Trending on Twitter: #IfYourDayIsBadAlwaysRemember

  Every time I have tried to come up with a weekly blog post, I either get bored of the idea before I start it, or I get bored of posting entries so similar they all start to blend to together. Lately though, I have been inspired, to try a weekly blog post that does not involve an overload of photographs. Especially as my photo-heavy posts have become less and less in the past few months. Only next week will tell how committed I am to this literary venture.

  I present for your reading pleasure (or displeasure if you do not like my ramblings) “Trending on Twitter”. Every week I am going to pick a trending hashtag and write about it. There were a couple of interesting ones to choose from today, especially since the Democratic National Convention is underway this week. I think, though, I have written enough about politics this year, and I do not really want to tackle a major social issue on short notice. Politics and feminism might be interesting subjects, but they tend to be inflammatory as well.

  For this week’s entry, I will be using #IfYourDayIsBadAlwaysRememer. I am pretty sure someone on Twitter’s creative staff came up with that hashtag to promote positivity on the internet. There are plenty of ways to encourage people in 140 characters or less.

  It would be easy, and incredibly clichéd, to say life is good and seeing the world as wonderful place is only a matter of whether or not you see the glass as half full.  There are times are times when that is certainly true. At other times, days are bad, and that is okay. Life is not a Macy’s Day parade. We have to cry, and feel pain, and get sick, and go to funerals. The world is a messed up place, and inescapable bad days will come and they will have to be endured. Pizza and rock-and-roll will not ultimately make anyone’s sorrow go away.

  As a Christian, I know I will have bad days. And I know that God is with me to carry me through my struggles. I also know there will be an end to the pain and sorrow on this earth: I can look to Christ’s coming as that end. I am going to have bad days. There will be many times in this life when I am not happy. But when I have bad days, I can look beyond my unhappiness to the eternal joy waiting on the other side.

God Does Not Need You to be Right

  As long as the church has been around, its members have fought. There are multiple instances in the New Testament where its writers address the quarrels that have sprung up among the believers. In the two thousand years the church has been around, not much has changed. Christians still disagree over many things. Those disagreements lead to arguments. And arguments usually do not lead to the resolution of the disagreement in question. They usually end by infuriating those involved.
  There is, in all men, a deep-seated desire to be right. While it at times springs from a passion for truth or a love of justice, it more often than not stems from pride. In his book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis says of pride, "There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. The more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others." Pride is ungodly, and it is ugly.
  Christians are allowed to disagree. They are people and so it is bound to happen. However, Christians are supposed to be known by their love for one another. This means, if they must disagree, they have to do so civilly. While there is certainly a fair share of examples of violent disagreement among church members, believer's squabbles tend to be polite.
  With those polite squabbles, there are many times when believers disagree on rather unimportant things. And they walk away from their disagreement believing they are right and the other is "Oh so wrong!" Then they will chalk the other's short-coming up to a lack of good theology, or weak spirituality, or ignorance, because naturally, they are superior. Not through any merit of their own, of course, but because God has seen fit to show them that much more grace. When it boils down to it though, they are right, and the other person is wrong.
  There are times, when I think I need to be right to prove that God is right. And I do not need to be right, because God does not need that from me. He needs me to follow Him. To obey and honor and glorify Him and love Him with every fiber of my being. But He does not need me to prove anything to anyone for Him. If anything, He needs me to open to the possibility that I am wrong a lot of times, and that others might be right. Being a Christian means kicking over my holy cows, loving God with all my heart and loving my neighbor as myself. All at the cost of my pride. And many times at the cost of my being right

because.

The word hurts because it is broken.

Its sharp shards tear at our hearts.

And life feel uncontrollable and big and messy.

Because life is not in our hands.

We do not run the show.

We are interactive spectators.

All our attempts will not make it eternally better.

Because the world is passing away.
That is the comfort.
Just as it is the curse.
The world is passing away.
Because it is followed by a glory much greater.
At the end of it all there is something else.
Something to look to.
Something to hope for.
Because of hope, going forward is possible.

No One is Going to Hell Just Because They are Gay

  God is perfect and righteous and holy. As the Creator of the universe, His standard is ultimate and inescapable. The fact that He allows us to argue with Him in no way gives us the right to set ourselves up as His equal. What He says is right and wrong is right and wrong.
  There is often a difference between being who God called us to be, and "just being who we are." Mankind is made in the image of God, but mankind is also fundamentally flawed. We are born into sin. All our lives we are plagued with desires that are contrary to God's law. Because we have the ability to choose between right and wrong, we are responsible when we choose to disobey God. As righteous judge, God has the duty to punish us for sinning against Him, and the punishment for sin is death on earth and eternity in hell.
  Sin takes many forms. It comes in all shapes and sizes and has varying levels of impact on our lives. Some sins are small in a worldly sense while other are much larger. Either way, sin is sin and it is an affront to God. God does not send anyone to hell because of any specific sin they committed, God punishes people because they committed a sin,thus rebelling against Him.
  Sin is as varied as people. Lying, lust, selfishness, homosexuality, adultery, anger, murder, pride. God does not see individual sins as being different in their need for punishment. We as people see differences in sins because we see sin's impact on our temporary lives. The prideful Pharisee living his life in denial of his need for God is as deserving of punishment as the unrepentant serial killer.
  In spite of our sin, God loves His broken creation. So much so, that He sent His only son to die in our place to bear the punishment we deserve. Because of Christ's death in our place, we can take on His righteous, so that when God sees us, He does not see our sin: He sees the holiness of His son. We must call on God to show us mercy and cling to the work of Christ as our saving grace.
  Part of being a Christian is trusting Christ's grace to save us. Another is repenting of our sin and striving to live a holy life. It is putting behind that part of us that is "who we are" so we can be who God has called us to be. Living on this earth means we are going to struggle with sin until the end of our lives. Just as sin is varied, struggles are varied. I struggle with pride; a lot. As a Christian, though, I do not have to give into pride. By the grace of God, I get the opportunity to live a life of holiness and humility, and I am forgiven when I do fall short and sin.
  And so does every believer who deals with their own specific sin. Believers who struggle with same-sex attraction are not going to hell because that is their struggle. It is their earthly battle and by the grace of God and with His help they can fight it.
  People go to hell because they decide they do not need God and His saving grace. Because they think it is better to live on their own terms then on His. It is not the specific sin that condemns: it is the rebellion behind it that does.

Talking to a Donkey

  A few weeks ago, I read through Leviticus and Numbers. In between the chapters about regulations regarding sacrifices and laws the children of Israel were to follow, there is the story of Balaam and his donkey.
  Balaam is an interesting character, only appearing in the Bible for these few chapters in Numbers. Other mentions of him in the Bible denote him as an enemy of God and of the people of Israel. Balaam was not a good person. He was not a hero, he was not a saint. Balaam was a gentile and a sorcerer. He knew of God, he even spoke to God, but he did not respect God enough to live his life in honor of his Creator. He was too busy pursuing his own selfish ends to be bothered with obeying God's law. In his career as a sorcerer, God apparently blessed Balaam. Those on whom Balaam pronounced curses were cursed, and those whom Balaam blessed were blessed.
  Because of this power Balaam apparently possessed, the king of Moab called upon Balaam for help. In their journey to the promised land, the people of Israel passed near Moab. Tales of the havoc God had wrought on the Egyptians while Israel was there spread all over the land. Balak feared what might happen to his nation, so he called on Balaam to pronounce curses on the people of Israel so they would be driven from his land. Here is where the story gets interesting. When Balak's men first came to retrieve Balaam, the Lord told Balaam not to go, and Balaam obeyed the Lord. When the first set of Balak's men went back to him, he sent more men to Balaam. And this time he offered Balaam a handsome reward to come and curse Israel. At first Balaam refused Balak's offer, but the moment the Lord told Balaam he could go, he hit the road.
  The Lord put a condition on Balaam before he left: he could only do as the Lord told him. It would seem that Balaam did not set off with the best of intentions, because an angel of the Lord came to speak to Balaam on his journey to the king of the Moabites. Balaam did not see the angel of the Lord. Three times. His donkey did though, and every time the dumb animal saw the angel, it fled. Balaam did not understand the donkey's action and so when his donkey would flee he would beat it. After the third beating, the Lord took pity on Balaam's donkey and let it speak its mind. So Balaam's donkey asked him why he had beaten him three times.
  Here the story becomes funny. Balaam was so intent on pursuing his own selfish ends, and so frustrated with his donkey, he did not stop to think about the fact his animal was talking to him, or that he was talking to an animal. He told his donkey how frustrated he was, saying, "You have made a fool of me! If I had a sword in my hand I would kill you now."
  His donkey replied, "Am I not your own donkey, which you have always ridden, to this day? have I been in the habit of doing this to you?"
  Balaam told his donkey, "No." And then it clicked: he was talking to a donkey. Then he saw the angel of the Lord. The angel confronted him about his actions towards his donkey and warned him against the reckless path he was pursuing. Balaam offered to go back the way he came, but the angel told him he could continue on his way to the king of the Moabites, only he must do as the Lord told him.
  The story goes on, and Balaam is commanded by the Lord to bless the nation of Israel, which he does. As I read the story though, the thought struck me, Balaam was so busy pursing his own selfish ambition, he failed to see the incredible things the Lord was doing around him. First an angel of the Lord appeared to him and he was blind to it. Then an animal spoke to him, and he was so angry he did not see the wonder of a talking animal. He just started arguing with a donkey. I can be like that too though. I get so busy pursuing my own self ends and disobeying that I fail to see just how incredible the works of the Lord are. It is important to obey God, not only because it honors and glorifies Him, but because I get to see His wonders when I do so.

Yes I am Judging You, No I am Not Apologizing

  There is, perhaps, no verse in the Bible more abused than Matthew 7:1, "Do not judge, or you too will be judged." When Jesus spoke those words in the Sermon on the Mount, He was saying that we are not to set our personal preferences and convictions up as the barometer for good and evil. As finite men, we will be judged by the infinite and absolute authority of God. We are not to pass on to our fellow man pronouncements of justice based on what we do and do not like.
  Somewhere along the line, the meaning of this verse became misconstrued. In our postmodern American society, we have the idea that we can create our own standard of morality and no one else has the right to impose upon it. And what better way to keep people from telling us we are wrong than spitting a Bible verse at them.
  So many times, people who are not in anyway being judgmental, are written off as such because they are telling the truth. The truth is often offensive. It is more than offensive though, it is loving. If someone sees a person running towards the edge of a cliff, they will probably try and stop the person. It not because they do not like the person's shoes, or because they think running makes them look stupid. They are going to tell the person not to run towards the edge of the cliff because they will probably fall off and die. They are not imposing some arbitrary standard they have, they are trying to make the person see the of the reality of the situation: what they are doing will kill them.
  If someone is doing something wrong, it is going to hurt them. If I tell them what they are doing is wrong, I am not trying to spoil their fun, I am trying to keep them from hurting themselves. There is a certain amount of judgment that does into telling someone that what they are doing is wrong. That judgment does come from knowing right and wrong. But that judgement also comes from being loving. And if being loving means being perceived as judgmental, then I am not going to apologize for judging someone any more than I would apologize for loving them.

Daylight Savings

  I have never had a good experience with daylight savings time. One year I may learn to go to bed early and then I will better be able to recover from my lost hour of sleep. This year was not that year. When its all said and done though, I am always glad that the sun goes down an hour later and I can enjoy the day that much more. Now that I am through with my spiel, here are some pictures of the great outdoors in the lovely daylight.

aimless.

  Sometimes it feels good to type aimlessly. With no concrete purpose, no idea to get across. Not even to have to chronicle a piece of the past for the sake of the future. A little wandering is not wholly fruitless.
  For those days when there is something important to say, there are days when nothing really needs to be said. Creativity and energy only need to be expelled.

Who I am Actually

 Labels

Do not actually

mean anything.

We

Humanity.

We like them.

Use them

To try to find

Our place

Here in the world.

And the labels come

From things we can touch.

What we can

Put our finger on.
What we make ourselves
Is not what matters.
It is what our Maker
Makes of us
That lasts beyond
The labels we make
For ourselves.

Love as a Commodity

  If anything has the remote possibility of turning a profit, there is a company somewhere that is going to market it. Every Christmas countless businesses have society paying up for peace on earth and goodwill towards men. Come February, every florist, jeweler, and chocolatier is working to convince people that their products will assure the buyer's loved ones of the validity of their affections.
  Saturday, as I walked through the store where America shops, I was struck by how commercial love becomes on Valentine's day. If you love someone, the obvious way to show them that is not to spend time with them and to listen to them and to serve them. It is to spend an inordinate amount of money buying them stuff. In America we live in this commercialized delusion that money is love; that love can be bought.
  Romantic love is wonderful, and it is not a bad thing that a holiday exists devoted to its celebration. Its commercialization makes it cheap though. Good things cannot be bought. Contentment and happiness come from choices people make as individuals, not from stuff people buy. Love is a gift to be given, not a thing to be purchased and sold. And while some show their love through gifts, the evidence of love ultimately shown through sacrifice and selflessness and kindness. Stuff is insufficient to express the depths of love. When love becomes a commodity, it is not really love anymore: it becomes a monster.

Holy Cows

  A couple of days ago, I was reading my daily Psalm and I came across this short passage, "At Horeb they made a calf and worshiped an idol cast from metal. They exchanged their glory for the image of a bull, which eats grass. They forgot the God who saved them, who had done great things in Egypt, miracles in the land of Ham and awesome deeds by the Red Sea." (Psalm 106:19-22)
  I have read those verses countless times, but the other day, they struck me a way they never had before. The Israelites saw God's wonders in powerful ways. They watched the Lord pour down His might and wrath on the people of Egypt through the plagues. In the desert they saw Him tear the Red Sea apart and then they walked across it on dry ground. In their wanderings through the desert, the Lord had feed them with bread from heaven and quenched their thirst with water from a rock. When they built a golden calf to worship, the Israelites were within sight of Mount Sinai as it stood cloaked in clouds from the presence of God. And yet they turned aside to worship a cud-chewing cow. One of those docile meandering animals that begs to be domesticated.
  Humans are stupid like that. We like gods we can control rather than the God that controls the universe. The Israelites were tired of God. They wanted him to show up when they wanted Him to and do what they wanted Him to. Then, when He did not, they starting worshiping a cow.
  It would be funny if it were not so sad; the silly idols we establish for ourselves. If something exists, a body is bound to worship it. And ironically, it seems the more unworthy a thing is, the more likely we are to worship it. There is an insatiable thirst for God inside us. As long as we turn to other things it will remain so.
  The holy cows we build for ourselves are silly and sad and wrong. We not only break God's law, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to worship the only God worthy of our adoration. Even if it hurts our pride, holy cows have to be knocked down so we can wholly worship our powerful and mighty Lord.

  My folly amazes and appalls me.

There is contentment.

And then there is being comfortable with the world.

Why do I let myself so easily be satisfied?

Building little gods that hold only the power I endow them with.

I do know better.

That there is more.

That I was made for more.

To worship my petty idols is wrong.

Yet I do it.

And I am sorry.

Living in a human skin is hard.

What 1984 Taught Me About Myself

  My resolution this year is to read a book every week. So far, I am doing pretty good. Why, though, I decided to kick off my fifty-two books for this year with a string of dystopias, I am still not sure. Anyways, I started with a classic and read George Orwell's 1984 (I do realize I mentioned this not many posts ago). As I said before, I did not like it.
  None-the-less, I learned something from 1984. What is more is that I learned something about myself: and that is the fact that I need a moral center. A wall to run against so I can know what is wrong and what is right. I want there is be truth, reality. Facts that I cannot reason away even if I do not like them.
  1984 is a book about a world constructed without truth. There are no real facts, no absolutes. The mind is trained to believe what Big Brother claims to be reality. If one moment the authorities say 2+2=5, then 2+2=5. It always has been and it will be as long as Big Brother needs it to be. Winston Smith questions the realities he has been lead to believe and as a result is re-educated.
  To believe lies takes work though. And Winston works desperately to believe in the lies that he knows are lies. "The arithmetical problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as "two and two make five" were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain."
  The fence of morality, of truth, of reality itself, can be uncomfortable at times, but no one can deny its necessity. To deny that gravity pulls things down is more than plain stupid, it is dangerous. Truth is rarely convenient, and yet, I cannot live without it. With all of the unpleasantness of  1984, it at least reminded me of that.

Love and Truth

 There is one thing everyone in this world can agree on, everyone wants to be loved. Even the most metallic of hearts can be melted. Love is one the most wonderful gifts a body can receive, and one of the greatest gifts a body can give.
  Love is tricky though. To love means, at times, to be hard. Last week, I read through the book of I John. Usually when I read through the book, I tend to pay attention of I John 3:16, which says, "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers." Verses about dying tend to be eye-catching. But as I continued reading chapter four, the verses following stuck out. "Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in His presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and He knows everything." (I John 3:18-20).
  Christians talk a lot about love because it is universal. Sometimes we talk about love at the cost of the truth. Everyone loves love, while the truth is often unpopular. John that we belong to the truth. It is the truth that allows to show love. To show love may be to tell someone they are wrong; to tell them that the thing that makes them happy is killing them; to tell them they are literally going to hell. It is far from pleasant to do those things. It is certainly not nice. God does not ask to be nice though. Kind, yes. Loving, yes. And to be loving and kind does not mean side-stepping sticky issues because they are uncomfortable. It means gently and relentlessly presenting our fellow men with the truth when it hurts them and us.

The Thing About Getting Older

 Last year, on my birthday, I did a very blogger-like thing and wrote about twenty things I had learned in the past twenty years. When I published that post, I assumed that writing what I had learned in the past years would become an annual birthday tradition. This year, my birthday rolled around sooner than I expected though. And I could have posted twenty-one clichéd things I had learned in the past year, but something about that seemed really fake this year. It is not that last year's post was fake. It is just that I am in no way a lifestyle blogger, and that kind of post did not seem like something I would do anymore. I am a nerd who likes to share her opinions about everything under the sun with the internet.
  I did learn a lot last year. As I oh-so-eloquently stated in one post, I learned that to be hopeful you must be intentional. I also re-learned that nothing lasts forever. I mean, God is eternal, and so is the human soul, but there were things in my life that I took for granted would always be there. Friends, marriages, life itself. I did know that all of those things had the potential to go away, but I never expected them to. It is not that bad things have never happened before, it is just that more of them seem to have come from my fellow human beings this past year.
  Change is inevitable. Its leaves behind memories both good and bad. Last year I learned to remember to hope. I also learned to let the good past go because though it may be good, it is the past. God has me living today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. As I live between yesterday and tomorrow, I am learning to trust that no matter what the past had, and no matter what the future holds, God will help me in the step I take in this moment. And learning that is so much more worthwhile than learning coffee is the elixir of life.

Here At the End of the Year

It is strange to think that the year has past already.

That the earth has completed yet another turn around the sun.

This past year has been the worst in the books.

It has also been the best.

And I would not have it any other way.

Because pain makes me grow.

It bring me closer to the ones I love.

Joy is made all the sweeter in the face of heartache.

I have learned to fight the darkness with light.

And I can laugh at the year to come.



The Reason for the Season (Yes, I know that sounds cliched)

  On Christmas day, I had the privilege of celebrating the birth of Christ: the coming of a Holy God to a fallen world. Friday morning, I woke up and read the second chapter of Luke as I always do on Christmas morning. And then I flipped back to read my daily Psalm. On Christmas morning, I read Psalm 22 which opens with, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far off from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning." 33 years after His birth, Christ spoke those words as He hung on the cross to die for man's sin.
  I do not follow any particular Bible reading plan. I read a few chapters of the Bible a day until I finish it, then I start over. This year, I started reading a couple of Psalms along with my daily Bible reading, and through no planning of my own, the Psalms I read are always relevant to my day to day situations. I could have in no way planned for my daily reading to fall on the Psalm that spoke of Christ's suffering on the cross, anyways, not without some serious calculating. Yet, with my imperfect stumbling through the Bible, I still got a glimpse of the whole of Christ's life.
  The reason for celebrating Christmas is more than just remembering His coming, it is remembering the reason Christ came. To suffer, to die, to bear the sins of His people so they could have His holiness and live eternally with Him. Christ came because of His love, and that is something worth celebrating.

Christmas Spirit, or Whatever you Call It

 

 

Christmas is my favorite holiday. The season surrounding it is full of great things. Peace on earth, goodwill towards men, love and family. Everyone who celebrates Christmas enjoys these things. But why? The spirit of the season certainly does not come from the commercialization of the holiday and the traffic and the last minute shopping and the cold weather. It is the celebration of the birth of Christ that makes Christmas a holiday worth celebrating. When December rolled around this year, I forgot that. I was merely happy about the happiness of the season, I did not think about the reason to be happy.

  Happiness is good, but in loving it for its own sake, I found happiness to be pretty hollow. It is not that I forgot what Christmas is about, I just did not take the time to ponder the wonder of it, and that is a shame. At Andrew Peterson’s “Behold the Lamb” concert, he refers to the Christmas story as “The True Tall Tale of the Coming of Christ.” As a Christian, I have a great privilege come Christmastime. I get to celebrate the coming of God to earth. God who saw that in my sinful state I needed to be saved and came to this earth to live a perfect life in my place, die the death I deserve to die, and then to rise from the dead and conquer death.

  Admittedly, the coming of Christ to this earth is worth celebrating all year. But if there is a time of year set aside just to remember Christ’s coming to earth, I ought to take advantage of it. It is, after all, the birth of Christ that makes Christmas worth celebrating.  It gives happiness. It brings a spirit that outlasts the season.

close to the end.

Living in the remnants of fall.

That is where we are.

Watching the world finish its death once more.

Waiting for winter to come.

Looking back on our memories as being what they are.

Memories.

Pieces of the past to remind us it was good.

And as it all crumbles away to prepare for life anew, let us also move forward.

 

A Man After God's Own Heart and Me

  Of all the people in the Bible, I can easily say David is not among my favorite. For the past couple months, my family and I have been going through the books of I and II Samuel. In those books, David showed himself to be a lot of things. A murderer, an adulterer, a womanizer, a dead-beat dad, a prideful king. Yet, those things are not what defined David in the eyes of God. In Acts 13:22b, God says of David, "'I have found David son of Jesse a man after my own heart; he will do everything I want him to do.'" It was through the line of David, that God allowed His earthly temple to be built. It was by David's hand that some of the most beautiful poetry put to paper was written. And it was through the line of David that God brought His son Jesus Christ into the world. God blessed David, and He also loved him enough to discipline him.
  David was a man passionately in love with God. He did sin, but he also repented. He patiently bore the consequences of his sin, knowing he justly deserved them. In Psalms 51:10-12, we read the words, "Create in me a pure jeart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of my salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me." After committing the sin of adultery and instigating the murder of a man, David wrote this Psalm of repentance, and after that he never again committed the sins of adultery or murder. He clung to God's grace, and strove to live a holy life after his mistakes.
  So there was David, a man after God's own heart. And then there is me, a well-behaved, law-abiding, self-righteous little Pharisee. David's life makes me look like a saint. But could it be said of me that I am a woman after God's own heart? More often than not, it sadly cannot be said of me. I am a selfish girl. Many times I use the excuse of living in my own skin to pursue my own lusts, but that is far from being a legitimate excuse for selfishness.
  By the grace of God though, He does discipline me and draws me closer to Him. I have to learn to pursue God and love Him whole-heartedly, just as He loves and pursues me. And by His grace, I can learn to chase the heart of God instead of chasing me.