A picture post!

A few pictures of what I've been doing with my summer

First off, right when school let out, I spent two weeks in Wisconsin for my sister's wedding. We helped out with everything imaginable, from booking an organist with only 10 days to spare before the ceremony to baking 22 dozen rolls to spreading yards and yards of mulch in the gardens at the Walkers' house. I was a bridesmaid for the first time, and quite honored to be Rosie's maid of honor. I can't believe my sister is married! She was a radiant, gorgeous, has-it-together bride, and I wish her and Mike all the best in their life together!

Then, on June 23, I became an Aunt for the first time! Jackson Stuart Scheiman entered the world and immediately became everyone's favorite person. (I borrowed these from Katherine's facebook.)

Two weeks later, I was off to another much-anticipated wedding between two friends and classmates. It was a joyous occasion and quite the Verity reunion!

THEN... dun-dun-DUN! The beach! We went to Cape Lookout National Seashore, which immediately soared to my list of BEST. PLACES. EVER! We were the only people occupying a mile-long stretch of perfectly clean, pristine beach. There was nothing around but sea and sand. Beyond "our" section of beach on both sides, it was closed because of nesting plovers, so we were literally in the middle of about 5 miles of empty beach. It was splendid.

And now I'm frantically busy getting ready for VBS at church. Happy to be in charge of crafts... but whoa! It is a lot of work. Perhaps in a future post I can post more pictures. Thanks for looking!

Getting in a hurry on God?

Think twice before you do. 

And he tarried seven days, according to the set time that Samuel had appointed: but Samuel came not to Gilgal; and the people were scattered from him. And Saul said, Bring hither a burnt offering to me, and peace offerings. And he offered the burnt offering. And it came to pass, that as soon as he had made an end of offering the burnt offering, behold, Samuel came. 1 Sa. 13:8-10.

 And Saul said to Ahiah, Bring hither the ark of God. For the ark of God was at that time with the children of Israel. And it came to pass, while Saul talked unto the priest, that the noise that was in the host of the Philistines went on and increased: and Saul said unto the priest, Withdraw thine hand. 1 Sa. 14:18-19.

Twice, Saul got in a hurry and got ahead of God. I am faced with a similar temptation. Saul saw that the people departed from him. I see that my money departs from me. I am tempted to act out of desperation and then expect God will understand the straits I was in.

But that's not faith, is it? Faith looks at the humanly impossible situation and scoffs, "That is immaterial to the outcome. God is the only one in whom I put my trust. (Not armies. Not wealth.) He is still able, even in the face of pressing circumstances."

So it's not a matter of God understanding the straits I'm in, but rather of me understanding that God is not in any straits at all, ever.

Again, Saul faltered when the noise that was in the camp of the Philistines "went on and increased." Likewise, my circumstances tend to roar in my ears, threatening to drown out spiritual realities. "Oh, God hasn't answered yet?" I say. "Well, that's just too bad. I can't wait any longer. I've got to take care of this problem right away, or everything will fall apart."

But again, that's not faith. If God hasn't answered yet, wait on Him until He does and let the tempests blow. Nothing will be able to happen without His permission or decree anyway. He is testing my resolve, waiting to see (or reveal to me) whether I possess merely a fair-weather faith.

Oh let me look steadfastly to God for His help, guidance, and deliverance from every situation and circumstance that threatens me. Let hurry not cause me to waver or falter. Let faith cling to Him with steady grip, even when it must wait. Let me not say, "Withdraw thine hand" from seeking the counsel of the Lord, but let me gaze upon Him, heedless of the roar of desperate circumstances.

Thoughts on obedience

When my will clashes with God's will, it is pride for me to pick my way. Who am I to set myself up above God and say that my way is better? Therefore, I must obey, or I will be walking in pride.

My future is totally obscured to my vision, but God sees it perfectly. He is in charge of orchestrating all the events; the only thing I have to do is obey Him, and everything will come to pass. How restful and worry-free obedience becomes when one realizes this!

My room is a mess, I have too much to do, and I'm not getting enough sleep, but somehow I found hours this week to spend on facebook, disregarding multiple inner prompts to leave the site and do something profitable. Simple obedience would have solved this problem. Maybe my room would be clean by now if I had listened.

Obedience is both the hardest thing to do and the easiest thing to do. All it takes is--doing what God said, like, "Wash 7 times in the Jordan River" or "Open up your mouth and speak." Not impossible. In fact, the task itself is usually simple. But it flies directly in the face of pleases me, and that is what makes it hard.

Consulting the Lord for His advice is one thing, but actually obeying Him when He tells me what I don't want to hear is quite another thing. How many times have I thought God didn't answer, when really He did, but He told me what I didn't want to hear?

My track record is so bad, I cannot trust myself to obey. Next time I am faced with a command, if left to myself, I am more than likely to disobey. But Jesus achieved perfect obedience in His life on earth, and He lives in me. I can trust HIM to obey God, and I can draw on His mighty grace to work in me the obedience that I would not have displayed on my own.

What is it about two conflicting wants that makes one triumph over the other?
"I want to lose weight." vs. "I want to eat cake."
"I want to obey God." vs. "I want to please myself."
Why does the short term, more irrational, more emotional decision tend to triumph?

Therefore, my constant prayer is, "O make me obedient!"

Praise Him in the midst of uncertainty

You know that sinking feeling you get when something goes wrong?
That stab of fear that maybe you won't be able to afford it, you won't be able to make it, you won't be able to figure it out?

That happened to me when I went to start Matilda and nothing happened. No lights, no sound, no action. I couldn't work the windows or the trunk or the lock button, and when I turned the key in the ignition, not the least bit of life was to be found.

"Aaaah! Matilda! You can't die on me!"  I thought. There was no reason for it. She was working perfectly the last time I drove her.

I had to drive my parents' car that day, and as I drove away, I was consumed with worry and uncertainty. "How much is this going to cost me?" I wondered. "How am I going to afford it?" These worries are very new to me, because I've never worried about money, even though I've never been rich.

"Praise me anyway," the Lord whispered.

So I did. I praised the Lord for His provision. I praised Him that He was enough. I praised him for His mercy, for the many blessings He has given me, and yes, even for the fact that my car was broken down. I thanked him for other difficult and undesirable situations in my life. I recognized that what He allows must be good, and therefore thanked Him for the good things He has given me.

That day, the worry lifted.

And then, later, I found out it was only a dead battery, which my dear expert dad kindly fixed by recharging it and cleaning the terminals. Matilda has life again--and I'm not a penny poorer. Indeed, I am richer. What the Lord taught me was more valuable than any car repair bill.

Thank you, God. Thank you that I can praise you even when life throws me for a loop. Help me to continue to be grateful for the easy as well as the hard times.

A Radical Decision

When I was 18, 20, 22 years old, I had this radical idea.

I believed God could lead me in the course of my life. I believed He knew where I should be headed, and that He could direct me into the exact niche in the world that He had created me to occupy.

I even believed that he would do this.

And lo and behold, things started happening. When I was 18, I was asked to take a job with a Bible publishing company. It was a "real job," in a nice office, with normal hours, and a great salary.

When I was 20, my project at that job was complete, and I went off to college. The two years I had worked allowed me to complete college debt-free, which I considered to be a significant achievement.

After college, I got asked to come back and teach some of the courses I had just learned. (It was a young college that was just getting started, so there were opportunities like this available for people like me who would otherwise have been underqualified.)

I was happy, had just enough of a challenge to keep me interested and on my toes, and couldn't see one step ahead of where I was on the road of life.

Then, somewhere along the way, I figured out how the world worked. "Ohhhhh, Rebekah! You had better get with the picture! What? You don't have a 5-year plan? Well, you'd better get busy. The way to get ahead in life is to envision your future, make plans, and then work toward the completion of those plans. I can't believe you're just now getting the memo! You've never even thought of looking ahead! What's up with that?" So I started trying to envision, plan, and act accordingly.

Suddenly, it seemed I had done everything all wrong. I had chosen a major without looking ahead to see what career path that would lead to, and now I didn't want to work in Communications. I had blithely ridden in the wagon of life while God held the reins, and I had merely gone where the wagon took me. Now I decided to jump off the wagon and make my own way in the world. This time, I would pay more attention to what was coming down the road.

Curiously, everything started to fall apart. None of my pursuits amounted to anything. I cleaned houses, taught piano students, spent a few months smothering in boredom as a cashier, and worked in a preschool. Life just wasn't going the way I wanted it to go. I was pushing on doors, especially doors to the mission field, but I couldn't open them. Nothing was working out.

Then I hit on the answer! What I needed was a Master's degree. That would solve all my problems and lift me out of the dead-end jobs I had been working in. Teaching was the highlight of my life (especially the piano students), so I decided a Master's in Education would be just the thing. I took the GRE and started calling for more information about different schools. Monday I went to an informational meeting at a local college and talked with the faculty about what would be involved in the Master's program.

I left the meeting feeling discouraged and thwarted again. There was no way I could pay for a Master's program. I didn't have $18,000, and at the rate I was going, it would take me more than 5 years to save up that much money. Sure, I could qualify for a loan, but I was absolutely unwilling to go into debt. Then I would really be stuck. I wouldn't have a chance to get back to the mission field until all that debt was paid off, and who knows when that would be. Besides, with all the cuts in education, I wasn't even sure I could get a job.

Then a simple, but radical idea dawned on me. Why not trust God for my future?

"Oh my goodness!" I thought. "He's the only one who can see it anyway. And look how much better things were going for me when I was actively trusting Him for the way I should go. I think I'll get back up in His wagon. I think I'll stop hunting, stop weaving my little webs, stop pushing, stop manipulating. I resolve to prove God. Can God direct my life without my help? And will He? I will try Him. I will stop trying to figure it out on my own. I will depend wholly and completely on Him to lead me in the way I should go."

A verse I had read that morning came back to my mind:

“And now Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, to keep the commandments of the Lord, and his statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good?” Dt. 10:12-13 (See also Micah 6:8)

What does God require of me? Not education. Not a fancy career. Not dazzling missionary activity. No.

He simply wants me to fear Him, obey Him, love Him, and serve Him.

"How about this?" I thought. "I will occupy myself with that, and let all the other things go. I will just do that one thing. And while I'm doing that, I will be content with wherever God places me. If He wants me to stay in the place where I'm at, with the amount of money I'm making, I will be content with that. My part will be simply to walk with God. His part will be to envision the future, make plans, and give me commands to carry out His will."

It seems so simple. It worked for me before. Now it will be interesting to see where He takes me from here. I don't know where the wagon's going, but I trust Him to know, and to direct my way perfectly to the destination where He wants to take me.

Giddyup!

Bitten by Covetousness

The other day I was in the mall and I saw a cute outfit. Suddenly I wanted it. I wanted it so strongly, I was taken aback by the raging, demanding lust that surfaced in myself. "It's just a cute outfit," I thought. "Where is all this coming from?"

Then last weekend I went to a wedding where I saw a bunch of my old friends. I was smitten afterward when I realized that I had expressed ungratefulness to just about every person I talked with. People would ask me where I was in life and what I was doing these days, and invariably, I would throw in some comment about how I was poor, or how I didn't really like my job, or life just wasn't going the way I wanted it to.

"Somehow, covetousness has really taken hold of me," I realized. "I want more money, a better job, nicer clothes...and I'm not content with what I have." So I repented before the Lord and asked His forgiveness.

Beyond that, there is a cure: Thanksgiving and praise.
Therefore, let me express my sincerest praise to God for all the undeserved blessings that He has bestowed upon me.

Lord, I praise You for this season of poverty. You have allowed me to go through it, and I accept it from your hand, knowing that You have ordained it for good. Besides, I am truly rich. In the first place, I am rich because I have You. You are my portion and my inheritance, and You alone are enough to satisfy the deepest desires of my heart. In the second place, I am fabulously wealthy compared to most of the world. I have a computer, a printer, a CD player, a sewing machine, a car, a closet full of clothes, shelves full of books, a room to myself, and innumerable comforts and luxuries that most people would only dream of having.

I praise you for the job you have given me. I thank you for the experiences I have been able to have through this work. I will be content with the paycheck you have provided for me, whether or not you ever open up the door for me to make more money. You, O Lord, are my provider, and it is You who gives me the power to earn money.

Thank you, Lord, for the unnamed person in my life who hurts me. Will you bless that person, Lord, with abundant grace and boundless mercy? Bestow them with patience, gentleness, and love. Let them walk in truth. Fill them with Your Holy Spirit and let them walk in Your light. I thank you for the very hurts themselves. What an unprecedented opportunity to learn forgiveness, to find Your grace sufficient even in the midst of pain, to overcome by faith and return good for evil. They have deepened my heart and made me more able to relate to others' pain.

I praise You, O my God, for the fact that I am waiting right now. Thank you for not moving ahead. Thank you for not being in a hurry. Thank you for keeping me sitting still, ever so deftly, ever so cleverly, even when I am trying to squirm away and make things happen for myself. Thank you for not letting my ways work out. Thank you for teaching me to wait upon the Lord, and letting me find that indeed I do renew my strength. Thank you for the patience that comes with it. Thank you for the very uncertainty that I face. I praise You that You do know exactly what way I should take.

Thank You, Lord, for being the sovereign God. It is all about You, not about me. I release my way to you. I don't have what I want anymore. It's all what You want. Keep me faithful to walk with you in Your will and in Your way.

In Jesus's Name, Amen

Grateful for Matilda

I got so caught up in complaining about Matilda ("But it's SUCH an old lady car." "Ah! I get terrible gas mileage." Yeah, she's a beast all right...reminds me of behemoth." "Why, oh, why did I get a car with a V8 engine??") that I forgot to be grateful.

Then all at once, it hit me.

This is actually a really nice car! I like so many more things than I dislike. It has cruise control, power windows, leather interior, and a huge trunk. It rides so smooth and quiet, has air conditioning, and is really a very low mileage car for the price I paid. It's comfortable to sit in. It's spacious. I like everything about it except for one or two things--so why are those the only things I mention when I tell people about the car? 

I decided then and there to ditch the complaints, put buyer's remorse behind me, and just enjoy this car. Of course I have already enjoyed HAVING a car, but not necessarily THIS car. Now I have resolved to enjoy this car with abandon. Okay, so it has one drawback. Well, so be it. I like it anyway. I am thankful for it. I see it as God's provision for me. I appreciate it. And I genuinely do think that I am pampered and got more than I expected in it.

Thank you, God.

Matilda, Lesson #2

One of the thoughts that crossed my mind as I was going out to buy Matilda (my car) was, "Well, it's not like I'm marrying this car. If it doesn't work out, I can always sell it and get a different one."

After the buyer's remorse set in once I had bought the car, I reflected on that statement.

You see, God had assured me that He knew my needs and would provide a car for me in His time. Then I waited a year and 3 months. "Isn't it about time already, Lord?" I was beginning to wonder. I kept praying about it, asking, "Aren't you going to provide my car?" Finally, in prayer one day, God gave me the go-ahead. "See, I have provided a car for you." So I went out and looked. The night before I bought Matilda, I spent a good hour in prayer about it, and I had peace about buying the car. I was so overwhelmed with excitement that I could barely sleep. So the next day, I went out and bought it.

Yet excitement turned into buyer's remorse nevertheless, due to the discovery of how bad my gas mileage was. And I had bought it with the kind of determined attitude that said, "I don't care what anybody says, I don't even care if I look into whether this is a good deal; I'm getting this car."

I thought to myself, "How many girls get tired of waiting for God to bring the right mate into their life? How many girls thrust their chin out and say to themselves, 'I am getting a husband'? How many girls make a snap decision to plunge into marriage, and then regret it for the rest of their lives?"

God has assured her that He will provide her a husband in His time. The girl waits. A good deal of time goes by, and she says to herself, "Isn't it about time already, Lord?" Perhaps it is within her power to secure herself a guy. She does it, overcome with excitement and infatuation, and before she really looks closely into his character and habits, she marries him.

Quickly the happy, excited feeling fades away, and she is left with buyer's remorse...only in this transaction there is no backing out of it. No selling the car. No 30-day return policy. No saving your receipt to get store credit. No disputing the transaction with your credit card company. She is stuck.

I think of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. Out of spite, she just up and marries Charles in a snap decision. She doesn't really love him, but she can have him. He's not really right for her, but she can get him. Once they are married, she is bored to death with him. He dies a few months later and she is left a widow with an even more boring existence, because she is expected to wear black and mourn his death.

How sober and careful we must be in following God's direction regarding a life partner!

If I felt trapped and ripped off shortly after buying a cheap old car, how much more disillusioned I would be if I blindly leaped into a similar situation in marriage!

If I kicked myself for not being more careful and doing my research on a car that I will only have for a few years, how much more if it was the husband I would live with for the rest of my life!

If I felt a twinge of jealousy at how much better looking than mine all the other cars on the road were, how much more disastrous it would be to the relationship if I was married and then started "shopping around" for better-looking guys!

If I could make a bad decision when I got in a hurry to "help God out" in his provision of a car, how much more dangerous it would be to get in a hurry to "help" God find the man I was supposed to marry! 

How much better it is to wait on God in perfect trust, confident that He can do everything I need, all on His own initiative. How essential prayer becomes, to connect me to God's eternal purposes and keep me on the right path. 

I will certainly tread more carefully the next time I go out car shopping. 

Let all those tread even more carefully who would venture to go "husband-shopping." 

Matilda

About a month ago, I bought my first car. Yay! I have wheels!

It is a 1996 Mercury Grand Marquis, quite the old lady car, so I named her Matilda.

Getting this car proved to hold an interesting lesson.

I had been wanting to buy a car for over a year, and I had been needing one for longer than that. I worked three jobs and scrimped and saved for over a year just to get $3000 together so that I could buy a cheap car. (Before that, the car I was driving was my dad's 1984 Mercedes with 380,000 miles on it. It finally gave up the ghost, and I was left borrowing other people's cars and walking or biking to work. Fortunately my job was only 3.5 miles away!)

God had assured me during this process, "I am your Father. I will provide a car for you. Don't worry about it. I will bring it to pass." And I had trusted in this assurance as well as I could.

I also felt very insecure about getting a car and didn't want to get ripped off, so I did a lot of research over the course of the year. My dad gave me some used car appraisal sheets that I could use to compare notes on different cars, and I started frequenting craigslist, autotrader, and edmunds.com. Every time I would go to look at a car, I would meticulously fill out one of my little sheets, go look up the VIN number online, and read reviews on it.

What I really wanted was an orange car. (What can I say? Orange is my favorite color.) I didn't really think it was asking that much. Say an orange, 4-door sedan, under 100,000 miles, good gas mileage, manual transmission. I would look on autotrader for those specifications, and NEVER would anything come up in my price range. Never. Not in the whole country. You can put in your zip code and then search within a certain radius of your home--well, I would say "any distance" from my zip code and still wouldn't get any results. Weird. Why are orange cars so uncommon, when they're the best color ever?

Then, one day in March, I saw a little Ford Escort station wagon in a used car lot along the highway. I pulled in and asked the lady the price. She initially said $3999, but if I paid cash, she said she could give it to me for $3200. That was a little higher than what I could pay, but hey, I thought, you can always barter these places down. I went home and looked it up online, came back with my little evaluation sheet, and wrote down all the specifications. It looked like it might have had a little fender bender once. There was dog hair all over all the seats. There was no power anything and no cruise control, but hey... that's what you get when you get a cheap car. I test drove the car and drove it to the bank, where I withdrew $3000 cash.

"I am getting this car," I said to myself with a stubborn thrust of my chin. "I don't care what's wrong with it. I'm just sick and tired of not having a car. I'm going to surprise my family and drive home in my own car today. Yeah. That's what I'm going to do."

I walked in to the office and started talking price with her. "Oh! Did I say $3200? Hmmmm. That was a mistake. The lowest I was really supposed to go is $3400," she said. "But--since I told you $3200, I guess I can give it to you for that." I couldn't talk her down. She didn't even care about selling the car to me. Before I was even done talking to her, she got on the phone and the conversation was over. I walked away with my cash still safe in its envelope.

That evening, however, I was on my way to a class I attend, and I happened to be a few minutes early. "I'm just going to pull into this other dealership," I thought. I drove around and looked at the cars and then a salesman walked up to me, so I got out of my car and walked around with him. He took me over near the Mercury when I told him my price range, and I barely even glanced at it. "No, that's an old lady car." I wasn't even willing to consider it. So he showed me some other cars, all the while treating me like a princess. We were back to my car and I was just about to leave when the boss stuck his head out the door of the building. "Did you say your price range was $3000?" he said. I said yes. "How about that Mercury?" he said. "We could give you the Mercury for $3000, taxes and fees included." I had forgotten which car the Mercury was by this point, because I really hadn't even given it a thought. We walked back over to it and when we got close, I realized, "Oh, it's this one." But the salesman was talking all about how nice it was, how it only had 85,000 miles on it, how it was owned by an old lady and garage kept all its life, how it was worth $6000 and they were going to let it go for $3 (hahahaha... worth $6000... riiiiiiight).

I was at a very dangerous moment. I was already taken over with that little chin-thrust attitude, "I am getting a car today." I was dazzled by the great paint job on the car. (It's blue, by the way.) Somehow, in a flash, I was sold on the car. I hadn't driven it, I hadn't filled out my little sheet, I hadn't even seen it from any angle other than from the driver's side back corner. The only problem was, I hadn't brought my money with me.

No problem, the dealer assured me. Come back tomorrow. We'll even pick you up.

Okay. deal.

They picked me up from work the next day and I handed over the money. I didn't end up getting it with the taxes and fees included, because the way they were going to do that was by lying on the title and putting down that I bought it for like $30, so that the taxes wouldn't be high, and I refused to go along with that, so I ended up having to pay the taxes too. But I didn't care. I was getting a car. (Now I think I could have negotiated that: Lower the price of the car or I'm walking out. But I didn't, and it's too late now. Live and learn.)

I drove the car home.

Parked it in the driveway.

Wow, this thing is a beast.

And I wonder how much gas this V8 engine is going use up?

I looked up the gas mileage. According to the cool little digital thingie in the dashboard of the car, the average MPG was 9.0. I calculated the cost of going to work and going to church at the current gas price (which was then $3.50).

Ahhhhhh! Aaaaaaaaaa! Ack! It was going to cost me $17 just to go to church!
It would cost me $3 just to go to work, a distance that I could walk. I'll be throwing a quarter and a dime out the window every single mile!

Suddenly I was wishing that life had an undo button. Oops! Ctrl + Z! Let's do that one over!

But other than selling the car for the price I paid for it (which I now doubted I could even do), there was no way to get out of this one.

Great. Now I was stuck with a gas hog, and I was never going to be able to afford to drive anywhere.

That night I wrote in my journal about my thoughts regarding it.

I thought I wanted a car, I reflected, but what I really wanted was freedom. Freedom to go on road trips. Freedom to be my own person, to go places without asking if someone needs the car, to do things I want to do without being hindered by lack of transportation to get there. I thought I was buying freedom for myself. Apparently, I wasn't. At least, it's going to cost me a lot more than I bargained for. Forget about road trips--I won't even be able to afford to go to church!

I didn't get the freedom I thought I was getting. But then I heard the sweet whisper of God's voice in my ear, and suddenly I knew why He had allowed me to get myself into this situation--just to teach me this one lesson.

True freedom is not found in roaming around geographically.
True freedom is found in Christ alone.

True freedom is not freedom from external restraints in my life (like lack of money or transportation).
True freedom is freedom from sin.

If I find my freedom in how many trips I get to take a year, I do not know the meaning of freedom.
If I find my freedom in being able to do things without asking anyone, I do not know the meaning of freedom.
I must find my freedom in Christ alone.

In Christ, I could be in a prison cell and still be free.
Apart from Christ, I could be a millionaire, driving the nicest hot rod in the country, and still be in bondage.

I am free--not because I have car keys, but because I have the living Christ reigning within my heart.

And this is more valuable than all the nice, efficient, orange cars in the world.

God's unmistakeable provision

In the last few weeks, I have been reading through the New Testament, and the thing that has stood out to me this time through has been the topic of God's provision.

Verses like these have really spoken to me:

"And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work." 2 Corinthians 9:8

"But we beseech you, brethren, that ye increase more and more; and that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you; that ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing." 1 Thessalonians 4:10-12

"For yourselves know how ye ought to follow us: for we behaved not ourselves disorderly among you; neither did we eat any man's bread for nought; but wrought with labour and travail night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you: Not because we have not power, but to make ourselves an ensample unto you to follow us. For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat. For we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies. Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread." 2 Thessalonians 3:7-12

"But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus." Philippians 4:19

Through these passages, God has brought me to the question, "Do I trust God to provide for my needs, or not?" 

I initially answered, "Yes." (Of course I did. That's the "right" answer. How could I answer no?) 

However, I came to see that deep down inside, I really felt that I ultimately had to trust myself. 

Trusting in myself, I went down to a local restaurant that had a "Now Hiring" sign outside, and I filled out a job application for a waitress position. I really did need to make more money, and I thought this would be the best way to "help" God to provide for my needs. 

Then God decided to confirm His word and show me, in real life, how things would be if HE was taking the initiative and providing for me. 

First, out of the blue, I got a call from a parent wanting to set up piano lessons with their daughter. They had "somehow" found my music teaching profile online, on a music lessons site where I had filled out a profile but had never paid, so technically it shouldn't have even displayed. Each new student I get is $40 extra a month that I make. 

Then, totally unexpectedly, the principal at the school where I work heard me playing the piano and offered to send out a letter to the parents of every child in the school, advertising my piano studio. :-O I designed a flyer and gave it to him, and he's even going to make the copies for me! 

Then, just as unforeseen, a family from church asked me to house sit and watch their dog while they went away on vacation. This opportunity came back to back with another housesitting job that I had been asked to do, so I went from one person's house to the other with not even a day's interruption between them.

Again, out of the blue, someone "accidentally" found me online, didn't even see a phone number, and had the initiative to look me up in the phone book, where they managed to find me under my parents' name and call to set up piano lessons for their son. 

Nothing ever came of the waitressing job, but with all the things God did for me, I will make that little bit extra that I was looking for. I am totally blown away by the fact that God did those things, all on His own initiative, without the least bit of my help. I am also blessed by the fact that these opportunities have been much less time-consuming and far more stress-free than the waitressing job would have been. 

Thank you, God, for fulfilling Your Word!

Jehovah Jireh is my provider!

Seeing and hearing...vexed his soul?

I was struck by this verse while doing my devotions yesterday:

"And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked: (For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds;)" (2 Peter 2:7-8)

Lot vexed his soul, not by participating in the evil deeds of the wicked, but just by seeing and hearing them.

I often think (especially regarding movies), "Seeing and hearing this thing won't hurt me--it would only be wrong for me to participate in it."

So this verse challenged me to think a little deeper and be a little more careful. I may not be in danger of committing the actual deed, but I am still in danger of "vexing my soul" whenever I see and hear sinful acts.

So what is a vexed soul? Is it really that bad? In Lot's life, we see evidence of a vexed soul in the fact that he would offer his two daughters to the wicked men outside his door.

How could he give innocent women to be raped by a gang of lustful men?
Could he not tell that this was wrong?

No, because his soul was vexed. Even while he successfully maintained righteous standards for one form of evil, he unconsciously became desensitized to other forms of evil. He had his guard up against one, but his guard against the others vanished.

How many Christians have "vexed their souls" watching movies that contain sex, violence, rebellion against authority, foul language, and other wicked acts? How many excuse it for one reason or another, never realizing the damage they are doing to their souls?

More importantly, how have I vexed my soul in my life? Am I taking care of my soul? Am I living in such a way as to protect my soul from wounds and damage? Or do I think, "Hey, I'm strong. I can watch this movie or this television program without any damage to my Christian walk. I mean, it's not like I'm going to go out and do those things." This type of reasoning doesn't work in the light of this passage.

Let me do what David did, when he said in Psalm 101:3, "I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me."

An Open Door

I love how God's timing is impeccable. One week after surrendering to Him my obedience, the deadline He had given me back at the beginning of the 2008 arrived months earlier than expected. This deadline had bound me to stay home, work, and not look into going back to the mission field until that date. Well, now I was free to start knocking at the door to go back!

Yay!

So I started looking into mission boards. I am filling out the initial application for one right now. This is exciting and fulfilling news. Hadn't God said, "Rest content here until this time, and then wait for me to open up the door"?

I look back over all that I learned in the past three years. Oh my goodness, it's incredible. I could never have been a missionary without all the lessons I have learned. I could never have been fruitful or effective for God the way I was. But He faithfully held me back until He had had a chance to work in my life all the good purposes that He knew needed to take place, and then He set me free.

The Master Professor kept me in His classroom and didn't let me leave until I had mastered the required curriculum. I love the fact that He allowed me to sit at His feet as He patiently and expertly taught me. I'm so grateful to Him that He sent me through "Heaven Univeristy's" courses.

To sum up, here are the lessons that stand out to me from my 3-year curriculum.

Open Up Your Mouth and Speak: When I encounter lost people, the Master Professor taught me to be willing to communicate the gospel to them. He not only convinced me that I should do it, He actually got me doing it! Now, instead of cowering in silence when my heart is pounding with the Spirit's promptings to witness, I make use of the opportunities God gives me to open up my mouth and speak.

Depend on God: My professor faithfully stripped away all of my own self-sufficiency. I look at missions with more of a dependence on God now. I have less of the cocky, sure-of-myself mentality. ("Of course I can succeed as a missionary! God should be really thankful to see someone as amazing as me signing up.") Best of all He stepped in and offered Himself as the source of my strength.

Pray: Without prayer, how could I have been an effective missionary? God actually got me praying. He is still teaching me; I know I have a long way to go. But He has put the power cord in my hand, showed me how to plug it in, and given me ample evidence of its effectiveness. I am dealing with the hearts of humankind here--who am I to think I can reach anyone's heart? Only God can, and He waits to do it until I ask Him.

Get Up Early: This is a valuable lesson on so many levels. It taught me the utter ineffectiveness of my flesh, it caused me to have to be disciplined, it made me have to fight for something, it led me to see what God was going to say about obedience, it caused me to have to cling to God by faith, and so much more.

Be Filled with the Holy Spirit: The Spirit of God is the one who can lead me into the exact niche that He has designed my life to occupy. I cannot lead myself there. Without the work of the Spirit of God alive and active in my life, I could never hope to bring forth fruit for the Kingdom of God.

Obey: The catch-all for future things God wants to teach me. My professor was wise enough to work on obedience in individual, manageable areas before He introduced the overarching requirement to apply it to all of life. He knew that it would have remained a theoretical concept in my brain indefinitely if He had not first achieved practical action steps.

Work: Not just "go to work," but work at whatever God has asked me to do. This means I'm not allowed to be lazy. It takes work to be obedient.

All of these are works in progress. However, the Master Professor has firmly planted my feet in the right path, and He has shown me how to walk in it, and He has succeeded in seeing that I take steps. Now, the fun begins. All of these areas will develop, strengthen, and mature in my life as I continue to follow the Lamb wherever He Leads.

The End

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The puzzle pieces fall into place

Soon after seeing how my job was simply to obey the Lord, everything started fitting together.

Getting up early? That boiled down to obedience. I simply had to obey God and do it.

Prayer? Obedience again. No longer could I raise my frequent excuse, "But I just don't feel like praying right now." If God had commanded me to pray, I needed to obediently pray.

Depending on God? Still obedience. If I didn't depend on Him, I would never be able to obey. Suddenly I was acutely dependent on God, automatically, because in and of myself, I was not very obedient.

Open up you mouth and speak? All I had to do to master that was to obey.

And suddenly I saw that it went so much farther beyond that. Obedience backed up everything in my spiritual walk. God was working on these three areas today, but he might choose to tackle other areas tomorrow, and in whatever He chose to work on, I needed to be obedient if I was going to get anywhere.

It was on December 14, 2010 that I was desiring something from God. I can't remember exactly what it was now...some kind of spiritual advancement or blessing...I'll have to look it up in my journal. Anyway, God firmly impressed it upon my mind, "You can't have this until you give me your obedience." The light bulb flicked on. "Ohhhhh! Obedience is the pathway to actually getting somewhere!" I realized. I felt a little ridiculous that it had taken me this long for it to dawn on me. "Okay, deal," I said. I felt God's smile. "I win," He seemed to say.

It worked!

I finally started to obey!

God had gotten through to me!

And then things started happening.

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Previous Post: Obey
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Obey

Obey, obey, obey.

I still struggled on with my three areas: Get up early, pray, and depend on God. From April until December of 2010, I met with one failure and setback after another. For a period of about a month during the summer, I read Romans 6 every single day, hoping to glean some insight into how to reckon myself dead to sin. I started to be so desperate for the power of Christ's resurrection to actually operate in me, and I didn't know what I was doing wrong. For about 3 weeks in July, I went on an early morning prayer walk with my sisters and another girl, where we all prayed for various needs, and I poured out my heart to the Lord, pleading with Him to change me. Why did progress have to be so slow?

One day, I took an extra-long walk by myself around a loop that we don't usually walk (because it's too long). Something just had to change. I just had to get ahold of God and find some deliverance. I walked along and prayed and cried. At one point in my walk, my eye was attracted to a small graveyard up a hill off the side of the road, and I walked up to it. I went in and looked at some of the tombstones and found a place to sit down against a fence. There, I continued praying, looking up into the sky and crying out to God for answers.

There seemed to be an especially large number of birds in the sky. I wanted to be like those birds, soaring above all my troubles.

Romans 6 came flooding back into my mind, and I started quoting it. I looked around at all the tombstones as I quoted parts about death to sin.

"Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death."
"We have been planted together in the likeness of his death."
"Our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin."
"He that is dead--dead!--is freed from sin."
"If we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him."

The phrase came into my mind, "The law of sin and death." I looked back up at the birds. An analogy came into my mind: "The law of gravity and death." If you step out of a plane, or off the edge of a skyscraper, you will certainly conform to the law of gravity and death. I thought, "The law of gravity is binding on me. It is the reason I am sitting here, stuck to the ground, and not flying around in the sky with the birds. It's just like sin. The law of sin is binding on me. It keeps me walking down on the ground, among all this death, instead of mounting up with wings and soaring to heights above with Christ."

But the birds! The birds were overcoming the law of gravity. And, I trusted, there was a way to overcome sin through the resurrection of Christ. But what was it?

I quoted through Romans 6 until I reached verse 16. There I stopped.

"Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey, whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?"

Suddenly, the light dawned.

Obedience!

There is the key. Obey the Lord.

"If I could only get that stuck fast in my head," I thought. "Obey the Lord. Obey the Lord. Obey the Lord." It simplifies everything. I only have to worry about one thing. All I have to do is obey. (All I have to do...heh...easier said than done, I know!) But I only have to occupy myself with this one task. Clearly, I have been disobedient. Obviously, that is what has hindered me from getting anywhere. I rebel against God in disobedience, and thereby obey the law of sin unto death.

I walked out of the graveyard with purpose and hope, clinging to that simple concept: Obey.

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Previous Post: Be Filled with the Holy Spirit
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Be filled with the Holy Spirit

About a month after giving myself to the Holy Spirit to be used and controlled by Him, I came across a friend's facebook page, where one of her friends had randomly made some comment about Jackie Pullinger. I was intrigued. I had read a short biography of Jackie Pullinger in one of Leslie Ludy's books (Can't remember if it was Set Apart Femininity or Authentic Beauty), and just out of curiosity, I googled her name. One of the things that came up was a link to some of her messages. I listened to a 3-part message called "Be filled with the Holy Spirit" (which you can find and listen to here), and through her testimony and praying with her at the end, I received the gift of tongues.

Yeah.

Right there, some of you are going, "Whoa, Rebekah just got herself far out into left field here." Yeah. Or maybe not.

This is the first time I am putting this information in public. It's not something I do in public, and it's not something I talk about with people unless they ask me about it. I considered not sharing this part of the story, but I think it's a vital part of what came later, and it seems sort of like hiding an elephant to pass over it and skip this part as if it didn't have anything to do with my spiritual development.

I was as curious as anything about it. I started praying in my new language every day, and I couldn't help trying to analyze what I was saying, what language this sounded like, what the words meant. I didn't get anywhere with that, but one thing I observed was that I didn't know the whole language all at once. At first, I only had the consonants 'c,' 'p,' 'n,' and 'g' mixed in with the vowels. I even thought to myself, "This is getting boring... let me introduce a new sound in here," but it didn't work. I had the feeling that the Holy Spirit chuckled at me and said, "That's not a word, silly." But when I wasn't trying to "get creative" with it, gradually different sounds added themselves in there, until I was speaking a full range of interesting-sounding language. Upon reflection, I was amazed that I had been able to pray initially in that limited vocabulary. Could you make up many sentences in English using only the consonants c, p, n, & g? I couldn't. But yet I had been speaking strings and strings of different sentences, causing me to marvel at the Holy Spirit's ability to filter out all the rest of the consonants and still say something (even if I didn't know what, I trusted that He did).

If you're going, "She's making this up," it's the same thing I was wondering. But this wasn't the first time I had tried to speak in tongues. Always before, I had just invented "baby-talk" words that I knew I was making up. This time, it was different. I had the divine witness that I was saying something. Also, the sounds I was making didn't all come from English. There were glottal stops and weird vowels and consonants that made my tongue do things it had never done before and a very melody of tonality that was different from English.

According to Scripture,

"For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God: for no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries."

"He that speaketh in an unknown tongue edifieth himself."

"Forbid not to speak with tongues."
(1 Cor 14:2, 4, 39)

So what were the results of this new adventure?

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the LORD search the heart." Jer. 17:9-10

The first thing God revealed to me was deception. He showed me how much deception existed in my own heart, and He caused me to begin to abhor it. He dealt with these areas of deception one by one. I had never seen how deceitful my own heart was. He caused me to seek and desire truth.

"But when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth." (John 16:13)

God also began to show me the desperate wickedness of my own heart. It took a lot longer to do this, and I am still in that process. I had always admitted that I was a sinner, but I still considered myself to be a pretty good Christian. God stripped all this away and showed me the extent to which my heart was at enmity with Him, how I fled from His ways, how I only sought to please myself, and how I rebelled against Him--all the time. He brought me to grief and repentance over this, and began to change me.

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Previous post: Help and Light 
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Interesting Connection

I interrupt this story to bring you this unique circumstance.

Last night I was reading a book called The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life by Hannah Whitall Smith. In this book, I came across the following segment from chapter 18, which surprised me at how nearly it paralleled the thoughts I shared in my last post, though I first journaled these thoughts approximately a year ago and had never read or heard reference to this book until now.

      "If I am really a child of God, then of necessity my heart is already the temple of God, and Christ is already within me. What is needed, therefore, is only that I shall recognize His presence and yield fully to His control.
      "It seems to me just in this way: as though Christ were living in a house, shut up in a far-off closet, unknown and unnoticed by the dwellers in the house, longing to make Himself known to them, and to be one with them in all their daily lives, and share in all their interests, but unwilling to force Himself upon their notice, because nothing but a voluntary companionship could meet or satisfy the needs of His love. The days pass by over that favored household, and they remain in ignorance of their marvelous privilege. They come and go about all their daily affairs, with no thought of their wonderful Guest. Their plans are laid without reference to Him. His wisdom to guide and His strength to protect are all lost to them. Lonely days and weeks are spent in sadness which might have been full of the sweetness of His presence.
      "But suddenly the announcement is made, "The Lord is in the house!" How will its owner receive the intelligence? Will he call out an eager thanksgiving, and throw wide open every door for the entrance of his glorious Guest? Or will he shrink and hesitate, afraid of His presence, and seek to reserve some private corner for a refuge from His all-seeing eye?
     "Dear friend, I make the glad announcement to thee that the Lord is in thy heart. Since the day of thy conversion He has been dwelling there, but thou hast lived on in ignorance of it. Every moment during all that time might have been passed in the sunshine of His sweet presence, and every step have been taken under His advice. But because thou knew it not, and did not look for Him there, thy life has been lonely and full of failure. But now that I make the announcement to thee, how wilt thou receive it? Art thou glad to have Him? Wilt thou throw wide open every door to welcome Him in? Wilt thou joyfully and thankfully give up the government of thy life into His hands? Wilt thou consult Him about everything, and let Him decide each step for thee, and mark out every path? Wilt thou invite Him into thy innermost chambers, and make Him the sharer in thy most hidden life? Wilt thou say "Yes" to all His longing for union with thee, and with a glad and eager abandonment hand thyself and all that concerns thee over into His hands? If thou wilt, then shall thy soul begin to know something of the joy of union with Christ."

Help and Light

God graciously gave me a hint to steer me in the right direction. And HERE begins the good part, that part that I've been waiting to get to. The very reason that I began this whole story back in the summer last year was so that I could lead up to this.

My pastor preached a sermon from Ephesians 3 one Sunday night, and one phrase from verse 17 particularly caught my attention: "That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith." Pastor said he hoped everyone present could say that Christ was dwelling in their hearts, and he went on to say that the Holy Spirit comes in to dwell with every believer at the moment of salvation. I knew that; I believe that, but a new thought struck me.

"If the Holy Spirit indwells me, what kind of house does He find it? Does He feel welcome and at home here?"

I had the realization that no, indeed He does not. I had a vision of the Holy Spirit shuffled away in some dark corner of the house, while I reigned supreme over my life, not even affording Him the slightest courtesy or the barest hospitality. In the little nook under the stairs where I had pushed Him, He was not "in my way" as I bustled about, cleaning here and there, making plans here and there, and taking action on this project or that project, all without consulting Him or even taking time to converse with Him.

How wrong!

If a delegation of ambassadors or dignitaries arrived at my door, I knew how I would treat them. I would dress my best, welcome them graciously, and lay myself out to attend to their slightest wishes. I would be alert to the smallest hints as to how I could better serve them. I would listen to their conversation and be sparing with how much I talked about myself. I would not complain at the length of time they stayed or question the things they wanted to do. I would be at their disposal. They would have the best seats, the best food, and every comfort I could provide for them. Their smallest wish would be granted.

I realized that I needed to get things right with God. He bought me--He redeemed me--He indwelt me--He blessed me with His glorious presence--and I had treated him this way in return.

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? (1 Cor 3:16)

What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's. (1 Cor. 6:19-20)

I got on my knees before God and asked His forgiveness. I said that from now on, I would give Him complete control. I would attend to His slightest wishes. I would take my orders from Him instead of the other way around. I would be shuffled aside into the obscurity of the little nook under the stairs, if He so chose. I surrendered to Him the deed and the key to the house. From now on, He would be the owner.

And do you know what? He accepted it. He didn't treat me like I had treated Him, either. He didn't forget about me in the corner under the stairs, but with the tenderest acceptance and love, drew me out by the hand and gave me a role to participate in the work that He was doing. Furthermore, He set to work, calmly ordering the house back from the sloppy chaos I had left, expertly putting things back to a state of peace and orderliness.

I was amazed at His patience. How did He wait so patiently, knowing exactly what needed to be done, yet allowing me to go on alone, not forcing His way into the picture, but waiting to be invited?

I was amazed at His forgiveness. It was a shame and an offense...an atrocity...an abomination... that the Holy Spirit of God should ever have been so rudely treated, so shoved into a corner, so shut out and marginalized, so dishonored and disrespected. But He forgave me. How I praise Him for His mercy!

Thus I began the adventure of learning how to walk in this new way, yielding to the Holy Spirit's leadership in my life. But the battle wasn't over.

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Previous Post: Get Up Early: Skirmish #2
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Get Up Early: Skirmish #2

So then I had this bright idea.

For every day that I didn't get up in time to have my devotions, I would fast the whole day.

"Mwa-ha-ha," I thought gleefully to myself. "This'll teach me!" I do love food, and I was sure that even the bare threat of going without it would be enough to get me up in the morning. However, just to make sure I knew I wasn't bluffing, I made myself the rule that I had to get up on the first ring of the alarm (no hitting snooze). I wrote in my journal that day, "I'm tired of the defeat that sees me, day after day, succumbing to the sleep-god. I can't not learn this."

I admit that I really thought I wouldn't have to carry out my threat on myself. But the second day, I was already fasting. I knew it would take a whole day of fasting to hurt badly enough to be effective, because fasting for one meal, or even two, is so easy for me that it would have no impact on my sleep-ridden brain's reasoning power. That day, I ruthlessly carried out my threat, determined to drive the knife blade into the flesh and kill it till it was dead. I sniffed deliberately whenever there were any food odors to be smelled--and there were some good ones. I deliberately looked at food items so that I could tell myself, "See? You could have had that if you hadn't done that this morning."

But even still, I was thinking I undoubtedly wouldn't have to do it a second time, once the flesh saw I meant business.

Ha.

By the time seven days had passed, I had fasted four of them. After two weeks had passed with me eating only about every other day, I was hungry, thin, and extremely irritable.

I decided it was time to reevaluate. I felt like I could starve myself to death before I would ever give up sleep. I evidently loved sleep much more than I loved food.

Also, I realized that I was fasting in the strength of the flesh. I was wielding a crowbar against myself to try to move myself, but it was about as effective as a tree trying to pull itself up by the roots. No matter how resolved I was, if I was operating in the flesh to try to destroy the flesh, the flesh would wimp out at the last minute and not carry out its threat against itself. And I felt like the more I fought against myself, the more I weakened myself and made myself unfit to continue to fight.

What made things even worse was that when I did get up to pray, my prayer times were duller than ever. Somehow, I just couldn't connect with God. What was wrong with me?

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Get up Early: My Custer's Last Stand

The third aspect of my assignment was to do my devotions first, at the beginning of the day. I never failed to do my devotions, but I did them at night. And it was here that my flesh put up a determined, all-or-nothing fight to not yield. My flesh was NOT going to sacrifice those precious moments of sleep if it could help it.

I must add, by the way, that I had been feeling like I should do this since at least 2006, so this was a long-running struggle going much farther back than the other two assignments. And I found that no matter what I did, I simply could not prevail against myself.

I would go to bed with the best of intentions of getting up early the next day, but sleep would totally erase them from my brain, and by the time the alarm clock rang, the only thing I could think of was indulging in as much sleep as possible before I absolutely had to get up and go to work.

This made me sad, because it was like God would whisper to me, "Do you love sleep that much more than you love me?" I could get up to go to work, but I could not get up to make my appointment with my Savior. I could get up at, say, 3 am if I was going on a trip, but I could not get up at 6 to meet with Jesus. I could get up consistently every day at 6 if I had to be at work by 7, but if my work schedule changed and I didn't have to get there until 9, suddenly I "couldn't" get up at 6 anymore.

The flesh had declared its intentions. No surrender! This is not going to happen.
The spirit declared its intentions. Oh, yes, you are going to do this, and I'm going to fight until I succeed.

And so, the battle raged. And raged. And raged.

One of the early skirmishes involved a plan where I determined to fill out an "Accountability Sheet" that I invented for myself. I set myself a period of one month in which I answered nine questions:

1. What time did you go to bed last night?
2. What time did you get up this morning?
3. Was your alarm set?
4. What did you read in the Bible today?
5. Did you pray today?
6. What time did you leave Edith's? (At the time I was spending the night with an elderly neighbor)
7. Account for the time you spent today. What did you get done?
8. Was there anything else you should have gotten done?
9. Was there anything you did that you shouldn't have done? (In other words, did you waste any time?)

I did this faithfully for an entire month, and I was trying really, really hard to improve. In my mind's eye, I saw a graph of my bed times and waking up times, with a gently descending line that settled on a sensible bedtime and arising time and then fixed there for the rest of the month. My goal was to go to bed at 10 and get up at 6.

When the month was over, I plotted my actual points on a graph in my journal. Here is the graph.

Chaos! I was dismayed. And this was when I was trying. I would hate to see what it was before that. Still undaunted, however, I determined that the fight must go on. "Now I see where I am and how far I have to go," I said to myself. "So I'll do it for another month, and surely I'll see some improvement."

Here is the second month's chart.

Still chaos! Sure, my bedtime evened out. But that was not the point. The point was to work on my waking up time. The point was to arrive to a state where love for God could get me up out of a warm, comfortable bed, to go kneel on a cold, hard floor in prayer, because God was that worth it to me. The point was to achieve self-discipline and go by the rules I had set for myself, not by the frenzy of emotion that the moment of the alarm clock's ring produced in me. The point was to love God more than I loved sleep. Funny how every night before I went to sleep, I could convince myself that finally, today, my love for God was going to be enough to get me up, but every morning when the alarm clock rang, I couldn't think of anything but, "Just give me a few more minutes." And those few minutes inevitably lasted until the moment where I panicked and said to myself, "There's no way I'll be able to get ready and get to work on time if I don't get up." No time now for a quiet hour of stillness before the King of Kings. Now that hour was used up and I barely had time to shower and dress for work.

So that skirmish left me pretty much where I was before. Many more skirmishes were to come.

Next Post: Get Up Early: Skirmish #2
Previous Post: Learn to Pray
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Learn to Pray

Oh, prayer is a hard one. I had so many ups and downs with this. I still have so far to go. But I can look back and see that I've learned a few lessons, which I will share here.

The flesh does not like to pray, but the Spirit does. In order to pray effectively, I must be walking in the Spirit. Never mind what the flesh wants. It's supposed to die anyway.

The point is not to "say prayers," the point is to connect with God. Be still on Him and wait on Him until you have truly visited the throne room and conversed with the King of Kings.

One of my biggest hindrances to prayer was a line of reasoning something like this: "I'm not successful at prayer, so prayer doesn't do any good, so why bother to do it at all?" But this reasoning is first faithless, and second inaccurate. The Bible says our prayers DO do good. By the way, we are commanded to pray, so the "Why bother" comment is invalidated just by that alone.

Another big hindrance to prayer was this line of reasoning: "God is going to do whatever he wants. Things will be the same if I pray as they will be if I don't pray, so why bother?" God taught me big time that this is not true. Whenever I prayed, things happened! Whenever I didn't pray, things didn't happen. It was almost as if God was deliberately withholding the answer until I asked. An illustration of this helped me to understand. I work in a preschool, and it is important to teach the kids to use language, so if they point at something and go "uuuh," we know perfectly clearly what they are asking for, but we say, "Use your words," and wait to give it to them until they ask. Also--it's free to pray, and you just might get what you ask God for, so you really have nothing to lose if you pray; you can only stand to gain.

I learned that body position had a great deal to do with whether or not I would get very far in prayer. Lying in bed, it only took about 3 minutes of prayer to put me to sleep. Kneeling beside the bed, I got a little farther, but pretty soon my head would be pillowed peacefully on my arms and I would be asleep, only to wake up an hour later feeling very stiff and uncomfortable. Standing up--Ah! There's a sleep prevention technique! So at different times I have had to give myself a rule that I have to stand up and not so much as touch my bed. It wards off sleepiness, all right!

Probably my biggest hindrance to prayer was a wandering mind. If I "think" my prayers, it's only a minute before my mind is zinging all over the place into random thoughts that have nothing to do with prayer. Before two sentences are out, I have already forgotten I was praying. Then I catch myself five minutes later thinking about, say, a kayak going down a waterfall, and I realize, "Oops! I was praying! Let me get back to that. Where was I?" I resume my prayers, say a sentence or two, and again, my mind is off in another direction and I have forgotten I was even praying. Do you know how frustrating and prayer killing it is for this to happen over and over again, every two sentences, every day of your life? So two solutions have saved me. One is praying out loud. However, in our small house, it is difficult to have the privacy to do this, so I often take prayer walks, where I can pour out my heart to the Lord in verbalized prayer. Solution two: Write my prayers and enjoy the ability to have silent prayer AND instant focus. An hour of prayer suddenly becomes easy when I'm writing. Of course, I can write slower than I can think, so I can't say as much in an hour as I probably could if I was praying silently, but given that my silent prayer is interrupted by a million random intrusions and I give up after about five minutes, I know I'm getting a lot farther with the written version.

So prayer is coming along. Not perfect yet, but getting somewhere.

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Valentine's party

Today I had several girls over to my house for a Valentine's party, complete with chocolate cake, roses, and of course, conversation hearts. (By the way--yuck! they've changed the recipe for those things and...bleck.)

The purpose of the party was to express to them the love of Jesus and ignite their hearts with a love for Him. The Lord really helped me to do that as I talked to them. I could see them listening intently, they got quiet, and one of them told me afterward she appreciated it.

We also got to do lots of other fun stuff, like go outside to see the chickens, feed grass to our neighbor's horses, swing on our backyard swing, and decorate heart-shaped sachets, which we then filled with potpourri. 

Tomorrow I'll try to get back to our regular story! But I just had to break in here with a little current news flash. :-)

Depend on God

These three pursuits, depend on God, pray, and do my devotions early, all occurred simultaneously, yet seemed distinct at the time I was going through them. Therefore, rather than treating all three together and progressing chronologically, I'm going to treat each one individually in order to bring out the facets that stood out from each one. So forgive me if we jump around in time a bit in the next few posts.

As I said, I was willing to learn to depend on God. Willing, but clueless.

So I said, "God, it sure would help if I could at least come to feel like I needed to depend on you." And God happily obliged me by introducing a set of circumstances into my life that were designed to be above my capabilities, outside the range of possibility for me, more difficult than I could handle.

Hel-LO, trials!

"Humph," I thought. "I didn't mean to ask for that."

It started out pretty mild. Things like being uncommonly annoyed at doing the dishes, and having to depend on God for the cheerfulness that I had always taken for granted. When I asked for cheerfulness, I would receive it, but before, it had always been automatically dispensed. Therefore, I had taken the credit for my habitual good humor to myself. I didn't realize how many ways God supplied me with blessings!

Things went along and I have to admit I almost forgot I was supposed to be working on this area of dependence on God. But every so often, a situation would crop up that was beyond me, and I would remember, and try to be a good, docile learner, and get better at this whole dependence thing.

Then came a job opportunity, and I took it without thinking. I was already working two other jobs, but I needed some extra money, and this seemed perfect. However, I didn't consult God about it. I just took it.

The day I was driving in the car to my first day on the job, the Lord convicted me about it. "You didn't find out if this was my will or not, did you? In fact, you didn't even consult me. You didn't wait on me. This was not what I asked you to do, was it?"

I had to admit, "No, it wasn't."

And that job, which was supposed to be a simple, quick project of four months, stretched into seven months of spectacular failure, in which I blew deadlines, frustrated my boss, and fell behind at every step of the way. It wasn't for lack of trying. It wasn't even for lack of aptitude for the position. It was simply and purely a personal fault: I couldn't produce the self-discipline necessary to actually put in working hours and work on the project.

It was around this time that I came to a certain realization: "Me trying is the same as me not trying." It happened this way: All throughout my life, I knew there were certain things I did well (piano, spelling, crochet, etc.) and certain things I did not do so well (swimming, being organized, staying focused, etc.). However, with anything I did not do very well, I always comforted myself by saying, "Well, you're not really trying. If you ever once tried, you would be as good as anyone else at it."

Three specific cases disrupted this idea. First, at work they had a weight-loss contest. Everyone would get weighed once a month for four or five months, and whoever lost the greatest percentage of their body weight would win an ipod or a wii. So I decided to join them. I could afford to lose 15-18 pounds, according to my body mass index, and for the first time in my life, I started to try to lose weight. Always before, I had stayed pretty constantly trim without trying. Well, my weight at the end of the contest was only one pound less than my weight at the beginning, and that was only because I had happened to skip breakfast that morning. So much for trying to lose weight. Me trying (to lose weight) was the same as me not trying.

Second, I stared an accountability sheet where for a month, I would record my bedtime and my waking up time. The idea was to try to get to bed earlier and wake up earlier, and see progress over time. Ha. At the end of the month, the only thing my chart showed was chaos. So I tried another month. Perhaps this time, the graph would show steady improvement and progress. Nope. I was all over the map. So much for trying to dictate to myself my bedtime. Me trying (to get up early) was the same as me not trying.

Third, I encountered the above-described difficulties in my job. I tried, and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried. Oh, how I pushed! Oh, how I tried to govern myself! Oh, how I tried rewards and punishments. Nothing worked. I continued on in the same rut of failure for all seven months. Me trying (to make myself work) was the same as me not trying.

It was this that got me thinking. "In my flesh, I really can't do anything by myself. If God doesn't come through for me, I'm sunk." (Remember what I had asked God earlier? How I had wanted to feel like I was dependent? He got me there all right! I just didn't know how painful it would be.)

I also did a word study in Scripture on the word nothing.

John 15:4    Jesus said, "Without me, ye can do nothing."
Gal 6:3        If a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself.
John 6:63    The flesh profiteth nothing.
1 Co. 9:16   I have nothing to glory of.
John 3:27    A man can receive nothing except it be given him from heaven.
John 5:30    I can of mine own self do nothing.
John 11:49  Ye know nothing at all.
1 Tim 6:7    For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.

It hit me for the first time in my life that I am nothing. Apart from God, I can do nothing. God is the great everything. And only as far as I am found in Him and receive things from Him will I ever do anything.

NOW I was on the way to true dependence on God.

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A Triple Milestone in Sight

After spending about a year to learn how to open up my mouth and speak, God sent me on another quest which would take at least a year. This time, it was really a three-fold assignment that would all relate to one common theme, though I wouldn't see how all three tied together until later.

First, depend on God. Learn to rely solely on Him. Don't live as though I were an independent, autonomous creature, but instead, one that needs God for every breath, every step, every day of my life.

Second, learn to pray. Not just "say prayers," but pray, mighty, faith-filled prayers that connect with God.

Third, put God first in my day by doing my devotions in the morning.

The first assignment, Depend on God, I accepted unquestioningly. "Sure, God. I'll be glad to depend on you. I don't really know how, but I'll be glad to try." I then proceeded to try to work up some good "dependent" feelings. (Haha... must've made God laugh.) Overall, I realized that for all practical purposes, I lived without reference to God, existing without consulting him or feeling that I needed to consult him. I had my own ideas, made my own plans, and went through the day by myself. It didn't enter my head to depend on God most of the time. Of course, if I was embarking on a major step or had a weighty decision before me, I would pray "for direction," but even that was sort of a token gesture.

The second assignment, Pray, was somewhat more difficult. The truth is, I didn't really like to pray. I wasn't good at prayer. My mind always wandered. But I knew it was a good thing to do, and I knew I would need to do it sooner or later, and I had been meaning to study it anyway, so I accepted the assignment.

The third assignment involved getting up early. And that meant sacrificing sleep. Now, I love sleep. I don't think you understand. I LOVE sleep. Wait, I don't think you get it. I really, really love sleep. At sleepover parties when I was a kid, while all the other little girls were talking and giggling and watching movies into the wee hours of the morning, I happily snuggled down in my sleeping bag at 9:00, wondering how they could possibly make such a sacrifice for each other's sake to stay up so late. I, at any rate, was going to enjoy myself at this party, and that meant going to sleep. Sleep, for me, was (still is!) the ultimate indulgence. Therefore, my entire being revolted from this assignment with everything that was in me. And oh, what a battle raged!

The Master Professor, however, remained unperturbed. He knew how to teach me the right lessons in the right order. His teaching techniques were absolutely effective. He had infinite resources at his disposal. He was sure of His own success with his pupil, though I was not at all sure of it.

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