Peace where are you??

On July 25, 2016December 10, 2016 By happyreignIn Heather, Reflections & Musings3 Comments

I found myself not feeling the same effect of my relationship with God for a season of my life. I had experienced great change, experienced some intense relational and work stress and found myself making efforts to control my surroundings in order to manage my peace and somehow restore the inner stillness in my mind I had lost.

peace-of-mind1

It didn’t work. Stress continued, unsettled sleep, and a general underlying presence of anxiety persisted. Even though I prayed, even though I worshiped, even though I studied the Word, even though I was hearing truth. I was attempting to self-medicate my spirit.

I was reading the writings of another saint and was reminded of how far my spirit was from the exchange she was sharing with God in her soul. I missed that. One morning I asked God how to return and I heard, “Preach forgiveness to yourself.” I love preaching even though I rarely get to do it, and over here in the Middle East I rarely here others do it either. He asked me, “When’s the last time you’ve heard forgiveness preached?” And he wasn’t referring to that I needed to forgive someone else. He meant between him and myself, and the always by-product of that is between me and myself.

I thought about it and it has maybe been over a year since I heard someone speak about what God did for me on the cross and what it accomplished on my behalf without any effort of my own required.

Now let me clarify something. I’m strongly a minded-person. And what I mean by that is normally in order for something to have an effect on my heart, I need to have a linear pattern of thought that makes sense to my mind in order for an impact to be felt emotionally within me. This, however, has also been a weakness in my experience as I will get so caught up in trains of thought that will have nothing to do with life or freedom. Whether they could be categorized as anger-based, or fear-based, or relationship-based, I tend to reason things out in my mind or have conversations in my mind. Again this–I have not observed usually ends up in anything life-giving.

So the question is where has my peace gone? And God’s answer was, why don’t you preach the gospel to yourself this morning. And so I did. I looked up the word forgiveness in the back of my bible, hunted out all the verses and at least one more that came to mind and wrote them down. Now realize, heaven is not a formula. Just because someone reads the verses below doesn’t mean, they will receive the peace I did through the process of looking them up, but I share them with you because of some of you who will believe them when you read them and it will settle things within your spirit and peace and calm will be experienced in an increased measure again. Here we go.

There is forgiveness of sin for all who repent
Through this man Jesus there is forgiveness of your sins and everyone who believes in him is declared right with God
Even greater than sin and death is God’s wonderful grace and his gift of forgiveness to many through this man Jesus Christ
Forgetting the past, I look forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of this race through Christ
He has rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his dear son who purchased our freedom and forgave our sins
For God was pleased to live in Christ and reconcile everything to himself. He made peace with everything through Christ’s blood on the cross.
You must continue to believe this truth and stand firmly in it
Don’t drift away from the assurance you received when you heard this good news
Now he has reconciled you to himself through Jesus Christ
He has brought you into his own presence and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault

My conclusion in all of this was that if Christ is at peace with me through Christ’s blood, I can be at peace with myself through Christ’s blood. I received a surge of confidence again in what Christ has accomplished and done entirely apart from my performance or abilities or competence, which freed me from any condition-ality in my relationship with God. There remains no room for my failure within his love and accomplished work on the cross.

calm-peace-innerpeace1

It felt so nice to be in the presence of a savior again. Previous negative experiences I’ve had had brought in a level of distrust between myself and God. Why was that so hard, why did that have to be that why, why is this still that way, etc. I grew in mistrust of him because I lot perspective of his heart through my experiences. All I could see was the past and present of what went wrong or what I was doing wrong now and I could no longer see what he had done for me or who he really was with me now. I lost sight of his goodness in all the muck. Now don’t get me wrong, my mind didn’t lose the knowledge of his goodness, it was my heart that lost belief through my negative experiences.

And so through reading the writings I read, I had regained hope of being restored not factually but emotionally with God and my heart flittering again with confidence in his goodness and his love for me where I could feel it when my thoughts drifted within me. He has returned this precious gift to me. It was once something I could remember feeling, but now again my heart is alight with a tenderness within. It is a gift that I have not been able to conjure up within myself for sometime. And I am grateful. His forgiveness is like nothing else that still the mind and soul; that he has made all things well and that treats me with kindness and tenderheartedness.

I will write another piece about returning a stillness to my mind soon.

Servant King

On July 10, 2016December 10, 2016 By happyreignIn Heather, Reflections & MusingsLeave a comment

Christians in Pakistan

I remember one day in my early twenties sweeping a floor in a soup kitchen for the umpteenth time and using their hand brush while on my knees to get EVERYTHING off the floor and into the wastebasket when I thought I would eventually graduate from service. Ya know, helping people and serving them. Like the cleaning toilets and taking out the trash kind of stuff.

I remember having lofty thoughts of leading something or speaking somewhere or doing something IMPORTANT. Something that would impact the world and make a mark. One day. One day I would graduate from service.

I can tell you now, a decade later — I will never graduate from service. If I will one day lead others, I will lead them into service. If I speak, I will speak about loving God, themselves, and others well. There has been a change but the change has been within me; I no longer hold a desire to move on to something else.

I still sweep floors, clean toilets, and take out the trash. I still wash others dishes, underwear, and throw away their leftovers. I still wipe that rag along baseboard so dust doesn’t make a home, and I scrub tiles in the kitchen so residue doesn’t stay for long.

Jesus never graduated from service, rather he graduated his disciples into service. His last night with them was spent on his knees getting his hands in their dirt and washing their feet. He didn’t have to. It wasn’t because they were worthy of the act. He did it because it revealed the likeness and nature of his father.

He may not have specifically been inviting them into the life of Cinderella, but in part, he was. Every day some of the people I am most impressed with in the world are not on television shows or the radio; they are people cleaning up the bathroom mistake of their elderly father or mother who didn’t quite make it in their feebleness to the toilet. They are the mothers and fathers who faithfully love an adolescent who hates them back and is being self-destructive. They are the beautiful families that serve siblings or spouses who are handicapped and will never live independently from their care or even have the mind or ability enough to say “Thank you.”

Not only does God serve the needy and take care of the poor, he invites us to something even harder. Welcome to not necessarily graduation from service, but maybe the next lesson within it: “27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. […] 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you. 32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. […] 35 But love your enemies, do good to them, […] Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” Lk 6

God never graduated from service. While he was on his knees in front of his friends he was king of the Jews with an unseen crown representing all authority on his head. Jesus was himself called a servant of God, executing his father’s will as his own. His admonishment for greatness was in fact this very thing. “Jesus called the twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.” Mk 9:35

My challenge is to not resent the tasks at hand before you; the tasks for which you don’t get paid, the tasks for which no one notices, the tasks for which you won’t get any online attention. And we can all be leaders, but the manner in which we lead says more than our words do. After all, its ultimately him we can do these things and live this life for. It’s him we say thank you to as we exhale our breath, or gaze upon a loved one. It’s him who sees.

The Gospel Revealed through our Enemies

On August 8, 2015December 10, 2016 By happyreignIn Heather, Reflections & MusingsLeave a comment

A man’s character is revealed through how he treats his enemies. A man’s love extends only as far as his nearest enemy. Or does it? There are many religions in the world that refer to conflict, human interactions, and behavior choices. During the time of Jesus’ life racism was as strong as ever. Especially between the current reigning empire of Rome and the ever persevering minority group of Jews. They were excluded, forced to walk in filth on the roads instead of on sidewalks with others, they would be heckled, ridiculed, robbed, spit on, and more, even by Roman ‘police officers’.

Jesus did not avoid these issues when while spending his days with us here on earth. Kingdoms and individuals, political parties and people groups all have enemies, and all choose to respond to their enemies in certain ways revealing what lies within their make-up. In regards to individuals, Jesus’ revelation on how we should respond to people who have hurt us, robbed us, and taken something from us is VERY clear.

We may not be slapped in the face, and someone may not take our clothing from us, but there are plenty of offenses that happen to EVERYONE in daily life. No one is immune to opportunities for woundedness and accusation to take root in our hearts. Jesus, again, very clearly gave instructions for appropriate responses in these situations. The places of grievances and bitterness in our lives are the very thresholds of which the body of Christ stands on to shine something that lives inside of them that exists beyond human justice and selfish reasoning.

Here are a few examples of teachings for instance:

“Love your enemies. Pray for those who give you difficulty and hard times. In that way you will be acting like My kids. For I give good to everyone, naughty and nice alike. Even corrupt politicians love the people that love them, how does that make you any different? But love with perfection as I do.”

“If you do not forgive others, I will not forgive you.”

“Do good to those who hate you.”

What would this like if we acted like this toward the people who hate us? What would it look like if we acted like this as a nation towards countries that hate us?

I heard a man here talk about all that happened to him from under the hands of ISIS here in the middle east. He said to me, “If you knew everything they did to me, you would be friends with no Muslim.” This statement revealed not only the hurt of the individual but also his lack of the knowledge of God. God himself was beaten, betrayed, abandoned and murdered, and still the words on lips that revealed the content of his heart were “Let none of this be counted against them.”

In his innocence, God did not bear up under scorn and cry “I must have justice! I must have payment!” Instead, in complete selflessness, God denied what was rightly due him, and gave himself–his life–as an offering for their freedom, their peace, and their wholeness.

So often–myself included–we get caught up in this loop-hole of a thought process of self-justification, self-consideration, self-sympathy. We are in the right; others are in the wrong. The very ones we accuse in our minds are the very one’s God thought were worthy to give his life for. ‘Being right’ is not the answer; ‘being love’ is.

It is in the opportunities of offense, injury, and hurt we have a divine opportunity to confound the mind of our offenders in reckoning ourselves having been already crucified with Christ and not acting on our own behalf, but in his likeness living in us, as us, and through us.

We have the power to let yesterday go in the relationships we hold with people around us. I’m not saying this is easy, but it brings to mind Corrie Ten Boom who forgave one of the very guards that held her in a concentration camp, but she knew it wasn’t of herself but it was God giving that man forgiveness through her. Displays of forgiveness, selflessness, generosity, and blessing without them being deserved or earned, or even in the face of hatred, is giving others the experience of heaven here on earth.

I feel like this would be most profound on a political and international level as well. Sometimes we are holding onto power so tightly that we don’t actually utilize the opportunities we have in using the power we’ve been given.

This loving response to injury does not only reveal his glory here on earth, but is our own path to liberty and restoration; individually and nationally. Restitution follows forgiveness rather than being a prerequisite for it.

My expereince with Divorce

On May 27, 2015December 10, 2016 By happyreignIn Heather, Reflections & Musings1 Comment

I just wanted to share an encouraging story about divorce; not that divorce is encouraging but what can happen with anything in God’s hands.

My childhood, from my perspective, was a rough one. Not that I didn’t have an abundance of things, opportunities, and food, but that I had a first row seat in watching my parents fall out of love with one another. And if anyone’s ever experienced this you know sometimes, well rarely is it a smooth road. Unfortunately this was my first exposure to what it means to be part of a family. I think my siblings and I grew in our abilities to stay out of the way, or at least we were trying to.

This did not continue forever and after attempted investments by both parties, they decided to take different paths. Both, I am assuming grew through this relationship of their lives in more than just becoming unhappy, they learned more about themselves, learned what doesn’t work in marriage, and also became parents. I learned later that during these hard relational times of my childhood, God was carrying us through it all, even though my memories didn’t recognize him in the same way until late.

My siblings and I, now older and equipped with very thick skins in life, began to see very different people through their new separate grieving processes during our teenage years. I met a father I had–in a relational way–never felt like I had met before and a mother who spent a lot of time in her room. This was a season of life and even here, when seeds are not visible above the ground, God was growing new things in the soil below the ground. Even the winter, after things appear to die, serves a purpose.

After this season would come me watching both of my parents dare to give their hearts to another and fall in love again. Granted it was through the eyes of an angry, resentful teenager that I watched, but that season too for me passed and I grew up and I began to witness healthy communication, support, enjoyment, laughter, safety, forgiveness, and I began to have two marriages, two places I called my family.

God weaved newness in spouses for each of my parents that I had known my whole life, people whom I already trusted and already knew me too. I think that for my experience, growing up in a household of divorce-I don’t know if the two are related-but I think there was some reconciliation that needed to happen with myself. Like the kids go through a divorce with themselves inside when they live in an environment of rejection that bears fruit in divorce. Like they need permission to fall in love with themselves again, if that makes sense. Maybe it was just me.

I remember the sprouts of new life after the separation, feeling new real expressed affection first time, the asking of forgiveness by a parent the first time, the ending of yelling in communication the first time, peace, love, and enjoyment springing up from the ground of what I had known as family that had died.

I am writing this piece not to grieve but to celebrate. I am celebrating the stories God has written in the life of my parents. Each are people that I now know and am proud to call my parents. They both are experiencing love and growing in love on a daily basis. I am a witness not to one healthy marriage, but two. And now my own.

Joel and I, the day–without trying or planning–the day we ended up signing our official marriage license, which wasn’t the beautiful day we got married on Malta, which was our real wedding, in my eyes, our word before God is more real than our pen before a government, but that day happened to land on the anniversary of my parents. I wouldn’t have even known it was that day, but they did.

And God in his goodness, overcame every heartache, every hurt, every pain, and every rejection in the life he has been showing me and calling me into and redeemed all those moments in the overcoming of my marrying Joel. I said yes to everything that I trusted that God said was good about this idea of his called marriage and I trusted him to be faithful to his word of inviting me into it. God has redeemed this sad story of my childhood experience of family by restoring my own, and I am writing today, in tears now, to share about his goodness, his faithfulness, and his redemption–even in the face of divorce. He has made all things new.