When You Get Over Yourself, Repent of Hypocrisy, and Give God Room

May 22, 2013 by 24 Comments

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When almost six thousand people from 88 different countries, representing a myriad of faith backgrounds gather in one place to worship the same Jesus you know and love, you can’t help but be changed by it. And realize that your perspective is quite small.

I stood on the concrete floor of the Royal Albert Hall, five rows from the stage, turning slowly like the ballerina on a child’s jewelry box taking it all in. Next to a folded seat draped with my damp trench coat, I watched people file into four stories of seats from the crowded city streets of London. Willing my mind to record it like a video camera of remembrance.

God’s presence was palpable.

Back home, I’d been so absorbed in finding time to write, connecting with people online and worrying about my children’s future, that I missed seeing Jesus’ perspective on the world. He was giving me a binocular view of unity and the way he loves mankind from the diversity of the Body of Christ.

But more than that, I realized I was avoiding the uncomfortable truth that sin has left an ugly indelible mark on the world. Not intentional avoidance, but one slow drive around my well-manicured neighborhood, one click on the garage door of my comfort zone at a time.

He’s longing for us to be carriers of Hope to a world living with the absence of hope. And there isn’t just one way to do that.

I stood up during a break and asked the woman seated in front of me if she needed prayer. She nodded to the affirmative, so I prayed for what she requested: more of the Holy Spirit’s power in her life. The sky didn’t crack open and she didn’t leap over seats, but we felt the presence of God as we bowed our heads to humbly ask.

The next day I stepped away from my seat, walked around a galley of people to the row behind me and prayed for a woman who stood in response to the need for healing in her neck. The muscles so tight she couldn’t move her head around while driving to see if the road was clear to pass. A young woman and I prayed over her together and after a few moments, she could move her neck without pain.

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Last weekend, I sat in a different kind of theater with my family, waiting for the new Star Trek movie to appear on the screen. As the lights dimmed, the putrid smell of alcohol and cigarettes permeated the air around us. H leaned over and remarked that the person behind us was so inebriated that the smell was leaking from his pores.

I thought about moving to another seat.

I thought about how I don’t like going to the theater anymore. I prefer watching movies on my couch with a blanket draped over me; eating popcorn from my own bowl, instead of a cardboard box.

I thought about how uncomfortable the seats are, how I have to swing my legs over to the left or right because the person in front of me leans too far back in their swanky theater seat, invading my personal space.

I thought about how loud the plastic wrapping sounds on the candy people were opening behind me, how when you are drunk you aren’t considering other people.

And then suddenly, I thought about how I sat crumpled up in the Royal Albert Hall just a few days ago, seated around people I didn’t know, listening to Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury say, “The key moment for Christians is when we realize what Christ did for us, not what we do for Him.”

So I repented of my hypocrisy and prayed for the person behind me as I watched Klingons threaten someone’s life from the Enterprise.  He didn’t stand up and ask for prayer but I boldly asked the Lord to heal him. Deliver him of his addiction and let him know he is loved in a tangible way.

We are carriers of hope. There is more than one way to deliver it.  More than one way that He’ll remind us of why we are here. God isn’t limited by venue, language barriers, cultural differences, faith backgrounds or our sin when it comes to showing His endless love and transforming power to mankind.

It is not what we do for God, but what He does for us that changes everything.

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Linking with Jennifer for Tell His Story.

 

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When Right Now is Just Right

February 26, 2013 by 47 Comments

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“Number 86,” calls the court clerk from behind a small podium at the front of the quiet room. The judge sits elevated behind her, draped in black, reading glasses resting on the end of his nose. I stand up behind a roomful of seated strangers in the back of the room and tell her what she wants to know.

“I’m a freelance writer, I’m married and my husband is an Anglican priest,” I say. The clerk stares at me for a moment, like she’s mesmerized by a pendulum swinging above my head.

“Ok, thank you,” she responds and looks down at her list.

She continues calling random numbers and a woman wearing a brace wrapped around her mid-section stands and leans on a cane. “Unemployed and single,” she responds.

“What did you do before becoming unemployed,” the clerk asks.

And so the process goes, one by one each of the sixty-something people in the room take their turn as potential jurors.

A tall, lanky man wearing an orange gingham shirt the size of a table cloth stands and looks down. His hands tremble. He tells the judge he had brain surgery recently and this process is making him nervous.  He feels unfit to serve as a juror because he still has seizures.

“We can deal with seizures,” the judge tells him in an educated southern twang. “We’ve done that before.” And the young man, he sits back down, hangs his head over his lap.

Two chairs away in the same row, a scruffy man with salt and pepper strands hanging below his collar, leans on the chair in front of him. Says he’s disabled due to an injury at work; jokes about having seven children. When he sits back down, his arms spread like wings over the empty chair backs on either side. He smiles sideways at a man nearby.

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Two questions to define someone, three if you answer married. What kind of work do you do? Are you married? What does your spouse do for employment? That’s it.

I wonder how Esther might have responded to those questions when summoned by the King. Orphan and single?

There isn’t a steeple overhead and we’re not sitting on pews but I’m seeing a picture of His church. A gathering of His beloved:  the broken, the discarded, and the destitute in need of a Savior. I don’t have a pulpit but I want to get up and tell them that they aren’t defined by a number, a job description, an illness, an injury or a marital status.

And neither are you. Like Esther, you are more, so much more.

But I have to be quiet and proper, so I look over at the woman seated next to me and smile. Her eyes widen when they meet mine. On a break, we learn we have a girlfriend in common, our boys are the same age, and they share the same birthday.

And the wise words of Mordecai spoken to to his cousin Esther echo in my mind, “What’s more, who can say that you have been elevated to the palace {courtroom, church, job, community} for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14)

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Because sometimes God has you right where you are, not for the place, position, or circumstance, but for the message He wants you to deliver.

And one day He may seat you right next to the only person in a room of strangers whose son shares the same birthday as yours, just to let you know you are right where you need to be. Even when you’re fulfilling  jury duty.

Have you ever doubted your circumstances? What is the message God is giving you to share right where you are?

Linking with Laura, Jen, Heather, Holley, and Jennifer.

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Why Healing Can’t Be Hurried Up

November 27, 2012 by 3 Comments

Sitting under the square hole in the mud wall, a window without glass or screen, I prop my voice recorder on the meager table and begin asking questions. I’m unprepared to hear the answers. How does one describe the horror of seeing their entire family mutilated and then go on to forgive their perpetrators?

Young Rwandans take turns on the couch across from me. Sit next to an interpreter and describe being orphaned, captured, beaten, raped, pillaged and wandering during the 1994 genocide. Then they share the redemption, how living in Hope Village changes their lives.

A five year effort fund raising for this child-headed village of 80 children brought me here. I can’t swallow their suffering stuck in my throat. I barely hold the recorder steady for the trembling emotion ready to tumble out.

I’ve never known this kind of suffering. Their stories cast light on the shadows of my own experience. Yet how do I feel more at home with my Rwandan friends than those in my own seaside southern community?

Please join me at Thorns and Gold to finish the story. I’m Tanya Marlow’s guest today on her series God and Suffering: Our Story and would be honored to see you there in the comments. I have a board on Pinterest called I live in England, in my heart and she’s one of the reasons I do.

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What Every Child Longs to Know

November 16, 2012 by 2 Comments

People were already leaning against the walls around the mortuary when we sat down in the last two chairs on the end of the back row. I wasn’t sure where to sit at my brother’s funeral.

My husband leaned over to ask about the people in the old photos scrolling on the screen hanging from the ceiling. He recognized the one of the eight- year- old girl holding her brother in footed pajamas across her lap. I began explaining the crooked arm of my family tree in a whisper, when a friend stood up and waved us over to the front row.

I told her I assumed there wasn’t enough room.

It’s what my father told me on the phone when I asked if I could live with him during my teen years. I’ve been hesitant to assume there is a place for me now.

Will  you join me over at BibleDude.net to read the rest of the story? I want to thank you for following me there last month, my first post at Living the Story was third in the number of views for the website in the month of October. Doing the happy dance over that one! I would be honored to see you over there in the comments again this month.

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Finally Letting Go, In Your Words {Giveaway}

October 31, 2012 by 45 Comments

We started this journey on a limestone ledge overlooking the Frio, bags packed for an October of Letting Go. Thirty-one days later, I stand among overstuffed couches and chairs looking at a framed photo collage on the wall of generations. A WWII pilot standing scarved next to a Corsair, smiling about the mark he left on the world.

Next to me, one Archbishop from Africa and two from Asia look at the black and whites. I think about how generations will look at pictures of them on walls someday and tell the tale of unfailing faith that changes the spiritual landscape of nations.

Mingling with friends around the room, I find myself talking about you, the way you’re leaving your mark on the world too. About how you embrace letting go with courage and abandon. The way a blog can be an altar of sweet communion, lives transformed in swallowing the message.

And while I try to recount the ways in which God reveals himself to you from the cafeteria of comments, I think I’ll step aside, because you say it best:

I have to tell you that more than once in this series God has met me at my point of need with your topic for the day. I was wrestling with the fact that my decision to leave an abusive husband was being misunderstood by someone “important”… until I read your wise words about letting go of the need to be understood. ~Mama Sheep

Oh my this resonates with where I am right now. I wonder what it would be like if we were measured by our fruitfulness instead of productivity? Or not measured at all! Thank you for your encouragement in this Letting Go series. ~Kristin

This website is a recent discovery for me . . . it has inspired me in such a way that makes me realize we all have the same struggles, and remember that I am not alone. Sometimes that in itself is a great feat! ~Sherri

I have so enjoyed your 31 days of ‘Letting Go’! I’ve taken notes every day. I’ve learned about the many ways I hold on, trying in my own strength . . .  ~Jillie

Once again, I find God offering me a spark of hope through the journey of another.  ~Claygirlsings

(This) makes me look differently at my own life and the letting go of one phase of life while I am walking into the next. ~Evie

Though our circumstances vary, we’ve discovered that we aren’t alone in what we suffer. Because pain is common and redemption looks beautiful on everyone. Letting go, it isn’t a magic pill for happiness, it’s a process that brings us to closer to seeing our true reflection in the eyes of our Father. The revelation of the way He’s been there all along.

Can I tell you something? I didn’t have a plan beyond this theme God gave me one day in the shower. I let go of needing to have it figured out every day. And He is faithful.

I hope you’ll join me on the next leg of the adventure. We’re throwing confetti over here and blowing up balloons to celebrate.

And because Jesus Calling by Sarah Young was the muse on many days of my 31 day journey, I’m giving one away with a journal to one lucky person.  Just leave a comment to add your name to the drawing.

Nikki@Simply Striving won the Jesus Calling giveaway. Congrats Nikki!

Linking with Jennifer, Duane,WLWW , Emily and Ann.

This completes the series 31 Days of Letting Go. You can read the collective here. I’m so glad you’ve joined the journey, it’s been a great ride.

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Letting Go of the Past

October 8, 2012 by 34 Comments

Providential Relationships

He sees me wince, grab my lower back with one hand, balance the cup steeping tea in the other.  Leans over to grab a cup and asks if the low back pain is normal for me. I tell him it usually happens when I’m doing something new I’ve never done before, like this coach training session we’re doing together.

This man who fell out of a window and flies free from the cocoon of pain, he tells me the body often remembers what the mind forgets. The same physical response happens in similar circumstances, he tells me. “Do you remember it, the first time you held yourself tight doing something new,” he asks.

And right there, over the table of cream and sugar I remember it, like God pulling out a forgotten chapter in the story of my life.

When it All Started

A few months into her fifteenth year, she boards a Greyhound bus for the first time.  She hoists an oversized brown teddy bear and small suitcase up the steps, navigating the narrow aisle.  Her eyes ping pong back to front, side to side, assessing open seats avoiding eye contact with strangers.

She takes a seat next to the window, stares at the crowd below watching couples kiss, families wrap remembering around shoulders one last time.  Worries the community she leaves behind will forget her. Prays the new one won’t reject her.

The bear, a gift from friends at her going away party the night before, it sits in the aisle seat next to her blocking off the odd and strange.

On this day, pressed against cold glass, she holds herself tight in fear.

Pivotal Circumstances

I put the tea down on the table to catch my breath. The man whose new home is healing, he whispers a quiet prayer among the others pouring coffee, grabbing napkins. And I cross the threshold into letting go of what holds tight from the past when I sit back down in my office chair, lean back against the towel wrapped ice pack.

That bus carried me from Missouri to Oklahoma. To the one bedroom apartment stacked with Barry Manilow eight tracks on the table across from the cot I slept on for two years beside my Aunt Paula. Because I love my mother, not what the alcohol did to both of us.

Fear loosened its grip the day I stood on concrete halos of exhaust and held hands with security. But my body never forgot.

And that providential meeting in a fifteen minute break around a skirted table in the corner, it wet the ground of dormant seeds. And faith sprouted.

Now, when God extends a platter of pivotal circumstance to try, my body remembers and sighs peace. He was with me on the bus. He is with me now.  I taste and see that the Lord is good.

Who in your life has God used to grow your faith? Will you join me in thanking God for them?

Linking with Ann, Michelle and Laura.


This is the eighth post in the series 31 Days of Letting Go. You can read the collective here. If you are a writer, I invite you to link up any post you’ve written on the theme of letting go in the comments here on Friday. Subscribe to receive the series in your inbox or feed by adding your address in the side bar under Follow Redemptions Beauty.

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Breathing The Light

September 2, 2012 by 19 Comments

It’s a curious thing how a life extinguishes in the blow of a candle flame, while a baby takes his first step toward a father’s outstretched arms and another lays his fork on the side of an empty plate.

Dust returns to dust and the parched soul seeds left behind, they crack open in grief. And  He breathes the pain beating back to life, one dark moment at a time fading in the light of blinding love.

I looked into his soul and he allowed it.

The world’s waiting for the light, to be set free from the darkness.

Breathe. Inhale His grace. Exhale His glory.

A friend was prompted to pray for my family this weekend as she was listening to this song.  It blessed me so much I wanted to share it with you: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxqfDs-64I0&feature=youtube_gdata_player

 

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