He Restores My Soul: Part 3

Read Part 1  |  Part 2

You know what makes me stay up at night? (Well, aside from my worst-case-scenario anxiety, desperate need for alone time, and good books.) What keeps me awake is the desire to make a difference. I want to believe that by working and reworking I can create something that changes things.

It’s a desire that is core to my personality, but it’s a desire that has also fueled my doing tendencies. It can turn that passion into frantic, required motion meant to prove and accomplish.

The chorus of the song by Sleeping At Last I quoted in part 2 says:

I, I wanna sing a song worth singing
I'll write an anthem worth repeating
I, I wanna feel the transformation
A melody of reformation

When I first heard that chorus I ached with sympathy. Yes! I know that feeling. I want so desperately to know that what I do will be worthy and worthwhile. It’s what motivates me to perfect things, to keep going when other people give up.

But in his beautiful and uncomfortable way this year, the Lord brought me back to Psalm 23 when I heard another song several weeks later. Internally the Spirit pointed directly back to the previous song while I was singing:

Let the King of my heart
Be the mountain where I run
The fountain I drink from
Oh, He is my song
Let the King of my heart
Be the shadow where I hide
The ransom for my life
Oh, He is my song

(King of My Heart)

The song that’s worth singing is Jesus. The anthem worth repeating is Jesus. The melody of reformation is Jesus.

The story isn’t really about the sheep and our clumsy adventures. The story is about the Shepherd. And what a Good Shepherd he is.

If I stick close to the Shepherd, he’ll lead me into paths of righteousness…paths that bring reformation and transformation.

The worth-earner in me is tempted to feel desperate and demotivated by this revelation. Like, what am I supposed to do now? I could literally sit and do nothing and still receive God’s love and grace. But of course, accepting unconditional love makes you want to reciprocate. In that way “doing” isn’t something that is required of me to measure up, it’s a gift I can give back. When the gift is something you know the recipient will love, it’s a joy to give—it’s restorative and replenishing.

So I’m going to keep trying to be a sheep that knows I’m loved and to follow the Shepherd and I’ll keep you posted.

He Restores My Soul: Part 2

Read Part 1

There’s a song by Sleeping At Last that says:

The list goes on forever
Of all the ways I could be better
In my mind
As if I could earn God's favor given time
Or at least "congratulations"

Now I have learned my lesson
The price of this so-called perfection
Is everything
I've spent my whole life searching desperately
To find out that grace requires nothing of me

Grace requires nothing of me. Gut punch.

As I’ve been really honest with myself, I fear that God is like every other area of my life and relationships and I need to try to be worthy, I need to have done the right thing to get his favor. And if I can’t get his full favor at least I might be able to earn a “congratulations.”

Maybe I can’t truly be loved, but I can at least be respected for a job well done and that can almost be enough, right? You know what the price of that kind of thinking is? Everything. It’s cost me relationships. It’s cost me sanity. It’s cost me peace.

This song settled in my soul and has walked me through Psalm 23:1-3 by the hand of grace. I don’t have to DO anything to receive God’s grace. I know that, but I have the hardest time really believing it. I’m working on believing it now.

The work I’m doing this year, my job as it were, is accepting. It’s a terribly vulnerable job, to just sit with arms outstretched and dare to hope that I can receive just because I am who I am and God is who he is.

I can be a stupid sheep, sitting on my wooly butt, and still have the Shepherd's love and favor. I can wander away and fall off a cliff and his opinion of me won’t change. That really makes my eye twitch.

But you know what? It’s also been a little bit delicious.

Instead of feeling like I need to “do” to walk with the Lord this year I’ve started just trying to be. I’m trying to embrace the fact that my spiritual self is not made up of a check list and progression chart. Part of finding restoration of the soul is acknowledging who God made me to be, who he delights in, and accept enough grace to just BE that.

I’ve found green pastures in late night fiction reading. I’ve found still waters in an obsessive and fascinating research project. I’ve found plenty when I’ve decided to say no. I’ve found freedom in my soul when I’ve relinquished control. I’ve been restored when I sit quietly and listen.

Grace requires nothing of me.

Read Part 3

The Ugly Truth

Honestly, life's been kicking the pants off me lately. We're busy, like lots of people, and I tend to be a really focused person...as in too many things at one time makes me a crazy person. Lately, I've been a crazy person.

Being task driven, this means that I still get a lot of work done, but, as I always remind my eager-to-please-people husband, "When you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else."

Well, I like to say yes to tasks. I like to feel a little bit of pressure pressing down on my shoulders--to know that I am taking on a challenge and feel the satisfaction in its completion. I love crossing things off of my to-do list and can get lost in the job for hours on end.

But, saying yes to tasks means I have to say no to something else. Often, what suffers is my relationships, because I only have so much extroverted energy to go around. So, on the outside I'm burning through task lists and on the inside I'm one big ball of ugly.

Usually it's the husband and child that catch the brunt of this. I'm snippy and impatient and lack a generous spirit. This week, the ugly leaked out beyond the confines of the family. It's hard to hide the truth when that happens.

This week I came face to face with the ugly, unloving, and impatient me that has built up inside of my outwardly productive body and this truth smacked me in the face (for what feels like the thousandth time--apparently I'm a very slow learner): It's not OK to trade productivity for love. In fact, its not only not OK, it's completely antithetical to everything I want my life to be about.

1 Corinthians 13 came to mind as I have been processing my inner ugliness:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³ If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

⁴ Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶ it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

⁸ Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. ¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. ¹² For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

¹³ So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

In other words: If I finish all my tasks and work countless hours in a day, but have not love...it's all a waste of time. It's humbling and re-prioritizing.

I've got some changes to make, and the first one is recognizing my constant need for Christ. My independent nature eventually always makes a mess of things and reveals that I cannot live my life in a way that matters without Him.

Praise God for His forgiveness and grace, and especially His love. May He give me those things in abundance so that I can live a life pleasing to Him.

One Point for Mama

I'm not a warm and fuzzy mother.  I don't worry about every little bump and bruise or if he will be unhealthy if he misses a meal.  I don't endorse extensive crying, even upon injury.  I encourage Little Nut Nut's wild adventures, which often include pushing his physical limits and testing his abilities.  How will he know what he can do if he can't try? 

Don't get me wrong, there are lots of hugs and words of affirmation.  I know our son feels secure and loved.  We also try to limit his dare devilish ways to jumping from no higher than 2 stairs and doing flips on softer surfaces.

I try to take the long view of parenting.  Most things even out in the end if you love your child, draw boundaries for them and keep them fed and watered...also, it goes a long way for your kids if you are not insane, just sayin.  Even though I don't worry about eating habits and whether or not he'll be dumb because I didn't do flash cards with him EVERY day this week, I do worry about behavior.  Not that you'd always know that by looking at my kid.  He is a sweet-spirited child but stubborn as heck.  As an extroverted boy, he has no qualms with loud and embarrassing demonstrations of his disappointment and/or rage. 

I think it's mainly my personality, but I LOVE to win.  It's so easy to get sucked into a battle mentality with my stubborn little three year old, and once that happens...heck if I'm gonna lose.  The problem is, in the world of constructive discipline that mentality doesn't get you very far.  Instead I end up crazy stressed out, angry, and still dealing with an obstinate little boy.  One day when I was at my wits end, my toddler drooling entirely-masticated "offending" food from his stubborn mouth, someone suggested I read Love and Logic for Early Childhood.  I bought that sucker on my Kindle within five minutes. 

It. Is. Awesome.  We're still working on how exactly to implement it all and of course there are still those days, but it is designed to take a lot of the frustration and anger out of parenting.  Can I hear an Amen! for that!!  (There are some aspects of the book that I don't totally agree with because it's not written from a Christian perspective, and for us, I feel it is best pared with the principles presented in One Becoming Toddlerwise.)  But, the basic premise of the Love and Logic technique is that as parents we are preparing our kids for the real world and should parent with techniques that teach them immediate cause and effect and guide them through their own problem solving. It requires accountability for actions, fixing things they've broken, paying with money, chores, or toys for time or items lost by their behaviour.

We started a Chore Box with age-appropriate chores to draw from when needed.  Our downstairs neighbors have heard a LOT of vacuuming lately!  He's been cleaning baseboards and dusting and sweeping.  I haven't had clean baseboards in, well, I don't know, but they're clean now!!  Of course, they are three-year-old-ability clean, but in a world where cleaning is not high on my list of priorities I'll take it.

So, while I realize it's not healthy to be in competition with my child over discipline issues...my house sure is clean :)...one point for Mama!

Confessions of a Control-aholic

It has been said, once or twice, that I like to control things.  OK, maybe a few more times than once or twice.  I could say it's a result of being an INTJ, because we have a knack for seeing things that need to be fixed and coming up with really ingenious ways to fix them!  We have high standards and work hard to reach them, which makes us tough task-masters to ourselves and everyone else.  It's true, but I can't blame it all on that.  A lot of it is just good, old-fashioned, universal pride.

This has played out in a myriad of ways as I have navigated relationships in my life...which would take too long to discuss here (sorry, Husband).  I have, however, been thinking a great deal about how this plays out in my relationship with the Lord.  Some recent discussions with a young lady, who reminds me a great deal of myself at her age (and, yes, saying that does make me old), has me thinking through the ups and downs of the last ten years (again with the oldness) of making my faith my own.

In a recent conversation with this young woman I looked her in the eyes and said, "I wish I had better news for you, but if you really want to learn to trust the Lord, it's going to be a rough few years for you."  My husband calls my habit of making these sorts of statements negative; I prefer realistic.  For those of us who like to rely on our own competence, who want to know what our next step is before we take it, who don't do well with ambiguity and uncertainty, who just want the ANSWER dang it (usually that's not the word I'd use)...learning to trust the Lord is H.A.R.D.!

"The good news though," I told her, "is, if you put in the work, it gets easier with time."  That is to say, sort of in the way that behavioral therapists work with Obsessive-Compulsive patients to help them learn to sit with their anxiety and desensitize themselves to it, us control-aholics have to sit with our anxiety and learn with time that God can be trusted more than ourselves. 

I wish I could be the sort of person who could believe without seeing, but I've never had that kind of faith.  It has taken many years of tears, anger, depression, anxiety, and confusion to begin to realize that God always comes through.  Not necessarily in the way I would have hoped for, but He masterfully, and patiently, weaves His plans for my life into a testimony to His name.  I don't have to have the dang answer.  I don't have to know what tomorrow will bring.  I don't have to be competent in everything.  God has all those things and more. 

But, asking God for more faith is kind of like asking for more patience...you shouldn't do it unless you're prepared for life to kick the crap (pride) out of you.  I've experienced some serious crap-kickings in the last few years.  I've wrestled with God in ways that have left me, like Jacob, limping but blessed.  I carry scars that speak of my stubbornness and a hopeful heart that speaks of a faithful God. 

I still have days where I freak out, where ambiguity scares me, and where I want God to tell me what I want to hear, but they are fewer than they used to be.  I've seen the power and precision of God bring me my son, carry me through ministry burn-out, and change people's lives miraculously.  I've found that my comfort zone gets bigger and bigger each time God nudges me out of it.  I pray (hesitantly and hopefully) that He continues to do so, because my journey of trust is far from over. 

If it means there are days where all you can do is crumple in the corner and cry, but your mind repeats "I will trust God.  I will trust God. I will trust God." that's a good place to start.  I've been there.  The Lord, in His goodness, will bring you through.  There is no easy path to trust for a control-aholic but a life of faith in the Lord is far better than a life of faith in myself...I'll screw it up every time.