Advent Is A Season, Not A Day

My brother has angels. Everybody in my family knows this. If Mama, Daddy, Austin and I all got together and we had to vote on who in the group should probably be dead, it's him. We've all had our close calls, but he takes the cake. I won't tell you all the incidents in which his life has been unexplainably preserved (I probably don't actually know about all of them) but I will say they range from shop and farm accidents to motorcycle and car wrecks. We had a conversation a couple of weeks ago in which he said, "If I'm still alive today, it's not for lack of opportunity to be dead." The take-away from this is that there's a reason Austin has a legion of angels following him around. He has something really big ahead of him. I believe God has a special mission in mind for my little brother and I cannot wait to see what it is!

The Christmas season is officially here (hence the red font) and I want to challenge you all to start reading the Christmas story in Luke 1 instead of Luke 2. It's the only Gospel that offers us a glimpse of what it looks like to prepare and wait for the birth of Jesus. Some of the things you'll notice about this preparation are that 

1. There's a really significant wait time. The Jews had received no spiritual revelation for almost 400 years. Think about that. That's about how much time passes between the Book of Genesis and the Book of Exodus. America is barely half that old. 

2. There's a couple of faithful prayer warriors still barely clinging to hope. If you want to know what waiting on God without seeing Him looks like, ask  Zachariah and Elizabeth. Esther and the Jews in Susa were not hearing from God directly, but at least there were other prophets in the world who were. Zachariah was a priest in the temple so one would think he'd have a direct line to Yahweh, but nobody was hearing from God anywhere. And 

3. Bonus! There's even more angels in this story than we usually remember. In fact, Gabriel's pretty busy making house calls about babies. Heads up, ladies. If Gabriel shows up at your house, you're probably pregnant. 

Today, I want to focus on the angels. I'm pretty convinced Gabriel and the heavenly host didn't make their birth announcements and then disappear into the sky. They stuck around. If my little brother has a legion of angels guarding his life, I can only imagine what sort of holy war must have been going on in the ten foot diameter surrounding Elizabeth, Mary and their children for the rest of their lives. But let me take this one step further; we know there were plenty of angels around after John and Jesus were born, but how often do we consider the angels that had to prepare Elizabeth and Mary for their special mission? Until recently, I've never even contemplated how many angels were contending for Elizabeth and Mary before they got pregnant. Mary was a young girl, but Elizabeth had reached old age by the time Gabriel told her husband that her prayers for a child were being heard. A lifetime is a long time to pray and not see fruit. I get frustrated when I don't see fruit after a couple of weeks, sometimes days. Yet Elizabeth (her name means 'God is abundant' by the way) knew her identity in Christ and never let go of that. I don't think she hung on alone.

Just like Elizabeth's waiting to see fruit from her prayers, revelation can take a long time to come. The church calendar only dedicates a few weeks to Advent; imagine waiting with that kind anticipation for years. But also like Gabriel's visit to Zachariah, once it comes, it can show up in a big way.  Advent has been particularly special for me this year. I'm finally getting answers to some questions I've been trying to process since my baptism back in 2014. A lot of things came to light then and it's taken about two and half years for my eyes to adjust. As I go through my Advent devotionals, I'm learning that waiting, hoping and anticipating should always be directed at a person and not an outcome. When we put our trust in Jesus for a particular outcome like a job, a relationship, a new opportunity or freedom from an old mistake, we are in danger of making that trust contingent on us getting those things. I'm finally learning to trust Jesus period, not just trust Him to give me what I want. Starting this year, if I'm going to anticipate and long for something so much that it consumes my thoughts and dictates my decisions, I want it to be Jesus. Not a dream job in Virginia and not a husband. 

I have to admit, this Christmas more than ever, I'm really thankful that Luke 1 is in the Bible and that I have Elizabeth to show me how to wait faithfully. I'm also really thankful that I have my brother around to remind me that angels are real.

P.S. For anyone interested in a new perspective on how angels (and demons) operate in our world, or for anyone who doubts for a single moment that there is a battle going on around us. I want to recommend a book by Frank Peretti called This Present Darkness. I admit, it's not very Christmas-y, but it will forever change how you view prayer, the other day-to-day tasks you perform every day and especially how you feel the next time your car won't start. 

Apology Unaccepted.

Today at church, I heard some beautiful words of wisdom from a woman named Kat Lee. Kat attends Antioch Community Church in Waco and for the last few years, she has written a blog for women entitled Hello Mornings. I strongly recommend it! While explaining the need for daily quiet time with God, Kat stressed the importance of starting small. "I am a model of low goals," she said, "I have never finished a Beth Moore Bible study, ever." Let me tell you ladies, hearing that from such a successful and kingdom-minded woman gave me some very real hope and encouragement. The main point is, starting small is still a start. She went on to say that talking to God for 30 seconds every morning often does more for our relationship with Him than a 3-hour 'prayer chunk' once a week. "What we do faithfully is a lot more significant than what we do sporadically."

So right there in my chair I made a list. What do I do faithfully? Here's what I came up with:

1. Cry. (Duh, I'm a woman, what did you expect)
2. Realize my mistakes and crawl back to God.
3. Dream of an adventure.
4. Dream of someone to share it with.
5. Realize I'm lonely & obsessed with finding said someone and crawl back to God.
6. Wonder if I'm beautiful.
7. Try to invest in my relationship with God, let it fizzle out and....crawl back to God.

At first, I took a lot of comfort from the fact that Numbers 3, 4 and 6 were straight out of Stasi and John Eldredge's definition of a woman in Captivating. But after I reread them, I laughed out loud. In church. 

There's a lot of crawling here. And let's not forget Number 1. 
Crawling and crying. 
Yikes. 
It's a good thing my God self-identifies as a Father.

I'm 110% confident I'm not the only one who is building, rowing and steering the ugly cry face boat. We all know that face, we all know that hurt. We all know what it's like to multi-task cry-face management with holiday shopping, dieting and taxes. And yet, when our aching, exhausted souls cry out to our Father, how often do our prayers begin with shame, with embarrassment, and feeling like we're taking up His time. God, I'm sorry, but I'm really hurting and I need you right now.

Let me go on the record and say that I think God takes personal offense when we pray that way. Honey, do not ever apologize for the way God made you. He made you to feel and love deeply, so don't apologize when you do. And it's not just our prayers, it's our everyday conversations. One of my favorite slam poetry performances includes a young woman who recognizes that all of her questions in math class begin with the words 'I'm sorry'. My friends, this should not be! 

I'm on a mission to stop apologizing for who God made me. 
I'm not going to apologize for disagreeing with you because God gave me an innovative mind and I intend to use it.
I'm not going to apologize for not understanding something, because He also reveals His wisdom in His perfect time. 
I'm not going to apologize for needing to talk things out, because God made women in such a way that this is physiologically impossible. 
I'm not going to apologize  for asking you for too much information about your life, because women are unique vessels of His ridiculous compassion. 
And I'm not going to apologize for realizing that I am worth more than the time someone else will not give me, because God told me so in His word. 

Women apologize for these things all the time and yet at the heart of each apology, the God of the Universe is screaming at us No, I made you that way! Apology unaccepted!

So here's a thought. If we're going to be consistent, let's be consistent in our crawling, not our apologizing. I hope you can see the difference. The former moves us ever closer to the heart of our Maker. The later is nothing short of the audacity to criticize His handiwork.

The Bar

A college friend and I recently discussed a double-standard we have encountered in our professional and personal lives. For the first twenty-five years of our lives, my generation has been encouraged to think for ourselves, be independent and shoot for the stars, but now that we are beginning to use that freedom and independence, many of those who wished it for us are expressing disappointment with the end result.

The examples are everywhere but I'll give you two. I know several people who have suffered severe breaks with their parents and grandparents because after years of going to youth retreats and Christian schools, their faith does not look exactly the way it did when they were children. What did they expect? I met a man a few months ago whose parents encouraged him to be open-minded and treat women well, but were extremely disappointed when he gave up football to work for a sex-trafficking awareness non-profit. Both of these groups of people are good, kind, compassionate people of integrity and I can't help but wonder, if they are a disappointment, what is the standard?

So I ask you, do we really want our friends, kids and spouses to reach the standard we set? It appears the parents I mentioned above might be second-guessing the prayers they prayed over their children in their cribs. 

Let's take that one step further. Do we really want to reach the standard we set for ourselves? The perfect job, perfect relationship, perfect house? Because we all know we're not actually going to get them. Why do we demand so much of ourselves, only to be as unreasonably disappointed as parents who want open-minded children to never change? The Millennial generation is shooting themselves in the foot here and the solution isn't settling for less, it's appreciating what we have. 

Growing up, everyone and his brother told us to set the bar high. I'm beginning to think there was an extreme miscommunication here. In this seemingly simple encouragement, my generation did not hear set, we heard high. I think the intended message was you set your own destiny, you create your future and no one else. But what we heard was, always aim high, anything less than the top is failure.  This is very important. We learned that fame was more important than how we acquired it. As a result, we created a standard that makes us feel like we failed and leaves us with no understanding of how to properly recover or try again. And now that we're having kids, we give out ribbons for showing up so that they won't feel like failures the way we did. 

I think we do the same thing to the Gospel. I once heard a pastor say that Americans are far better at adding to the Gospel, adding rules and standards, than they are at cheapening it. We are a nation built on overworking - for both our jobs and our salvation. To this, God says, "Why do you think I'm disappointed in you? I didn't create that rule for you, YOU did!" When we fail to meet the Gospel standard we created, no only are we convinced that we are bad people, we are convinced we are bad Christians. We are irretrievable and hopeless because, since our standard is so fluid and emotion-based, we have no idea how to recover and get back to a point of grace. But that's the beauty of grace - we don't have to get back to it. Rather than swing the pendulum back to a place where we are still working for it, we simply have to remember our Sonship and be thankful for what we most assuredly have. 

Once we know our salvation is secure, maybe then we won't demand perfection in this life because we know it will only be found in the next.

Steroids.

Last Tuesday, I  discovered a new level of feeling miserable when I got tonsillitis. 
On Wednesday morning, the doctor gave me steroids and antibiotics. 
By Thursday evening, I wasn't just back to 100%, I was flying at a solid 150%. 
It's now Sunday evening and I can't believe that I'm still riding this high. 

I haven't felt this good in months. I'm motivated, happy, smiling more and crying oh so much less. I'm feeling amazing physically, in control emotionally and mentally I feel like I'm breathing fresh air. I am at peace with things I used to worry about constantly. It's truly glorious. The doctor wants me to steadily decrease how many pills I take every day, but lucky me, I have to finish the bottle. At this point, it looks like it'll last until about Friday. 

It is truly amazing how much your life changes when your body feels good.
I get why people work out regularly, eat healthy and get plenty of sleep.
This. Feels. Good.

But that's just it. This is completely drug-induced. 
What I've felt for the past few days has been generated by pills, not by me. For now.

When you make a commitment to understand how your body, your heart and your mind all work together to make the best version of yourself, sometimes the team doesn't communicate so well at first. Your heart goes on a joy ride and stops listening to your mind or your body tells you that you want something when both the heart and mind are screaming to just leave it alone. As miserable as tonsillitis was, it was a real wake up call. The last really bad interception before coach finally calls a time out. 

Sometimes, I think God lets us get tonsillitis or dumped or demoted because we need to know what happens when we stop communicating properly. When we get distracted, the team starts to throw some lousy passes and I imagine God just holding the whistle out to me saying, "Whenever you're ready." But the great thing is, once we finally own up and get the team in a huddle, God's got the playbook to turn it around. And sometimes, He gives us a glimpse of what it will look like when we start playing like a team again. 

Right now, my million dollar question is What am I going to do to stay feeling this good once the meds are gone? I haven't figured it out yet. But thank God for tonsillitis. I wouldn't have realized how sick I was without it.

A New Way to Worship

Have you ever considered that maybe God sings with us when we worship Him?

After you read this, I'd like you to find some of your favorite worship music and imagine that Jesus is singing it to you rather than you singing it to Jesus. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but when we sing about how much we love our Heavenly Father or how faithful and sure our salvation is, we should take a moment every so often to remember that the truth of the Gospel teaches us that Jesus feels the exact same way towards us. Just as we long to someday be with Him, He longs to present His bride in the Throne Room of Heaven. 

I'll start with a simple example. Matthew West's song More has always been me and Jesus's love song; it is probably the only song I never sing along to as a rule. I just sit and listen while Jesus sings it to me. I love you more than the sun and the stars that I taught how to shine. You are mine, and you shine for me too. I love you.

Just a heads up, this does not usually work with old hymns. They are very foundational and heaven-focused, which is healthy and necessary in worship, but they don't usually work for this practice. However, I have recently grown incredibly fond of Blessed Assurance, and every now and then, I imagine Jesus singing it instead of me. Go with me on this. Blessed Assurance, You are mine. You are my story, you are my song. And for just a moment, this song is a two way conversation. Jesus is my story; to tell my story is to tell of Him (Thanks Big Daddy Weave for that great quote). But you are also His story and His song; when He retells the story of history to the angels, it's a story about you. And I think we forget that sometimes. To accept the gift of salvation from Jesus is a one-time decision, but the reality of the depth of love in the Gospel is something we need to remind ourselves is real every single day. 

Here's a little deeper example. A recent favorite of mine is You Will Never Run Away by Rend Collective. The chorus goes: You will never run away, you're forever mine. You will never run away, you're by my side. You will never run away, you'll forever shine. You will never run away you're by my side. I think on our hardest days, Jesus sings this to us. He knows the strength of our faith better than we do and He's cheering and fighting for us when we question where we stand. One of my favorite Bethel Music song's declares Jesus we love you, Oh how we love you. You are the one our hearts adore. Whenever I sing this song, it's really weird, but my focus literally goes back and forth; I sing a chorus, then Jesus sings a chorus, repeat. When was the last time you had that kind of a conversation with the God of the Universe. 

So give it a try. It might feel strange to imagine Jesus worshiping you, but in a kind of weird way, He does. Worship is an act of love. When we worship God, we are lifting Him to a high place in our hearts reserved only for Him. And believe it or not, Jesus has a high place in His heart for you too and He will always, always love you more than you love Him. And while we really shouldn't let it go to our heads that we are worshiped, what I want this exercise to teach us is to never forget that we are loved by Jesus in a way that surpasses everything we could imagine.

I Fasted for Three Days and Nothing Happened.

I know this is supposed to be a blog about Eating, but permit me to dedicate just this one post to NOT Eating. Immediately after teaching His disciples the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6, Jesus spends 2 verses stressing forgiveness and then the first 'next topic' words out of His mouth are "Whenever you fast". Note that He does not say if, but when. It's like every other Christian discipline; it doesn't always, but it can cause movement in the heavenlies and should be a practice that saved believers (at least) think about (at least) occasionally. 

After extended seasons of attendance at Zootown Church in Missoula and Antioch Community Church in Waco, I've come to expect a lot from fasting. I've seen my food-free peers experience supernatural healing, prophetic declaration, the works. I myself had a truly profound experience during a fast I did about a year ago. After several fasts in several different environments and seasons of my life, I expect Spiritual Awakening when I fast. So...

From sunrise on October 14th to sunset on October 16th, I did not eat any solid food.
I drank water, milk and juice.
I read the same passage every morning when I woke up and every evening before I went to sleep. (For the record, it was Psalm 119:33-40)
I attended daily prayer meetings at my church and I only listened to worship music.

And nothing circumstantially changed in my life. 

I woke up on Saturday morning in the same apartment with the same job, still hungry, still a graduate student and still unsure of how I was going to wrap up the next chapter of my thesis. There were no fireworks, no prophetic dreams, no writing in the sky and no dry fleeces in my shower. I had no visions of a museum career in Virginia, no name of my future spouse underlined in my Bible and no burning desire to be any nicer to the annoying undergrads that blared loud music last night. In fact, I'm pretty sure every emotion I felt those three days, every word I prayed and every faint whisper I may have heard from God (or imagined) were all familiar, repeated things I'd heard and felt before. Leftovers.

And somehow, the God of the Universe knew that leftovers were EXACTLY what I needed. 

I recently finished Beth Moore's 10-week study on the Book of Esther and Beth points out several times that the name of God does not appear anywhere in Esther's 10 chapters. In this way, Esther is the book of the Bible that shows us what God looks like when we cannot see Him. After the king's best man Haman sets a calendar date to destroy, kill and annihilate all the Jews in Persia, a secretly Jewish scribe named Mordecai fasts, puts on ashes and mourns at King Xerxes' gate, crying out to Yahweh to save his people. At the end of his fasting, the Jews are still not saved, but Mordecai is still certain that 'relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place' (4:14). For three days this week, I thought about Mordecai a lot. And this morning, I was still missing a lot of the answers I wanted when I started fasting, but I have to admit, after three days of hearing nothing but familiar words of the hope and faithfulness of my Savior, I was pretty sure that He had all my questions handled.

I believe that the will of God is something we Earthlings often experience in retrospect, but rarely as foresight. As Soren Kierkegaard gloomily points out in Fear and Trembling, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." We see in Scripture that the moments God revealed His will before it happened were rare and even among those few, most of them were pretty fuzzy on the details. What was absolutely NOT fuzzy was the faith of those He revealed His will to. A lot of them ended up in the Hall of Faith in Hebrews 11, but none of them got there because mountains moved and walls came tumbling down every time they decided to skip a meal. They got there because after pouring their hearts out, fasting and mourning, the silence that followed didn't slow them down.

So, if anybody out there is considering fasting, I pray that you can be content with whatever revelation God gives you or chooses to keep secret. If He told us everything we wanted to know, we wouldn't need Him, so even when we fast, He sticks to telling us what we need to know. And sometimes, all we really need to know is, Dear Heart, did you know that I love you?

Silent Treatment.

Does anybody else write down their anger and never, ever let anybody read it?
Or maybe wear their heart on their sleeve, but only when they're in front of a mirror?

I want to suggest that social media is full of two kinds of people:
1) People who hurt and tell someone.
2) People who hurt and tell an empty room.

I think there's a lot more women in this second category than we think. And it's not healthy, ladies. The fear of being too much and too little at the same time comes out on Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook. We fear being too little in fashion and motherhood, so we post dorm decor, recipes or pictures of our children. We fear being too much emotionally, so we avoid anything that might suggest we are stressed to the point of tears. Which is ironic, because going to all the effort of making our own pumpkin spice latte cupcakes with creme cheese frosting and a cinnamon stick is what induces the stress we want to hide. Face it ladies; social media is your great-grandmother's last ditch effort to convince you not to air your dirty laundry in public, to put on some lipstick and fix your hair before your husband or (God forbid) your girlfriends get here for Bible study. Yeah, because those are definitely two relationships in which secrets are totally acceptable.

I cannot tell you how many screaming, angry, crying, just-want-to-rip-my-hair-out posts I've considered posting on my Facebook status these last three weeks, only to reword, rework and rewrite until I just get fed up and retract. I give in to the old granny behind my ear, still whispering about dirty laundry.

This needs to end. And it needs to end now. 
Because I'm a time bomb waiting to go off. 
But I don't know how to tell you that yet.
So the clock keeps counting down.

I really don't have an answer to the silent treatment. 
I hope you weren't expecting one.

The only thing I can suggest is to keep going, somehow.
Eat. Pray. Plank.
Most importantly....PRAY.
Because even if you try to give God the silent treatment,
He hears it.

Psalm 18:6-7, 9-10, 16, 19

In my distress I called to the LORD; 
I cried to my God for help. 
From His temple He heard my voice; 
my cry came before Him, into His ears.
The earth trembled and quaked, and the foundations of the mountains shook; 
they trembled because He was angry. 
He parted the heavens and came down; 
dark clouds were under His feet.
He mounted the cherubim and flew; 
He soared on the wings of the wind.
He reached down from on high and took hold of me;
He drew me out of deep waters.
He brought me out into a spacious place;
He rescued me because He delighted in me.

If that's not a knight in shining armor, I don't know what is...