what was meant for evil, God uses for good.

I've been thinking a lot about a certain sentence from the Bible. I haven't read the Bible in quite some time I must admit, but there is one scripture that keeps replaying over and over and over in my head. It's Genesis 50:20.

"As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good..."


It hits me. 
It hits me like a ton of bricks and I am wrecked and I am humbled. 


We all carry grief, dear friends. Brokenness, hate, resentment, anger, fury, spite, whatever it may be... We are human and we have a great capacity to hurt. And even though our pain can seem overwhelming, unfair and even cruel at times, our capacity to love is far greater than that.

I read this scripture of Joseph's story and I feel whole and I feel honest.

And it's hard as hell to get here....to where Joseph was. Humbled and subservient to the Lord. But I can tell you one thing, he didn't get here because he tried hard enough or cared enough about it. He got here because of who God is in Him. He got here because he sat in the presence of the Lord and he gave up. He saw His heart. He felt His heart, and despite all of Joseph's anger, righteous anger at that, he wept (Gen. 50:17).
He forgave.... and he loved.


May we all seek to be humbled and feel God's love like Joseph. May we seek to touch the Lord's glorious redeeming robe.

"I could hear my heart beating, 

I could hear everyone's heart.

I could hear the human noise we sat there making,

not one of us moping, not even when the room went dark."

                                                                   

                                                                            - Raymond Carver, 1938-1988

Give me a sec.

I woke up at 4:30 this morning and here we are at 7:22am and I still can't sleep. So after tossing and turning, sitting up and stretching, and finally getting up and eating leftover pizza, I decided to utilize this time to pray.

I found myself praying for someone very special in my life who has a lot of pretty large burdens on their shoulders right now. I first started to pray for specific things in this person's life to turn around, go better, lighten up, and then God calmed and focused my heart to pray for something different. He wanted me to pray for my friend to sit and stop.
The Lord in His word says, "Be still and know that I am God." Why does He say that? What does He mean by that? And....? Why doesn't he just say "Be still and know that I've got your back? Be still and know that everything will be okay?"

Friends, the fact that this sentence is phrased the way it is in Psalms 46:10 is extremely important.

He means that the most valuable thing you can do is to stop, sit, and intentionally know that God is our provider because he simply cannot not be. No matter how hard and crazy our lives can get swirling around us with today's agenda and tomorrow's deadlines, the Lord remains Love.

My prayer for my friend, for myself, and for all of you out there is that we might first and foremost believe that God is, and then seek to find His face. The more you intimately know who the Lord is, the more those burdens lose their might.

"All right, then, I'll go to hell."

today i thought i'd share a post by one of my favorite thinkers, Rachel Held Evans. i hope it challenges you and i hope it moves you as much as it did me. hats off rachel.

If I had to pick a favorite American writer, it would be Mark Twain, and if I had to pick a favorite scene from an American novel, it would be the one where his unlikely hero, Huckleberry Finn, accepts his fate in hell.

It’s the moral climax of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The duke and dauphin have betrayed Jim and sold him to the Phelpses “for forty dirty dollars,” and the Phelpses have locked Jim in their shed, where he awaits his return to his rightful owner for a $200 reward. Huck goes back to the raft to figure out what to do next, and there he gets to thinking about the lessons he learned in Sunday school about what happens to people like him who assist runaway slaves.

“People that acts as I’d been acting about [Jim],” he’d been told, “goes to everlasting fire.”

(After all, the Bible is clear: “Slaves obey your earthly masters with respect and fear”
- Ephesians: 6:5.)

Huck feels genuine conviction regarding his sin and, fearful of his certain fate in hell unless he changes course, he decides to write a letter to Jim’s owner, Miss Watson, to tell her where Jim can be found: 

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking- thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him agin in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:"All right, then, I'll go to hell"- and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.”

It is a moment of true moral courage, complicated though it is by troubling ingrained cultural assumptions. (Later, Huck can only make sense of Jim’s kindness to him and Tom Sawyer by concluding he must be “white on the inside,” a comment that reveals Twain’s gift for creating characters that both critique yet fully inhabit their cultural contexts.)

I often think about Huck’s resolution when I am told by religious leaders that “the Bible is clear” on this or that, and that I’ve got to stop listening to those gut feelings that tell me maybe we’ve gotten a few things wrong, that maybe there’s more to the story than we’re ready to see.

“Your feelings don’t matter,” they say.

“Your feelings cannot be trusted,” they say.

“Once you start listening to your feelings, over and beyond the plain meaning of Scripture, it’s a slippery slope to hell,” they say.

A part of me agrees. I want to be faithful to the inspired words of the Bible, not bend them to fit my own desires and whims. Being a person of faith means trusting God’s revelation, even when the path it reveals is not clear or comfortable.

But another part of me worries that a religious culture that asks its followers to silence their conscience is just the kind of religious culture that produces $200 rewards for runaway slaves. The Bible has been “clear” before, after all—in support of a flat and stationary earth, in support of wiping out infidels, in support of manifest destiny, in support of Indian removal, in support of anti-Semitism, in support of slavery, in support of “separate but equal,” in support of constitutional amendments banning interracial marriage.

In hindsight, it all seems so foolish, such an obvious abuse of Scripture.

...But at the time?

A few months ago, I was invited to serve communion at a church in San Diego that included quite a few LGBT Christians in its membership. A lot of things happened in that service that would make some of the leaders in my evangelical religious community very angry: a woman serving the bread and the wine, a lesbian couple partaking of the elements with their baby daughter in tow, a gay man embracing me in a big bear hug and telling me that it was the first time in twenty years he felt worthy to come to the Table.

In that moment—the one with the big bear hug—I knew what my Sunday school teachers would say. They would say that this man was most certainly not worthy to come to the Table, that I was most certainly not worthy to serve, and that daring to participate in this endeavor would surely take me one step closer to “everlasting fire.” 

“The body of Christ, broken for you,” I said anyway.

“The blood of Christ, shed for you,” I said anyway.

“The body of Christ, broken for you,” he said anyway.

“The blood of Christ, shed for you, he said anyway.

As we embraced, I knew in a way that I cannot put into words that sharing communion with this man was the right thing to do, that it was an act of bravery and grace for both of us—together unworthy, together worthy, brother and sister, in the mystery of the Eucharist.

So when the thought of my Sunday school teachers’ disapproval crossed my mind, the only words to surface to my lips were, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”

God and Gays #2: Sharing the Gospel

So I got a lot of flack for my post entitled "God and Gays". I got a lot of encouragement and support, but I also got a lot of flack...which should be expected if you write about things and put things on the internet.

Most of the tomatoes that were flung my way were by conservative readers who were upset over my take on what it means to "properly" spread the Gospel. And I want to first and foremost say that I appreciate your positions and respect your viewpoints on what it looks like to present the love and compassion of the Lord. There is indeed no formula for this and to be honest, there are many of us who are going to have differing opinions.

Just with any book one reads, the mental pictures developed and the lessons learned will vary from one person to the next. The slight differences in raconter of the four Gospels alone show us how our viewpoints on the same story can look slightly different sometimes. Are the underlying lessons and standards Jesus set for us open to being altered and colored by our own opinions? No. No they most certainly are not. I am not here to adjust the Good News to my liking. In fact, I promise you that I will always address difficult issues from a compassionate, Bible-based, Christ-centered perspective.

So back to the subject on what it looks like to spread the Gospel.

In order to answer that question, it is important to answer a few others first. My answers will not be lengthy, they will be to the point and hopefully clear.

What is the Gospel and why is it important?

The Gospel is the account of Jesus' life, and the central Christian message is a proclamation of redemption through the offering of Jesus Christ for one's sins.

I am keeping this answer short not because I want to spare you from reading an 8-page blog post, but because I hope that it is at this point you will stop reading here, pick up a Bible, and read one of the Gospels yourself. Christian or not, it's important to have a grasp on all religions in order to love others well. Beliefs are important to people, and that matters. This goes for you too Christian friend of mine. Don't be ignorant of other faiths. There is beauty in all and even though you don't embrace something in another faith, doesn't mean it's irrelevant and isn't important to someone. It's extremely difficult to love others well if you don't understand what they value.

No matter what religion you follow, we can all agree that there is a lot of corruption in the world. We have to teach babies to be good, not bad, and we go through our days rarely feeling hook line and sinker satisfied. Yes, we have moments when we're on cloud 9 and yes we have days when life just makes sense and feels good. But please don't be arrogant enough to think that life is consistently happy, your bank account is always so full it's embarrasing to talk about, and your significant other meets every beating desire of your heart. If you disagree with me here and your life is perfect, then may I borrow some money and have the keys to your Bugatti.

Christianity shouldn't be something you're convinced or scared into. Christianity is born with God's perfect will revealing Himself to us and us responding to that Grace. The wisdom and tenderness of the Lord's work becomes more apparent to me with every scripture I read and every moment I give. It is liberating and humbling, and unfortunately, I feel that a lot of us miss the mark due to an austere formula of what it looks like to share it.

A dear friend of mine from college, Gabriel Mudd, wrote what I feel is a theologically sound and compassionate view on what it looks like to share the Gospel.

"At this day in age in the US, you would be hard pressed to find someone who has not heard the gospel message, doesn't have a minute familiarity with the bible, or at least hasn't heard the arguments for, about, or against sin, and specifically homosexuality. There tends to be a lot of bitterness (legitimately) because of how someone has been treated, spurned, thrown out of a church, rejected, unloved, hated and abused for being honest, trying to seek help, or feeling different.
If someone confesses to be a charismatic Christian, generally speaking, people in the US know what that means, and often the association is having a hard-line stance on certain issues, complete with biblical support. And there is nothing wrong with standing for what you believe and knowing why you believe it. But often what gets lost in the balance is love for others. Some people are so zealous that they forget the human aspect of our basic intrinsic needs, to be loved fully and completely. They overlook the person’s heart in the balance and some are unfortunately trying to exault their own holiness over someone else for whatever reason. Instead of handling a situation with compassion, they blatantly say the hard line answer, not knowing the person’s history and not handling it with tact or understanding the story behind the situation. I’m not saying the situation is right, but from my own experiences, struggle and treatment, I know that things can be handled better so that others aren’t burned by Christians.
Jesus says that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. That is how you share the gospel. By consistency. By compassion. By having a stance but not judging others, (which is exactly what “sinners” have come to expect from “Christians,” almost so that they are pulling for the judgment to justify their uneasiness). We are to share the love of Christ, let God be the judge of all morality, and gain a better understanding of someone else’s heart and struggles."

I am a Christian. And my responsibility is to humbly and boldly follow the Lord and lay down my arms. It is to live like Jesus did. It is to stop waging war. It is to wash your feet.
So here is another apology on behalf of the Christians before me and around me who have not only epically failed at this, but who have put a chip on your shoulder or a dager in your heart.

Where are your affections?

I've become more and more aware of the battlefield in my mind. I have to constantly check myself and see where my affections lie. For the most part unfortunately, they're where they shouldn't be. I find myself focusing consistently on the wrong things. On things that damage my self-esteem, on things that fail to promote good tidings in my heart, and on things that are really just ...pointless.
All too often we worry like this. Some more than others, but I indeed find it true that our innate human nature is not to trust, but to disbelieve.
My goal and challenge to all my friends is this; discover where your affections lie and make sure they're where they should be. Ask yourself "What do I want my life to be? What am I scared of? What do I consistently worry about and how can I change my thinking? What do I believe in and how can I manifest more of it in my life and less of what i don't believe in? How can I keep my mind on the bigger picture and what is that bigger picture for me?" I think most of us believe in love. I think most of us believe in happiness and good morality. And yet I also think that most of us forget that we can not only have all of these things, but have them abundantly.
So there's my challenge to myself and to you. Make a list if you want. Do this challenge with a friend or just do it daily in your heart and mind.
And hopefully your life will become a little brighter.

i didn't think this mattered.

i was sitting down with a friend last night and we were chatting back and forth about perspective. well, about God and perspective. and it lead to me recounting a moment in my life when my perspective radically changed. it was the moment i saw a bigger picture. and this bigger picture really matters.

i was 19, it was a Thursday night, and my best friend and college roommate, julie park, and i were sitting in her car discussing an issue that would ultimately change my view point on the Christian life. i didn't think it was important to share on here because it's actually very simple and i don't want to come off dumb, but it has helped shape my faith ever since and maybe it'll help yours.

i had come to Christ about 8 months before but was having trouble reconciling a lot of things. i was having difficulty letting go of my old lifestyle that had helped shape my identity. it had made me feel uncomfortable and i was exhausted. i hadn't embraced any sort of faith growing up, so my god, was me. and even though that god had obviously left me empty inside, at least it was familiar.

i had been crying. we had just left a church service and julie had seen me crying. and it hurt her heart. she was the closest friend i had, and had been along side me that year through a lot... answering my questions, feeding me food to sober me up when i'd come home to our little dorm room at 3am, wiping my tears when yet another one night stand (to my surprise) didn't fulfill me... she had seen me at my worst and she loved me entirely.

"i just don't get it!", i sobbed. "i'm sittin here trying to obey Him, trying to let go of my old life, and i can't f%@king do it!! this is TOO HARD julie! i don't understand how you do it! i WANT to change! i WANT to be happy and i KNOW God wants me to be happy but i just can't DO THIS! i'm so f%@king TIRED!.... (sob)"

julie: "liz. ......liz. hey, it's okay. let me tell you something. cause you've got something radically wrong."

me: "what..." (crying softly, looking out the window)

julie: "you don't stop doing something because God tells you to. you don't stop it because it's in the Bible that that's not okay and you shouldn't do it.  you stop doing things because you love God. and that's it."

me: "what?" (turning towards julie)

julie: "the only thing that God wants from us is to love Him, liz. THAT is our focus. THAT is what changes someone. THAT is how His yoke is easy and His burden is light. if you sit here and focus on your own strength and efforts to achieve something, you will grow weary, liz. you will be frustrated and you will miss it. for example, a wife doesn't refrain from cheating on her husband because cheating is wrong, she refrains from cheating because she loves him. THAT is how this all works."

... 

cue light bulb

...

friends, we aren't called to exhaust ourselves. we aren't perfect and God knows that. but WE and our plans don't have to be. so if you're sitting there today, weary and frustrated because you just can't seem to get your life together, take a minute and check to see what perspective you've got goin on. you might need to see the bigger picture. and that bigger picture might change your life.

“Be still, and know that I am God.” -Psalm 46:10

“I have loved you with an everlasting love." - Jeremiah 31:3

living above your circumstances.

i was reading this morning and came across a line that said, (read as if God was speaking directly to you) "Thank Me for troublesome situations; the Peace they can produce far outweighs the trials you endure." i started thinking about how terrible 2011 was, and i imagined reading that sentence and wanting to know what it would mean to me if i didn't know God. how confusing it would be or how meaningless.

it's one thing to build up strength from a situation and say, "Well, if i can make it through that, I can survive anything." but it is another to find Peace in it. strength and peace don't always go together. in fact, my strength fails me quite a lot.

the Peace that God offers us is engulfed in the understanding of how to live above your circumstances. to be frank with you, it's learning how to let go and embrace the truth that your ultimate purpose of being on Earth is not for your own happiness, but for God's. (though i am fully aware that God loves for us to be happy). this gospel liberates. and i know that many Christians in the past have abused the Gospel and have misunderstood it. Westboro Baptist church comes to mind immediately. but the freedom in this whole story is that God loves us enough to give us a choice to love Him back. and that means we can choose not to love Him and we can choose to do things while on earth that are quite horrific and bring sorrow to God's heart.

i know this blog post might ruffle some feathers, but to be flat honest, i'm really tired of Christians treating God like he's a genie in a lamp. if i sit here and profess to be a Christian running round with Jeremiah 29:11 on my lips and yet cannot embrace that same Promise when my father dies in front of my face and i am utterly betrayed by the man i thought i was to marry, then i am a hypocrite and something is radically wrong with my understanding of who God is.

if anything from the trials i have to endure, i want to learn how to love other people well because that's what Jesus commands us to do, friends. not to judge. not to ostracize. not to be double-minded and weary in our beliefs, but to love and to love unconditionally. when i let go of always needing to be the happiest person in the room, i am free to enjoy other people's happiness and value the bigger picture. i begin to live above my circumstances and cherish more and more the grace that God turned His face that fateful hour, so Love could win.

what if.

I've been trying real hard lately to be disciplined and more intentional about spending time alone with God. This is hard for me. I've never been good at it. I get bored, I get distracted, or I drift off deliberating on what it is I have to accomplish during the week, instead of sitting in God's Presence.
This morning, I caught myself wondering again, but in a different way. And I want to address it.

It is my opinion, that too often we Christians spend our time alone with God trying to convince ourselves of something we do not truly believe. And when I say "believe", I am not attacking your foundational conviction that the God of the Bible is real and sent His Son to die for us all. I am addressing the day in, day out, belief that God is who He says He is.

So at 7am this morning, as I watched the rain fall on the tail-end of Autumn, I asked myself, what if? What if God truly is the Pursuer of my soul? What if I actually believed that God is the Wooer of my heart? What if Matthew 10:30 was real to me?...that God cares for me so intimately that He knows how many hairs are on my head? How would that make my life look different?
Would I still have as many worries and concerns or would my burdens be lightened because I would trust what God says about me over what I or my friend say about me? How would my relationships look different? Would I be more patient and loving with people, or would I continue to not live past my nose when my circumstances get hard and life is "unfair"?

Is it that simple? Not easy, but simple? Is that what Jesus meant when He said that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to children (Matt. 19:14)? Because kids just trust? Because kids don't worry about next week or next year. Because kids are only aware of today and they're okay with that.

So....do I really believe God is who He says He is.

I think if I did, I'd be strong. I could be a leader. I could handle sadness and not get depressed. I would utilize self-control. I would think of others more. I wouldn't fear being alone for the rest of my life. I'd see Death as a swinging door. Nature would be more beautiful to me. I would be bold. I would be humbled.
 
Don Miller once stated that Christian Spirituality cannot be explained, it can only be experienced. And I agree. I want my time alone with God to be an experience. I want the God of the Bible to tear up all of my formulas and ravage my heart. I want to preach God to people without using words. I want to show you Love when I am down-trodden and weak of heart.
I want to let God be in my life who He says He is.

Reconciling Revenge

today i thought i'd share a post on revenge by Jordan Green.


I would generally consider myself a pacifist. I say “generally”, because I don’t really know how I’d react in a given situation. If, for instance, a crazed hobo woman attacked my daughter, I’m fairly certain I would resort to physical violence in order to get her to stop. So maybe I’m a pacifist when it comes to larger communities, like nation-states and youth groups. Because of my semi-pacifist philosophy, I’ve always had one major hang-up with narrative morality, an idea this blog’s esteemed owner discusses in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. That hang-up is this: when played out in story, revenge is sort of awesome.
For instance, I’m reading through George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series right now, and there are plenty of characters in this epic, sprawling fantasy series who I want to pay. And I don’t want them merely brought to justice in a court of law and imprisoned for life. They are evil people, and I want them to die the most painful deaths possible. Most of them do end up dying horrific deaths, simply because (SPOILER ALERT) a lot of people die in these books.(END SPOILER ALERT)
Of course, the characters in Martin’s novels aren’t real, but real life has its share of bad guys. The latter half of the 20th century seemed to mark a turn away from Old Testament-style justice. Adolph Hitler: committed suicide to avoid capture by the Red Army. Joseph Stalin: died of a cerebral hemorrhage at 74. Pol Pot: died at home of a heart attack. Slobodan Milosevic: heart attack while under trial for war crimes. Saddam Hussein: hanged after being convicted for crimes against humanity. The point is, the deaths of some of the 20th century’s worst people were decidedly unlike that of your average Bond villain.
Then, in the last six months, Osama Bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi died extremely violent deaths. The former, of course, was shot in the head during a raid by US forces. The latter was captured in a hole, beaten viciously, and, according to some reports, took around 30 minutes to die after being shot in the head and chest.
Now, I know I am supposed to love my enemies, to pray for them and even bless them. I know this because it is discussed pointedly in Romans, Luke, 1 Peter and 1 John. But what’s curious to me is how these deaths feel to me from a purely narrative standpoint. And, if I’m honest, the deaths of Osama Bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi feel somewhat…well…right. As much as I tell myself the death of a human being should never be celebrated, I do at least feel some satisfaction knowing these men are gone. Gaddafi was a madman who ruled with an iron hand, who lived in unchecked opulence while his people suffered. Osama Bin Laden was Osama Bin Laden. One of the key components of Protestant Christianity is the belief we do not get what we deserve, that through following Christ all sin is absolved, but there is still a very real part of us that wants to see certain people get what’s coming to them, from cruel despots to schoolyard bullies. If narrative morality is ingrained in us by our creator — and I think for the most part it is — why is vengeance so undeniably gratifying?
The easiest answer is to say we want justice, and that’s partly true. We yearn for God to put the world right. But there’s more to it than that. One of my favorite stories takes place in Corrie Ten Boom’s book Tramp for the Lord. Ms. Ten Boom is lecturing in Germany when she is approached by a man whom she quickly recognizes as a particularly brutal Ravensbruck guard. Before he can speak, she forgives him:

“For a long moment, we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.”

What we truly want is for villains to repent. Ideally, we want a villain to understand what he did was wrong, and redeem his horrible actions. When that doesn’t suffice, we want him to realize he was not as powerful as he thought. This is why, when a villain dies in a story, we are shown his reaction one last time as he plummets to his death or realizes a bomb is about to explode. We want to see him recognize he is a broken man.
The question from there is whether we want our villains forgiven, and I suspect that’s a matter of perspective. Did anyone really want Die Hard to end with John McClane forgiving Hans Gruber, grasping hands, and experiencing God’s love? Doubtful, but this is partly because Hans Gruber is not a real human. He’s an avatar for evil. Real people are a lot messier, with compounding factors like traumatic childhood experiences and mental illness.
Like all sin, we each have our limits. The tools God gives us to push those limits — empathy and a willingness to cede control of our lives — are crucial in determining our reactions. If I had known Muammar Gaddafi, or Osama Bin Laden, I wonder if that glimmer of satisfaction I felt would’ve been diminished completely, and a story read as justice served would more closely resemble a tragedy.