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My heart beats for love. I want to be different. I want to be who I am called to be. WORTHY and LOVED!

Sunday, April 19, 2009

With vs. Through

    Earlier this week MJD preached a sermon entitled "What if I don't love Jesus?" As I reflect on it and talk to several people who heard it, I'm amazed how each person has taken away something different from it, which can be attributed to the fact that several points were made. 
    However, I have unabashedly been sharing that I do in fact love Jesus. But there is a difference between loving Jesus and being in love with Jesus - a point that was perhaps not as clear during the sermon. 
    To me MJD was saying that we need to avoid being in love with Jesus to the point where it harms our relationships with others, however as I reflect on these words through the lens of my experience I have to pause. Way back in sophomore year of college I started to develop several mantras that have stuck one with me - one is the domino effect of love. Our love for another should prompt us to do something bigger then we should ever do on our own. And that love between two people should spread like a row of dominoes falling or a wildfire. This has become more then a mantra for me, it is the truth, and I have seen it in all of its glory and beauty ever since. 
    Let's apply that to what MJD was saying. I believe that I can love more fully because I love Jesus. Together, we can do something that I would never be able to do on my own. I also keep thinking back to Ben Lowe, who I met earlier that day, and how he was teaching us that Christian values love and actions come from a different place. That does NOT mean that people who do not love Jesus cannot love people, but it just means that it is different. And in the case of my own life I see that the more I love Jesus the more I can fully and authentically love others. 
    Perhaps it all comes down to the "with" vs. "through" argument. I'm not that great at grammar, but I believe these are prepositions (feel free to correct that assumption if it is wrong). When I am in love "with" someone, I am infatuated. It is all about me and that person, creating a very contained and self-centered love affair that has very few benefits, if any at all. But when I love "through" I am taking something between two entities and making it something bigger, far reaching, and powerful. It is also different then loving someone "with the love of Christ". Here it comes form a place of attempting to model, even if we have never felt that love ourselves.  I love through Christ. This is different in both in sentence structure, meaning, and effects then being in love with Christ. It is unfortunate that we lump both together under the category of "loving Jesus". A point I wish the sermon would have made clearly. 

Growth

Sometimes I am amazed at how God is stretching and forming me, even when I don't realize it. For the longest time (since Middle School) I have struggled with change - in particular when plans changed. I took that to be a sign that I wasn't worth being with. However, over the past couple of weeks, I have been seeing/ feeling God strip away those insecurities and replacing it with bands of healing and wholeness. Its like discovering a new freedom; I can just be free to love others without their reactions being a reflection on me. 
May we all take time to recognize how God is at work in each of our lives. 

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Community

  I was asked today if I thought that true community could exist at Drew. I was taken aback that this even needed to be asked. I have such a deep sense of authentic community that is around and through me. But I also have a different idea of what authentic community is - the place of knowing and encouraging and rebuke. Community is what forms and sustains me. It is real and deep and beautiful. But it saddens me that other people don't have that blessing in their lives. 

Monday, April 13, 2009

"My God, My God"

   When I got home from celebrating Easter at church, my dad asked me what I thought about the sermon. I avoided the question, which I usually don't. Something about it bothered me, and I wanted to pray about it and talk it over with some people from school before I responded.
   Maybe I misheard or misunderstood, but during the sermon what I heard for one of the three points was that because of Jesus' death on the cross we can never feel forsaken by God. I believe the wording was something to the affect that Jesus was the only person who ever felt the absence of God. 
  And I cringed.
  Because that just isn't true in my life, the lives of others around me, or in the Bible. 
  I keep thinking back to Australia and the semester that followed when life was very rough - to the point where I pulled Shane aside and asked him what it meant if I was preparing to be a pastor and I couldn't pray. That when I tried, God was totally absence and it felt like I was running into a brick wall. As someone who needs prayer as a time of refreshment, guidance, and life, I felt totally and utterly abandoned. I can't even really say, as I now reflect on that time, that God was there and I just wasn't paying attention. I can say that God used that time in my life later, but I cannot say that I was wrong in my feelings of abandonment. But according to part of the sermon, that isn't even a possibility.
   I also had the sermon intersecting in my mind with a discussion my group in New Testament had surrounding parables - what happens if God looses you? Is it possible? And what are the implications? All too often we want to cry no, that isn't in God's nature. But really there are so many people that have gone through what St. John of the Cross describes as "dark night of the soul", where God is just distant, but absent. 
   Finally, Christ was not the first to cry "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The Psalmist pleaded the question first. In fact, various psalmists speak of the distress of God leaving them, but Psalm 22 asks the question as Jesus did in Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34. And if the Psalmist and Christ can cry out, are we not allowed as well?

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

God's Will

"...Thy will be done..." 
      Every Sunday Christians around the globe pray this line to the Lord's Prayer in their native tongue. But somehow along the way I think we have distorted what this truly means. Does God, even after praying this line, force the Divine's will upon anyone? When the unexpected, the horrible, or the destructive happen, is that just "God's will" being done? Or rather does God not will those situations but rather redeems them?

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Fruits of the Spirit

When the Holy Spirit is allowed to freely work in and through us, the fruits of the Spirit should be exhibited.

Love
          Joy
                 Peace
                            Patience
                                            Kindness
                                                             Goodness
                                                                                Faithfulness
                                                                                                        Gentleness 
                                                                                                                              Self-control

What have you exhibited today?

Boxing God In

   In the church we have a division that is getting heated - "liberal" versus "conservatives". As the sides are drawn, each group gathers followers by attacking the other group with vicious accusations, mostly centered around how to read the Bible, who is God, and how to love our neighbor. 
  The problem with this this battle is that neither side really exists, because people are transient. When we try to apply a label to another human being in order to simplify our experience of them, we actually cut off any opportunity for authentic relationship. I was thinking about the labels that are applied to me the other day, and how they vary according to where I am. Even though I don't change anything about how I act or speak or think, I am labeled "liberal" at Houghton and "semi-Conservative" at Drew. Why can't I just be Michelle? When words that are supposed to be verbs in conjunction with a lot of other verbs become nouns, we loose something vital about the humanness of our identity as we box people in, making our experience with and of them shrink as we push them harder and harder to become a certain shape. 
   What is even more distressing is that we do the same thing to God, trying to shove the Divine into a box and then close of our experience of anything that doesn't fit our limited definition of the Holy. God is in relationship with us, as individuals and as community and should be treated as such. Stripped of labels and allowed to just be, God can be fully God and our view of divinity will expand. Knock down the walls and be free, friends, both in relationship to God and our wonderful neighbors. 
 Where did we get the idea that community is defined by the volume of people and not the quality of relationships? Why is more but shallow better then deep? How can this produce the domino effect of love and what would community be like without it?

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Holy Spirit Come

  Why do we become so upset when people do not act in a Godly way, when a person doesn't really believe in God? Is it right to desire that everyone should act in ways guided by the Holy Spirit, even when they are not letting the Spirit act freely in their lives?
   I do not believe in the total depravity of human nature, but I do believe in the power of the Spirit to do amazing things in the lives of ordinary people. With the Spirit comes a new life, breathe, and relationship between ourselves, God, and our neighbor. So why do we expect so much from our neighbors whose lives are blocking the acting of the Spirit of Life?