True confession: I am an impatient person living in an impatient age. This does not work well when I stop to realize that God’s timetable is often much different than mine. Immediate for him is not immediate for me. For God a day is like a thousand years. That’s a long time for a person who wants things to happen in minutes, not millennia. And I don’t think I am alone in my desire for the immediate. In this digital age, our impatience is even more pronounced.
Lessons from Unanswered Prayers
I have said it before on this blog, and the Lord keeps bringing me back to it. The psalms are filled with tremendous encouragement and hope for the weary Christian. In them we find honest human emotion: joy, pain, sorrow, happiness, and the like. There is something for everyone in the psalms. In the last few years I have repeatedly gone back to this precious book. I have found encouragement, hope, comfort, and peace from God through these inspired writers.
A Surprising Encouragement (at least for me!)
One of the main reasons I enjoy running in the morning is the fact that I can usually make my way through a sermon over the course of my run. It's primarily owing to how slow I run, which is more of a jog than a run. But it serves my soul. I like morning, but I also find that it is in the morning where the greatest battle for my joy happens. I can go to bed feeling pretty good about the next day, and wake up completely discouraged. And all I did was sleep! It is in these dark moments that I have experienced God's kindness through the preaching of his word.
Help a Younger Sister Out
Before I got married, and shortly after, I was regularly told by older couples to enjoy the happy moments of wedded bless because it won’t last. One couple even told us that after we had been married as long as they had (three years) all the excitement would wane and we would be just another married couple like them, hardly touching, bickering constantly, and doing our own separate things.
I Can Do All Things
Like most teenagers I made frequent trips to the orthodontist over the course of a couple of years. My teeth were definitely a piece of work, so I saw my orthodontist regularly. He was a Christian, so it was not uncommon to hear the local Christian radio station playing in the background, or see Bible verses and posters plastered on the walls. And while I would wait in the chair for him to do his work, unable to do much of anything because my mouth was screwed open, I would stare at the posters. At the time I was not a Christian, so even though I was the child of Christians, the verses meant very little to me. But one in particular stands out clearly in my mind.
My First Live Radio Interview
ast Friday, I was interviewed by a Christian radio station in California about my most recent post on Her.meneutics, "Why Jesus is Not Your Boyfriend." I had never been on live radio before and was honored to be asked. To be honest, I had no idea what to expect. But Joe Pursch (the man who interviewed me) was kind, and the callers were gracious and encouraging.
Rejoicing When It's Hard
Rejoicing with others is sometimes really hard, especially when they are getting what you desperately want. I have been convicted lately that I put people in categories: those who are easy to rejoice with and those who are more difficult. In the second category it can be much harder to rejoice with them. Maybe you want to be married and your friend (who always seems to have a guy hanging around her) just recently got engaged. Maybe you are hoping for a certain job and the person who cuts corners gets the promotion or the opportunity. Maybe you want a particular scholarship and you are looked over, again. Or maybe you have been trying to get pregnant for a while and every time you check Facebook one more person is expecting a little bundle of joy.
God is in the Heat
One of the most helpful things I've learned in the past few years is this concept of Heat and Thorns/Fruit. We all face Heat in a variety of ways. While the Heat can be difficult, it does not dictate our response to it. It only reveals what is already inside. Heat has a way of doing that. But what has been even more encouraging to me is that God is in my Heat.
Our Creativity Tells a Story
We are all familiar with Psalm 19:1, which says “The heavens declare the glory of God.” In this psalm David is saying that every inch of the created world—from clouds to vegetation, human beings to animals—screams the greatness of our amazing Creator. The uniqueness in each person’s face, the rain that falls on parched vegetation, the creation of a little life in the womb of a mother—every tiny detail reflects the glory of our great God.
Jesus is Not Your Boyfriend
Daniel and I have just finished a much needed vacation, hence the silence on the blog this past week! But I have been writing. This morning, Her.meneutics (the Christianity Today blog for women) posted something I wrote on a popular trend in Christendom--single women calling Jesus/God their boyfriend. I'm sure at some point you have heard someone say something along these lines, "until God brings me a husband, I am content to just have him as my boyfriend." Some have even gone so far as calling God their lover, as so many popular songs often do.