Before I knew you...

Wow! I love spending time with God and my son. The Lord blessed me with an incredible experience with Christopher yesterday and it meant so much to me. We did our Bible reading for the day and then we did our little devotion that focuses on just one verse. Now, before I tell you the verse, let me preface this by saying that I am still in the process of embracing Christopher's diagnosis of Aspberger's along with a host of learning disabilities. And after much prayer, I don't believe that there will be a miracle of healing for him. I believe the miracle has already been done in the person that he is. I believe that the depth of feeling and the connecting that he has with God and the heart that he has for people and for missions is in fact a miracle. And I know that God has something wonderful in mind for him.

So yesterday our verse was Jeremiah 1:5 "I knew you before I formed you in your mother's womb. Before you were born I set you apart and appointed you as my prophet for the nations." This wasn't my devotion for the day, this is the devotion that Chris and I do together. All I could say was YES!!! Absolutely! Then I got to have a wonderful conversation with my son. I had been struggling with how much to tell him about his diagnosis or what to tell him, how much he needs to know and I prayed and asked God to show me how to tell him and what he needed to know. So in this moment I was able to tell him that his brain works a little differently than some other people's and he learns in different ways. But no matter how his brain works, God planned it in advance. His brain is special just as he is special. He is special because God has set him apart. His brain isn't different because God made a mistake, his brain his different because God planned it that way before he was ever born. And his eyes lit up with the joy of the Lord and said "Really?"

Yes Chris, God has set you apart for a special purpose. He made you special and unique and wonderful. God created you perfectly. Remember to always follow His leading for your special purpose and everything will be fine. He was so excited that day. Instead of feeling inadequate, he felt unique. Instead of feeling stupid, he felt special. Instead of feeling less than, he felt exalted. I can't wait to see his life unfold as he serves God and we see His purpose lived out in Chris.

"I knew you before I formed you in your mother's womb. Before you were born I set you apart and appointed you as my prophet for the nations" Thank you God for creating us perfectly.

Heavy lifting

I was reading in one of my favorite books today and the discussion centered on Proverbs 10:29 "The way of the Lord is strength for the upright."
I love that verse! I always thought about how the Lord strengthens us for the tasks He brought to us. There's so much in life that we need strength for. Especially in this economy, we may need strength for to open the statement of our ever dwindling 401k or even just to find a job that will provide a steady paycheck let alone health care or 401k. We need strength to face the daily battles in life of health or strained relationships, our latest diet or our new year's resolutions, and we certainly need strength as followers of Christ to live in a way that honors God.

But as I was reading this book, the author began to illustrate something she needs strength with. She told about how she's getting older and more forgetful and she travels a lot so she carries a gigantic bag with everything she may ever possibly need, she'll be set for the zombie apocolypse. And then she realizes she needs her cell phone so she goes in search of her cell phone. If you are a woman, you can already picture the scene unfolding as she finds everything from chapstick to her stun gun but no phone, dumps everything out on the floor in search of the elusive contraption and then suddenly realizes she's forgotten what she's looking for. Stop laughing, you've done the same thing yourself! Then moments later her phone rings and guess what...it was in her pocket all along. Frustrated and grumpy is how she now answers her phone and it's all the fault of this enormous purse that she has to lug around. It's larger than she is, it weighs down one side of her body, even makes her walk a little lopsided.

Let's face it! We all have our oversized bags. We've got baggage. Stuff we carry around because we think we'll need to get back to it at some point or we just can't let it go. And boy don't we need strength to lug it around! But just remember, when we're carrying around such weighed down baggage, it's hard to remain upright. Now read the verse again, "the way of the Lord is strength for the upright".

Lay down your baggage, give it to the Lord. Trust that He will help provide what you need in the moment, He will strengthen you for troubles that surround you today, He will guide you where you need to go and you don't need to carry around yesterdays baggage to get there.

Matthew 11:28-30 Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

2 Cor 12:9 My grace is sufficient for you, My strength is made perfect in weakness.

As I prepare to start the 21 day Daniel fast with my church, I will choose to lay down my baggage, clean out my bags, allow Him to lighten my load so that I can be upright and allow Him to strengthen my soul.

What are you carrying around with you? What weighs you down? I encourage you to take and leave it with the Lord.

Holland?

There is a poem written by Emily Perl Kingsley that talks about what it's like to raise a child with a disability and that's what I want to discuss today. Now, if you are thinking, oh this topic isn't for me today because I don't have a child with a disability, stop right there and continue to read, you may be surprise where I end with this and may find it's for you after all.

First the poem, she writes that having a baby is like planning a trip to Italy. You get prepared, pack the right things, get the tour books and plan all the sites you are going to see, learn some new phrases. You're excited! All your friends are going to Italy and talking about the trip they're planning or the one they've already been on. You can't wait! You board the plane and the excitement mounts and finally you land and the flight attendant says "welcome to Holland". You start to freak out because you're supposed to be in Italy. The flight attendant says sorry but there's been a change. You aren't going to land in Italy, Italy has been canceled. You're in Holland, enjoy your stay. You are freaking out, your friends went to Italy. You know Italian phrases. You know what to visit in Italy. You have prepared all your life for Italy. You don't know anything about Holland and you don't want to be there. So what do you do? Well, you have to buy new guide books, maybe learn a few new phrases. There's pain involved here, because you wanted to go Italy and the pain of not going there won't ever go away. But if you stay in that place of grieving the loss of Italy, you will miss the beauty of Holland. You will miss the tulips and the windmills, you'll miss the Rembrandts, the people you would have never met, food you would have never tasted, and the beautiful experiences you would have never had if you hadn't gone the Holland. If you spend your life grieving the loss of Italy, you'll miss the extravagant beauty of Holland.

Now, having said that...don't we all have our own detour to Holland? You may not have a child with a disability but we all have our own Holland. We all have a place we were supposed to go, a dream we dreamed of for years that for whatever reason, wasn't fulfilled. We all have a detour. Some of us have let our detour take us to a place where we spend our lives feeling sorry for ourselves and making those around us miserable because we didn't get to go to Italy and we miss out on the beauty of our Holland experience. We spend our time grieving our Italy and don't embrace the fact, that Italy was our dream, our plan, not God's and that God's dream is far greater than ours ever could be. Jeremiah 29:11 says "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future". If you continue to read in that chapter it goes on to say to seek the Lord with our whole heart and that he will bring us back from captivity and restore us. Now if I relate this to our Italy and Holland chat today, this is what I hear. We planned to go to Italy because the world said Italy was the place to go and the place to be but it was never God's plan. We held ourselves in captivity with that plan and judged Italy to be the beautiful place through the world's standards. But that's not where God wants us to be. We were actually on a detour and he is merely bringing us back to the plan that He laid out for our lives. Italy was the detour, Holland was the original destination.

So whatever your Italy is, may I suggest learning to embrace Holland knowing that God's plan is greater. He will never harm us, He will never forsake us and He will show us the beauty of His plan...His Holland.

Heart Blocker

Well, hello again. I know it's been a while but I recently had a friend tell me I needed to get off my duff and start writing again. So here I am, once again, with a renewed commitment to embrace the writing I love so much. I'll start with my favorite story of late involving my youngest son.

My Christopher and I pray together a lot. So on this one day not so long ago, we found ourselves in my car heading to the store and guess what, we were praying again. And I asked him who he wanted to pray for and his response was that he wanted to pray for his friends...even the ones who are mean to him. Now my first thought was, if they're mean to you why do you call them friends, but I didn't voice that thought because I was just so proud he had managed to master a concept I had not mastered. My next thought came out in the form of a question, why do you want to pray for them? (still very curious as to how he has managed to get this concept). His answer to me was so profound it is still ringing in my ears so listen carefully. "Because I love them, their hearts are just blocked".

Wow! My son just blew me out of the water with that one. How, at his age, did he get that? For those of you who don't know, my son was recently diagnosed with Aspberger's which is part of the autism spectrum. With all of these labels that he's just been given I am chosing to focus on what I know to be true about my son. He is creative, he is caring, he is loving and he loves life and God. He has such an innocent and pure love for God that it amazes me and there are so many times that God grants him incredible wisdom that just shocks me. So when he gave that answer I had to ponder it. Why, because God says for us to come to him as little children and that made me think of Christopher. He is that little child. Not the already jaded elementary age kids we see too often today but the innocent child that still believes that at the very heart people are still good, that God's plans truly are better than our own, that God truly can do the impossible and prays until something miraculous happens knowing that no matter how long it takes-something miraculous will happen, that he is treasured and loved by all around him and by a God that thinks he's priceless, and a child who doesn't hesitate to run and jump into the arms of his Abba Father.

This same child who knows that even though his friends may be mean to him, their hearts are just blocked. Unlike us, because we immediately seek to judge these people don't we? We judge them instead of considering their back story. Maybe their having a really bad day or lost their job or lost a loved one. Maybe they've had a bad life and have hurts and trauma that has hardened their heart. Whatever their story, we don't think about it, we just judge them and write them off. I once had walls around my heart (truth be known, there are still some standing but they're smaller now and have some holes, their crumbling slowly) but I used to have so many walls, no one could see around them and scaling them was near impossible and for years, no one even tried. Until some people came along and cared about my back story. They cared about why I had walls and they made the effort to be the visible expression of Jesus in my life. They loved me in spite of my walls, they cared for me, they prayed for me, they considered me a friend and they kept working at tearing down my walls until one day like the Berlin wall they crashed and they forever changed the trajectory of my life.

You can have that impact on someone's life. When you make the commitment to come to the Lord as a little child, that's one of the things you're commiting to. Not judging others, simply loving them and being the expression of Jesus in their life. You are saying you will choose to believe the best about them even when it doesn't seem as if they deserved it. If you think back, someone came into your life and did that for you, even though you didn't deserve it. When you do that, you can forever change the trajectory of their life. Who in your life do you know that you've judged unfairly, not knowing or caring about their back story? Stop blocking your heart and seek to help them stop blocking theirs. I'm so glad someone did that for me.

He left

You may be familiar with an old story about how Jesus is our shepherd. And a good shepherd, when one sheep is lost, will leave the other 99 and go in pursuit to find the lost sheep. As I read yesterday, a thought struck me. I have been that one.

There was a time in my life and probably a time in yours when I felt certain that God has left me. My life was a mess, I couldn't feel His presence, I was alone. As I read the story about the one sheep that He went in search of I realized, He hadn't left me, I had left Him. Now, before you think further, I already knew I was the one that had walked away. That part wasn't new to me. But the thoughts that followed were. I had turned away from God. I had put my earbuds in my ears and cranked up the volume on the ipod. I couldn't hear Him because I wasn't listening. I couldn't feel Him because I was dead inside.

And as I look back, I can see His pursuit. He was pursuing me. I couldn't hear or see or feel Him and didn't want to and yet, He pursued me. I was the one lost sheep and He would do anything to bring me back. There were people that He put in my life that He used as His hands. I didn't recognize them as Jesus at the time, but that's who they were. Someone who, seeing I had a crying baby and a cart full of groceries, let me go in front of them in line. Someone who offered to buy me a cup of coffee and offered a shoulder to lean on. Someone who spoke words of comfort, encouragement and strength and yet didn't preach at me. Someone who called just to say "I've missed seeing you". These people were all Jesus. They showed me His love, His kindness, His forgiveness, His comfort. He pursued me.

Today, I am far from where I was back then, but I'm sure you know there are always those days. I am starting to feel a little worn down and getting a little sick and it began to distract me. I started thinking things like, "really, I'm getting sick again!". I started to feel discouraged. And I tried to pull up my boot straps and get back on track. When suddenly, there was a knock at the door. When I answered I saw a bouquet of flowers sitting on my porch with a thank you card unsigned. The love of Jesus went straight to my soul. I don't know who they were from, or what I had done to deserve a thank you card, let alone flowers, but they came at a time when I needed some encouragement. He pursued me.

Each week Pastor Chris tells us to go out and "Be the life of Jesus to our world". We are to do that because God is in pursuit of someone who has wandered away from the flock. Maybe they've wandered far, maybe they just got a little distracted, but He wants to use us to pursue them.
Thanks for listening.

Do You Remember?

Deut. 1: 29-32 "Then I said to you, "Do not be terrified or afraid of them. The Lord your God who goes before you, He will fight for you according to all He did for you in Egypt before your eyes, and in the wilderness where you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a man carries his son, in all the way that you went until you came to this place. yet, for all that, you did not believe the Lord your God..."

I was reading that passage today and though about all the times the Lord has asked me to do something and I said no, I don't want to, or doubted that I was capable and that God would provide a way for it to happen. Have you ever been there? Have you ever let your fear and doubt stop you? I remember when I was first asked to speak at one of our women's meetings. I had known that God was sending me in that direction. And yet, when the time came, I was scared. All of these doubts flooded my mind. What right do I have to teach women about God? Have I prepared enough? Do I really have a word from God to share with these women or am I fooling myself? Has God really prepared me? I have to think that's what the Israelites went through. They knew God was moving them in the direction of the promised land, but when they got there and God told them to take the land, they got scared.

They didn't look at God's track record and trust Him. They just let their fear stop them from doing what God had called them to do. And that angered God. It made Him so angry that He no longer allowed them to take the land as a consequence to their rebellion and disobedience. The next generation took the land.

When you are facing something that is scary, do you look at God's track record? Trust me, He has an amazing track record. In spite of the bad that has happened in my life I can look back and and see how God was working in that situation. He never left me. He has always been there, He has saved, He has prepared me, and He has been faithful.

So the next time you are afraid and consider letting your fear keep you from doing what God wants you to do; Look back at what He has done in your life. Then move forward and go into the promised land that He has prepared for you.

This is the stuff

I was driving down the road on Sunday and heard these familiar lyrics "I lost my keys in the great unknown and call me please, 'cuz I can't find my phone" These lyrics rang oh so true to my heart that day. I am routinely losing my keys or my phone or something else I put down for just a moment that seemed to have grown legs and ran off just to tease me. But today, they all happened in the same day and this song touched me at my very core. Saturday night the family went out, my husband drove and so I put my keys in the dash rather than putting them in my purse like I should have. So Sunday morning when I'm leaving for church and my husband has long since gone to the race track, I reach for my keys and get that familiar sickness in my stomach. My keys are in my car. In my dash to be exact. My car is locked. My husband has the only spare. Inside for just a moment I feel the need to scream "NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!" but I maintained my composure and thought for a moment. My nearly 20 year old son (how is that even possible, that I have a child who is 20, surely I'm not that old), has gone to California so he can't help me. Oh yeah! He rode with someone and I do have a spare to his car, I'll take his car to church. Great! When I got to church, I shared about my minor problem with a friend because I was so thankful that God had already orchestrated the solution to the problem. This friend immediately told me anytime that happened, give them a call, they'd be glad to give me a ride. And I couldn't help but think how wonderful that God always has a back up plan for me. I came home and walked up to the door to find that I had locked the front door. Of course I locked the door. Why wouldn't I lock the door? Unfortunately, my keys are in my locked car still. So I stop and think, ok God, what's your backup plan. Oh yeah, I have a keypad for the garage, i'll just punch in the code and enter through that way. Which I did and it worked wonderfully. I went to the store and saw someone who's battery had died and thought, hey I have jumper cables in the trunk. So I stopped to see if I could help. In no time they were back on the road. I sat realizing, I was just God's backup plan for someone else. And that's when I heard the song. Things like these happen for a reason. These are the little things that drive us absolutely crazy. They aren't major issues in life, they're more like little irritating things that at times can seem to make life unbearable. But these really are the things God uses. These are things God uses to break us of our impatience, our tendancy to get frustrated over the little things, our self centeredness perhaps. These are things God uses to grow us and mold us and also to show us that He always has a solution. He is always there. He is faithful in the little things and He is faithful in the big things. And if we can really get that and understand it, when the big things come, we can rest easy knowing that the King of Kings and Lord of Lords has our best interest at heart and is there with us. He already has a plan in place and He is in complete control. It may not seem like it when we look at it with out human eyes, it may not be what we would chose, but He really does have everything under control. So if you are trusting Him in the little things today, thank God for His faithful presence. And if you are trusting Him in the big things, thank God for his faithful presence. He is there with you and He will see you through and on the other side, you will be a better person, more like His image. And know, this is the stuff he uses. "in the middle of my little mess, I forget how big I'm blessed, this is the stuff that gets under my skin, and I've gotta trust, you know exactly what you're doing, it may not be what I would chose but this is the stuff you use!"