Cross Words Journey

We made an offer on a home!  We’re excited, I think.  Kind of scared.  And we’re languishing in the process of the waiting game.  What if the seller says, ‘no?’

Each day there are times when I’m convinced we’ve made the wrong choice on which house.  The problem is that there just aren’t alternative choices for our family.   It may be that we return to house hunt again, starting the process anew.  I wonder if next time our stress level would be the same?

Grace has brought us safe thus far and grace will lead us home.  Amazing Grace.

We’re looking for homes in our new city with growing panic.  Of the 9 we’ve toured not one warrants a second look.  Super out of date or super out of price range.  We feel we’re reasonable people who don’t require a McMansion and we’re willing to work to do some updates, but nothing fits with our vision of home.

So we’re praying and I hope you’ll pray for us too.  We know God called us here, to this new job opportunity for my husband and new community for our family.  We know that God will certainly bring us to a new home.  But in the meantime….we’re disappointed, panicked, sad.

My sister, a youth director, and her boss, a pastor, clashed recently about a mission trip to Mexico.  He micro manages by his own admission.  She refuses to worry about unforeseen conflicts for this July trip when it is, after all, only March.  She has things planned out: contingencies covered, transportation & lodging arrangements made, volunteers, chaperones,  Bible studies, prayer partners, funding + fund raisers.  He is worried that she isn’t worried and suggested she is, “Putting the Lord to the test!”

I mention this incident because I’m riding a fine line of trust and control.   I believe I’m gifted by God to make reasonable judgements, decisions, plans, etc.  But I also  believe that God’s plans (Jer. 29:11) supercede anything I create.  I’ve felt God’s calling and I feel God with me now.  But more than anything my sinful self longs to lash out against God, to rail for the discomfort I’m in during this process.  At this moment I don’t feel like trust, I feel like tirade!

I ‘m resisting with all my strength.  At the end of this journey will be the perfect home for us and all this will be worth it.  Right now I’m hanging by a thread!

Abiding Lord Jesus, touch my heart and mind.  Raise my eyes to you.  Keep me focused on your love, your grace, your plan.  Help me trust the time it takes to lead us home.  Amen

The adrenaline is rushing!  Lying in my bed reading (Agatha Christie), I heard a giant screech and cracking sound.  Some one (an idiot) ran into the telephone pole outside our home and drove away!  The pole is snapped in half and barely standing; the energy company is on the way.  The street is littered with debris.  People who saw it said the driver was going 70mph.

I live in an old neighborhood where telephone lines aren’t buried, but the poles are set back from driving traffic.  So really, the pole ought not to have posed a problem.  How could a person be so stupid?  Reckless with their life and with the lives of others?  My children and I play out there all the time during the day right in the area where this car went through our yard.  It makes me sick to think of the possibilities!

I’m a bit angry about this, and scared.  I know that I’ll have to do the one thing that will make me feel better: pray for that stupid driver.  This is how my life always works: I get angry and solace comes from the Lord, specifically when I pray for the person who made me angry.  At first when the anger is white hot, I just mumble something like, “God bless so-and-so.”   If I pray for another person invariably God changes my heart toward them.  Frankly this is nothing short of a miracle because my anger wants to dig in and hang on.

So tonight I pray, “God bless that person who drove like an idiot.  I hope they’re okay even though I can’t imagine that they are.  Amen.”

Carter is busy coining new words.  One is thumbernail, meaning the nail on your thumb.  Another new one is ‘Easterrific!’  Definitely said with an exclamation point attached.   He will say something is Easterrific  “just like Jesus.”  I’m taking this to mean that he finds such a thing unbelievably great.

And isn’t that exactly what Jesus is?  Unbelievably great.  I can scarcely  wrap my mind around God’s love for us through Christ Jesus.  It brings me to my knees quite literally.  I am in awe that God loves me that much.  I hope during this Easter time you’ve reflected on this love for you, for all of us.  It is a conundrum as Paul states in Ephesians.  He prays we can understand the enormity of God’s love through Jesus Christ while at the same time accepting that the why and how of God’s love is not something we will comprehend.  Today it is hard for us to accept mystery in anything especially in a God we commit our lives to.  But in Christianity there is a lot of mystery because, well, we’re not God!  (Thank God!)  And the love of God is a mystery, one in which we may see the enormity but not how it is sustained or true.  We must trust with faithful hearts that it just is.

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Check out all of Ephesians 3:14-21 (These verses were read at our wedding!)

An odd worship experience this morning.  Today is Palm Sunday, the day we celebrate Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  Palm Sunday is a tense day of the church year.  It is filled with hollow celebration because of an undercurrent of knowing something is about to go terribly wrong for Jesus.

We’re Easter people.  We know how the story ends and why it has to happen this way.  Yet every year part of us roots for Jesus to live.  We know Jesus is unjustly crucified and want it to end like a movie: God sweeps down from the sky saving Jesus and establishing Him as an earthly ruler.  Palm Sunday is as close to that happy dream ending as we come.

Even though we know what will happen later this week, even though we know how it all turns out, we need to celebrate Palm Sunday.  It is an important part of the Lenten journey.  But apparently many people aren’t taking the time to observe Lent.  Well, at least not in my church.

Today we celebrated a mixture of Palm Sunday + Maunday Thursday + Good Friday.  The only reason I can figure our traditionalist Pastor chose to do this is that the body of the congregation isn’t observing the Maunday Thursday and Good Friday portions of the Easter story.  They are going from the celebration of Palm Sunday to the celebration of Easter without the reflective, sad, painful stops in between.

People have to know what happens on Thursday and Friday, otherwise Easter means nothing!  So it is good that the church makes sure they get a taste of the whole week on the one day they come, Palm Sunday.  And our usual service was unusually packed today.  People come to church for Easter and Christmas, but at least they’re coming!  And as a church it is important to help everyone understand the immensity of Easter, especially those who don’t come regularly.

Lord Jesus, make me let go of my old ways so that I do not stand in the way of your Word.  I know I like Holy Week the “old way” best, but the old way is gone.  Help me get over the format of worship and just worship!  Amen

My husband took a job in Green Bay, Wisconsin!  We’re really excited.  Well, I am except for the whole Packer thing.  I’ll be biting my tongue a lot.  I like cheering for football, but I stop at worshiping at team.  Any who…

This was a long decision and mostly we sat at indecision.  One day my sister shared these song lyrics with me:

If you say, “Go,” we will go.

If you say, “Wait,” we will wait.

If you say, “Walk out on the water,” and they say, “It can’t be done,”

We’ll fix our eyes on you and we will come.

It totally changed my thinking.  I was so worried about every potential thing.  But then God lifted my face by the chin and I could see and trust again.

Here I am, Lord.  Looking at you.  Lead me.  Amen

We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one. 1 Corinthians 8:4

I’m pondering idols these last two days. My 4 year old, Carter, came home from preschool with a drawing of Carter’s World (akin to Elmo’s World.) It has a house with a chimney and smoke. There is a gray rainbow. He drew a cabinet and some people. But the largest item in the drawing is: The Television.

The television is in yellow, his favorite color reserved for drawing only his most favorite objects or people. It has three buttons for, as he explained, on/off, volume, and channel. And on top of the TV…well this is really what got me thinking. On top of the TV there is what looks to be an elaborate antenna and satellite dish.

“Wow. Look at your antenna or is it a flower. That is neat,” I say.

With scorn Carter says, “Mom. That is not an antenna. That is The Cross. I mounted a satellite dish on top of that.”

I said nothing. ..but I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

How often have you mounted something on top of the Cross and tried to pretend it was ok?  We use the Cross as a platform for anything and an excuse for everything.  Sometimes we take answering a call from God too far, further than God asks.  We create an idol and try to justify it through what God originally asked of us.  We can take a leadership position too far, for example.

Or we can, in the name of Sabbath, take the idea of rest into a daily festival of lazy by watching anything on TV.

At our house all we have an antenna  and no satellite dish or cable. (This was a deliberate decision on our part.  My husband and I know we’d watch too much TV and we don’t need the temptation.)  We also limit our children’s viewing time which of course makes it all the more attractive. Our guys love PBS kids, which is mostly what they watch. What I’m getting at is that we try to have no big commitment to TV in our house like some of the homes we visit for play dates. We have an antenna and if the wind blows strong then we get no reception at all and we’re ok without it.

Second, the idea of the cross on the TV mounted by a satellite dish just screams idol! And isn’t that what we’ve made it though? We have to watch a certain show. We need to know what happens on Survivor or Grey’s Anatomy. In a way, we’re addicted to the TV.

And, in order to relax we often ‘veg out.’ We could watch anything so long as we don’t need to engage our brains; and we do watch anything. After the kids were in bed the other night I surfed my 5 stations and stopped on the My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad show. It was like rubbernecking at a car accident. Some man bobbed for tomatoes in a bin of water snakes. Then he taunted the other dad to do the same. The crowd went wild. I changed the station.

Really, is this what we are interested in watching? If there is nothing else on that is worth watching, do we settle for this crap? The show I wanted to see wasn’t on owing to the fundraising drive on PBS. After a few minutes of watching Nothing Good I shut it off, headed upstairs and went to bed to read. When was the last time you did something else instead of watching TV you weren’t committed to?

When we take things too far we can create an idol.  Not a golden serpent (I hope), but an idol none the less.  We need to limit how much careful attention we give an object so that we don’t start worshiping it.  It is God we should worship and plan our days around.  It is God we should gather with friends to enjoy (like we do when we gather for a night of TV).  It is in God we should rest and find true Sabbath.

We’re thinking about moving. We’re not in danger of losing our home, thank goodness, but we are in danger of tripping over each other. We have two small, but increasingly active boys who come with paraphernalia. Kind of like Pig Pen’s dust cloud only filled with toys and crumbs.

One recent afternoon I was emptying the dish drainer. (We don’t have a dishwasher and until recently I’ve seen this as an injustice.) All the plastic containers we have seem to multiply when washed. Kind of like gremlins. No matter how much I attempt to organize these necessary pieces of kitchen junk they slip, slide, and fall every where. This is exactly the cupboard I hope no one looks in because it is dangerous to open!

Anyway, one day I was standing ankle deep in the contents of the cupboard because they’d all fallen out…AGAIN!…and I was frustrated. I wanted to shout! Instead I prayed, right then and there. “God! Fix this! I cannot be in this tiny house any more. How on earth am I supposed to live like this? I can’t even put the Tupperware away!”

No ‘Amen.’ Just a blatant demand for something big, tangible and obviously huge on God’s list of priorities.

Immediately, I kid you not, God answered me. I truly felt the Holy Spirit move on me and I knew just what God meant. God gave me the Spiritual equivalent to a smack upside the head. Out loud I said, “Oh. I get it: have less stuff.”

And then I laughed.  Hysterically. So much I had to sit down. I laughed so much my boys came in from the next room where they were ignoring my fight with the Tupperware and then with God. They sat and laughed with me not really understanding why. It was a joyful, humbling lesson.

I laughed at myself because really God said, “Amy, give me a break.” I’ve lived in this small home for 4 years and as evidence of my martyred plight I hold up to God: Tupperware! God answered me clearly: give up so much junk you’re holding on to. You don’t need a bigger home. You need less stuff. Use what you have and appreciate it.

Sometimes you really have to be careful what you pray for because you might get an answer you don’t want to hear.

Have you been watching the news of the housing market? A better question may be, have you been able to miss news of the housing market? Perhaps you are affected by it. Selling, buying, foreclosure. It is serious business.

I’d like to know how so many people got into loans they couldn’t afford. “Predatory lending” practices are a shame, dangerous, sinful really!

But I also wonder what on earth possessed people to agree to buy something they could only just afford. My sister calls this being ‘house poor.’ She said, when looking for a home in the crazy San Diego market, “I want somewhere safe, where I’m comfortable, that is nice. But I don’t want to be so indebted to my home that I can’t buy milk or go to a movie. I don’t want to be house poor.” I fear this is the situation so many found themselves in after buying or building their dream house. Budget questions like furniture, fuel, or food became a reality. Surely that wasn’t anyone’s dream. I’m sorry for all the people who have lost or are losing their homes.

God bless them, let them find a more secure place to call home. One that cannot be taken from them. And let us all abandon the temptation for more, be it space, clothing, whatever. Help us all be content with ‘enough.’ Amen.

(As an aside, this is how I pray. Exactly when I think of things. I don’t wait until the end of the day or church on Sunday. Nope. I pray when it comes. Try it.)

We’re in a spot, not of trouble.  Just a spot of bother.  My husband, Paul, and I have a big decision before us.  My, our Christian faith says, “Pray!  Listen to where God is calling you.”

Easier said than done.

How can I listen when I have so much to say?  And what am I saying?  Nothing!  I’ve got a serious case of the ‘what ifs.’  I’m not sure how to cure them.  I mean, I know that I should be listening to God.  Praying.  Meditating.  But my mind is running away on 5 different paths!

Lord, Help me!  Help me focus on what you’re saying, where you’re leading.  Quiet my mind so that I may hear you.  Amen