Alone…

Roll, roll me away,
won’t you roll me away tonight
I too am lost, I feel double-crossed
and I’m sick of what’s wrong and what’s right

‘Roll Me Away’ ~Bob Seger

What do you do when even the church betrays you?

When you are hurt by the ones that are supposed to have the medicine?

What do you do when

The ones that are meant to be safe

Are unsafe?

What do you do then...

If you’re anything like me, you hide.

You build a wall around yourself so that nothing and no one else can hurt you.

Yeah, thats what I do…

Thats what I’ve done.

The problem with that is it doesn’t work.

Building a wall from ever getting hurt again only leads to loneliness…

And being alone sucks.

As I am sitting here writing this the only living thing around me are plants.

Plants and the ticking of a clock somewhere off in another room…

(But the clocks not actually alive…it’s just making a sound)

~When you are physically hurt you go to a dr. to diagnose the pain and apply medicine,

When your soul is hurt you are supposed to go to God and God’s people

To help heal your souls pain.

But what do you do when the soul wounds are inflicted by the ‘soul healers’…

Whatcha-gonna-do?

Once-upon-a-time I lived in a city that was full of Christian churches.

Name your flavor.

It was there.

I was raised in the church so I knew how to act and how to fit in.

But alas, when I lived in that city I grew weary of acting,

And I decided to let my limp show.

Guess what?

My limp exposed all the other Christian’s limps,

But they didn’t know it.

My taking off my mask of ‘Perfection’,

Brought about tongue lashings and rejection of the cruelest kind.

The kind that’s done in the name of God.

This happened over 13 years ago,

And to this day I am still scared to come out of hiding.

I still shiver when I walk as a visitor into a church.

My smile still quivers when I greet people,

Because deep inside my heart,

The tape player plays back the old voices…

Voices of condemnation,

Voices of shame.

So I hide.

~And while I’ve been told,

to have a friend

You have to be a friend.

You have to smile and show yourself friendly,

And ask about others,

About their story…

But if I do that,

They might turn around

And ask about me about mine…

And I would have to reveal that I have a limp,

And face their scorn.

No,

It’s easier to hide.

While I may not be able to fit into the mask I once wore of ‘Perfection’

I at least do not have to place myself in a seat of inspection from others.

I’ve done that too.

I’ve thought, ‘well I might as well just tell them up front what my limp is

And they can reject me right away..’

But that didn’t work either.

(Sigh…)

What do I do with my limp?

What do I do with my poor, ragged, muddied soul?

I give it to God…

I give it to Him.

He alone holds the balm.

He alone mends my limp.

He alone holds my head to His chest.

He alone.

Alone.

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Who is God The Father…God the Papa……

It seems all I want to do lately is spend time alone with God.

I hear music and it makes me think of how He created music…

I see the blue, blue skies of Colorado,

And it makes me think of how He created them for me just this morning….

I sip my warm cup of coffee and smile…

Everything makes me think of Him.

Him.

God the Creator

God the Father…..

Once upon a time,

Not that long ago,

I used to ask who

God the Father was….

I knew Jesus.

I experienced the Holy Spirit,

But God the Father…

He seemed so distant…

So very, very far away…

He was the disapproving One,

The frowning One,

The disappointed-in-me One.

So, I stayed at a distance,

And spent time talking to Jesus.

Yes, they are Three-In-One,

But the only One I thought cared of the Triune,

Was Jesus.

Then one day, my heart heard Him called Papa.

Papa.

Heavenly Papa.

The name Heavenly Father still sounded aloof….

But Papa….

Papa is a name you run to,

Not run from.

My heart began to wonder about the Heavenly Papa…

My heart began to glance at Him….

My heart began to yearn for Him.

Wondering if this Heavenly Papa really did actually Love me…

And not frown on me…

And so quietly, every morning,

I began to dare to slip into my prayer room,

Gather my blanket over me,

Sip my cup of warm coffee,

And whisper…

“Papa, Heavenly Papa, Good Morning….I love you”

And I would feel His welcoming reply…

“I Love you too my precious daughter…..

I Love you too.”

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Letting Go…

I love this quote by Corrie Ten Boom;

“It is not my responsibility in what form God answers my questions for guidance.

That, is quite safe in His hands.”

This is a woman who was thrown into

a concentration camp during WWII.

What does she mean

“It is not my responsibility in what FORM God answers my questions for guidance?”

She is talking about herself…

She is talking about her own body,

Her own mind,

Her own spirit….

Isn’t she in control of herself?

But no!

She is saying God is in control

God is in control of her body,

God is in control of her mind,

God is in control of her spirit.

She reminds herself that

She is not her own.

She has been purchased with a

Mighty Price.

I forget this

Consequently I fight this.

Why do I pray and tell God what to do?

I give God options on how to answer my prayer

“Ok, God here is my request, You can answer it

This way, or this way, or this way.

My  natural self fights

And dismisses that

I am

Not

My

Own.

Self-Centered creature that I am.

In my heart I need to be under the

Benediction of God.

What does it take for a woman

That has been in a concentration camp

And has seen her family brutally killed by cruel guards

To utter those words up at the top of this page?

At what point did she trust God implicitly with her

Body, mind, and spirit?

Oh, how I long to give up my control of my life!

I want to run the race with One Goal in mind,

To Please God….

To Please God.

10,000 years from now

I want to look back on my little

Blip of life here on earth,

And smile.

I want to look back and see that

I trusted God.

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Bitter ~ Sweet

And we know that God causes all things

To work together for good

To those who love God,

To those who are called according to His purpose.

~Romans 8:28

Value of one ounce of Gold ~$1,151.00

Value of one ounce of Silver ~$15.31

Value of Painful Lesson ~Priceless…

“God Never Wastes Our Pain”

~Joyce Meyer

Oh how I have wished that my life would be free of pain….

Oh how I have longed for a life of zero regret…..

If only I had shut my mouth instead of opening it…

Or opened my mouth when I held it tight…..

Sometimes I inwardly cringe when I think of my wounds.

Wounds caused by me…cause me to wince.

I hurt less at wounds that others have given me;

But the wounds I have given out…..

That’s a whole other story.

“And we know that God causes ALL things to work together for our good…”

Hopefully I have learned….

Hopefully I am not on repeat…

I pray that today I am one day wiser than I was yesterday,

And tomorrow I will be one day wiser than today.

I do know this.

If it hadn’t been for the pain in my life,

I would only be half of the person I am today.

I remember the days when I was pretty confident that I was Good.

Those were my younger years……..much younger years.

In my 20’s I knew Everything.

In my 30’s I knew it All.

In my 40’s I wondered if I knew Anything.

And now in my 50’s…

I simply know God.

It was in my 20’s and 30’s that I caused the most pain…

Then In my 40’s, my pain came crashing down around me.

When I woke up in my 50’s, standing in the midst of the rubble,

Was God.

He never left me.

He simply stood right beside me thru the storm…

Yes, I have learned from my pain,

But had I never actually made the mistakes and went thru the pain,

I would still be as arrogant as I was in my 20’s…

And in my 30’s…

You see,  God Used My Pain to teach me a Priceless Lesson.

The lesson I learned was that I Needed Him….

If I had not fallen I would never know that I needed help.

I was raised to be Good.

I did all the right things.

One day God said, “Let me show her what is Really inside her heart…”

And when the dust had settled…

And all the anger and bitterness had spewed out.

I said, “Oh”

“I didn’t know that was inside me…”

God did.

He knew all along and Loved me enough to reveal it to me.

Even though I wince when I think of it,

And I wince when I think of all the pain I caused….

I value my Painful Lesson,

Priceless.

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Insults that Heal…

Father Jonathan Morris had this happen to him yesterday in NYC:

“Walking down Broadway and 22nd St just now, I ran into gay marriage parade.

Two men walked by and spat on me…

Oh well… I deserve worse.”

Here is another story I read about the same thing happening to Mother Teresa:

One day Mother Teresa went to a local bakery

to ask for bread for the starving children in the orphanage.

The baker, outraged at people begging for bread from him,

spat in her face and refused.

Mother Teresa calmly took out her handkerchief,

wiped the spit from her face and said to the baker,

“Okay, that was for me.

Now what about the bread for the orphans?”

The baker, shamed by her response,

gave her the bread she wanted.

I was having a rough morning this morning….

I woke up mad.

Mad about a situation that has my entire life been a trigger for me.

I tend to think that most triggers in people’s lives have to do with their inside more than their outside.

Anything that insults who they are on the inside, vs. merely the outside.

Being slapped in the face, and being spit upon hurts the flesh it’s true, but what it really brings out is the character that broods on the inside.

The Reaction is the True Person.

When you take a grape and apply pressure to the outside, what spills out is the inside.

What was spilling out of me this morning was not sweet grape juice, but instead was indignation at how I felt I was treated.

I was mad at the person who spit on me.

I had to go into my prayer room, and get right with God.

Over and over God says, ‘You will be forgiven to the EXTENT of your forgiveness’

I cannot expect God to forgive me my sins against Him (and EVERY sin is a sin against Him…)

And not forgive those who have sinned against me.

I am not saying that they have NOT sinned against me, of course they have…

What I am saying is their sin is no greater than mine, and to the extent I forgive them, God will forgive me.

I can honestly say that if two people had literally spit upon me this morning, I would not have simply wiped it off, but I would have been angry……

But now…

Two hours later……

After having my quiet time asking forgiveness from the Lord….

I have been shown that my heart is just as ugly as any others….

And that God allows the fiery trials in my life to not burn me up..

But instead, to purify me, and make me more like Him…

And less like me…

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Atheism is a Wound…

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
When they’re starving or freezing or so very poor

No one laughs at God
When the doctor calls after some routine tests
No one’s laughing at God
When it’s gotten real late
And their kid’s not back from the party yet

No one laughs at God
When their airplane start to uncontrollably shake
No one’s laughing at God
When they see the one they love, hand in hand with someone else
And they hope that they’re mistaken

No one laughs at God
When the cops knock on their door
And they say we got some bad news, sir
No one’s laughing at God
When there’s a famine or fire or flood

“Laughing With”

Regina Spektor

I have never met a true atheist.  I have met people that call themselves atheist, but when we talk, inevitably it came out that they were actually very angry at God because of some horrible, terrible wound they had suffered at some point in their life.

How can you be angry at something/someone you don’t even believe exists?…….

No.  It is much easier to deny God and somehow ‘slap Him in the face‘, then to admit that this Omniscient Being would allow tragedy to occur, and you walk away bleeding the rest of your life.

The Wounds……O The Wounds.

The absolute worst wounds are the wounds of the heart……..the wounds of intention…..the wounds that come from inside the church…….the very place you are supposed to feel safe…..

Safe.

I am so very careful to not cause pain, but of course since I am human I still do; but I honestly try not to intentionally, because I tell others that I am a Follower of Jesus, and I don’t want to mar His Name.  ~It’s the same reason I place no bumper stickers on my car about God.  If I cut someone off, or if I am driving rude, what name do you think that person behind me will see?

Anyhoo.

Jesus said, “I have come to bind up the brokenhearted”  And who exactly did Jesus have the most rejection from?

The sinners? (No, Jesus was called the Friend of the Sinners..)

It was the church of His day.  The beautiful, perfect, never-do-anything-wrong Pharisees.

And if we’re not careful, it will be the pharisees of today that will also lash out at us.

But who wants to be careful?  Who wants to walk perfectly, trying to impress some mere man?

I want to live for an audience of One.

I have learned, from all the many years of growing up in the church and seeing the politics behind the scenes, that the majority of the ones that call themselves Christians, are not Christ Followers at all.  They are only ones who want promotion, recognition, pats on the back from their fellow men.

I could have, at one point, made a decision, that all this God stuff is just fantasy because of what I saw with my eyes, and heard with my ears…

But somehow, deep inside of me, I KNEW that what I saw and heard wasn’t God……wasn’t God.

Now, my husband and I are going to the most authentic, real church we have ever been to.  It is called The Road.

But it has taken years to find.  Years.

I thank God for bringing us to The Road.

And, yet, I am very aware, that it is run by humans, and we are still surrounded by very human Followers of Christ, that have themselves been wounded by modern day pharisees, just like me, and some of them drive around with bumper stickers about God on their car while cutting other cars off…..

Atheism is a Symptom of a Great Wound that cut to the Deepest Part of the Heart.

And that kind of wound is one only Jesus can Bind Up and Heal.

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What’s Your Sin…

“Do not judge so that you will not be judged.

“For in the way you judge, you will be judged;

And by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.

“Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye…

But do not notice the log that is in your own eye?…

Matthew 7

I recently have been re-listening to Rich Mullins songs.

Every once in a while I come back to his songs….

They begin repeating themselves in my head, and I pay attention to the lyrics.

My all time favorite has to be the song, ‘We are Not as Strong as we Think we are.’

The lyrics go like this:

Well, it took the hand of God Almighty
To part the waters of the sea
But it only took one little lie
To separate you and me
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are

And they say that one day Joshua
Made the sun stand still in the sky
But I can’t even keep these thoughts
Of you from passing by
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are

We are frail
We are fearfully and wonderfully made
Forged in the fires of human passion
Choking on the fumes of selfish rage
And with these our hells and our heavens
So few inches apart
We must be awfully small
And not as strong as we think we are

And the Master said their faith was
Gonna make them mountains move
But me, I tremble like a hill on a fault line
Just at the thought of how I lost you
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are

And if you make me laugh well I know
I could make you like me
Cause when I laugh I can be a lot of fun
But we can’t do that I know that it is frightening
What I don’t know is why we can’t hold on
We can’t hold on

When you love you walk on the water
Just don’t stumble on the waves
We all want to go there somethin’ awful
But to stand there it takes some grace
‘Cause oh, we are not as strong
As we think we are

Amazing words…

About Amazing Grace…

So, the other day I was clicking thru one of the facebook pages dedicated to him and I ran across a comment by someone who called him up on a ‘sin’ that Rich was supposed to have done.

I don’t know if Rich did the sin or didn’t.

I honestly did not care.

Rich’s life was so incredibly transparent and honest, he was so humble and daily cried out for God’s Grace and Mercy, knowing full well he was not capable of earning Heaven on his own merits, that whether or not Rich did what this person accused him of, meant little to nothing in my eyes.

Sigh…

I could ask why people need to judge one another, like they are better then the next, but I already know the answer.

It is simple.

We have an enemy that whispers in our ears that we are undeserving of God’s Grace.  He whispers our shame and our deep dark secrets of our past in our mind and we allow them to swirl round about like a pinball machine pinging around over and over…

Because we truly do not believe that God adores us and has Completely forgiven us of our sins when we asked Him to, we feel the need to earn and work for our deliverance.

We have to point the finger at others sins. To draw the attention away from our own sins.

The idea of Unmerited, Unearned Grace is simply more then we can wrap our heads around…

And so the lie continues boinking around in our heads…..

This is one area of my life I am Sooooo familiar with.

I  know, because my sin used to be, and can still be, (if I am not constantly on the watch for it), judging others.

The concept of Grace and the Love of God is almost too big for me to grasp.

Why?

Because I Am Not as Strong, As I Think I Am……

And, my dear friend…

Neither are you.

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