incurable cancer. What do those things have to do with a future and a hope? "Plans to prosper you and not to harm you"? Dying seems pretty harmful to me.

So last night I read it with my usual frame of mind, wondering why I was even in Jeremiah 29. (You hear "Jeremiah 29" and automatically think of verse 11, right?) But as I read it, everything changed. I LOVE how God speaks through His word.

I heard His thoughts in my own: "This verse isn't about you, you're right. But it's not about the exiles either."

He stopped there, but it hit me so hard. That verse is about Him and his character. He showed me that even if those words weren't directed at me specifically, that is what He is like. He is a God who makes plans for His people. That verse is not about the exiles and their futures, their hope...it's about the kind of God who plans and dreams and wants what's best for His people, who sends a message to them in their exile, when they're furthest away from any type of normalcy or safety or comfort. It's about the kind of God who wants us to seek Him and find Him, the kind of God who promises He will hear when we cry out.

Yeah, so that passage doesn't have a "Dear Shannon" in front of it. But He said those words and meant them. That's who He is.

If we could read the Bible while remembering that God is the main character, not us, it would mean what it's supposed to mean. It's all about Him and who He is. Jesus didn't just come to die for us; he says in John 18:37, "For this reason I came into the world, and for this I was born, to testify to the truth..." He came to clear up our notions of God, to show us the truth of who He really is. He showed that with His life.

God said those things about a group of people one time, but He doesn't change. His heart is the same. He's got us in His hands. And we've got to realize that although circumstances may look bleak and hopeless in this fallen world, He can and will use them for good and bring us forth as gold. Even if our hope and future pertains to heaven and not on this earth, that's a hope and future that we don't deserve and is more than enough.

Filled to Be Emptied

I was looking through my old journals and read a post from March of this year. I'd been in Greece a month. It caught my eye because it mentions something I'd been talking about with a friend about half an hour ago. She'd asked me what some of my goals were, what I want to do, and we got to talking about justice issues like abortion and human trafficking and the poverty in the world, both physically and spiritually. We talked about our trips to Russia and India, how things seen there just broke our hearts. I talked about how I don't understand why I am safe in a free country, blessed beyond belief, in an amazing house with a loving family (we have our issues, but who doesn't?). I made it into this world without being aborted. I was never abused. I was never sold to a brothel at age 8. Why me, here, and why them, there, and in those situations?

This is what I'd written in March:

I know you hold the world in your hands and that you have determined the times and places where we should live. I just don't understand why I have this life and they have that one. Why have you blessed me so tremendously? These thoughts are tearing me up. How would you have me spend my time on this earth? I want to help and to bless those who need help. "I know I'm filled to be emptied again / this seed I've received I will sow" -- Desert Song, Hillsong.

The only answer I can think of for why I'm here, with this life, and not there, with that life, is because I'm meant to help in some way, to show the love I've been shown, to give what I've been given. And this doesn't necessarily mean I'm supposed to go to other countries. America is a place of darkness just like the rest of the world, a place desperately in need of the pure and transforming love of God.

My prayer is that I can take every blessing I've received and pour it back out as an offering to the Lord that really counts, that really moves his heart. And people are on his heart. The oppressed and brokenhearted are on his heart.

We have nothing that has not been given to us. I hope this encourages you to take inventory of what you've been blessed with and to seek God's heart on how you can use it to bless someone else.

Let Justice Roll Down

One of my best friends gave me some verses last night that ripped into me... Isaiah 1:11-17.

"What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who has required of you this trampling of my courts? Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations- I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am wear of bearing them. When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourseslves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause."

I'm not sure what I'll be doing later in life. One thing I know I will not do: get comfortable in a half-hearted, tepid walk labeled "Christianity", where I do just enough to get by or to appease my conscience. The church needs more than tradition and ceremony, more than a shallow "hey, how are you?". The world needs more than "here's a tract and some spare change." Not that those things are wrong, but if the heart behind it is not sincere, if it's not done out of love, then it's trash, less than nothing, like Paul says in 1 Corinthians.

Another passage I love: Micah 6:6-8.

"With what shall I come before the LORD,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?"
He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

In every action and thought and word, my heart has got to have pure motives. I wanna be genuine. What's worse than turning your back on someone who needs help? I'd venture to say, helping them in pretense or just to look good in front of other people. Pour yourself out for others in sincerity, or don't pour yourself out at all.

People see what we do; God sees why we do it.