Take this life

Staring into the mirror I see the figure of someone trying to take a stand & live for something more. Integrity is what I need & honor to my soul, I feed it up, pack it in getting rid of all my sin that’s weighing me down. In my pursuit of what is real my heart is longing with a need to feel my soul come alive.

I know it seems like I am stalling. I know it seems like I don’t have any direction or even a clue as to what to do next. I feel like I have little or no choice. I feel like I have no release or hold.
What I do know is that I can’t stop trying…I might not be trying as hard as I could be trying but I’m still pushing, reaching, and moving in the direction I should be. Keeping my thinking as clear as possible and keeping that ember burning inside. I won’t give up.

I may make the same mistake over and over. I may say and do the wrong thing time and time again. But that doesn't mean that I am going to quit or give up. It doesn't mean that I'm going to throw in the towel and resign to this inferior version of myself. Somewhere in the distance is an anchor of hope that I am tied to that will pull me to what God has created me to be. I must keep striving, pushing, pressing and reaching forth so that I one day may apprehend righteousness in the Glory that is to come.
I realize that my efforts at righteousness or right acts are as filthy rags before the King of Glory. Its by His blood that I am redeemed and saved not of myself or my works. Does that mean I can freely sin, God forbid! But I know when I do, I can go to my heavenly father and ask for forgiveness and He will not forsake me but help me to see what I can be, dust me off and enable me to be walk in grace and mercy as I travel the road of life.

Worship

The other day I was in my car listening to my itouch and Israel’s version of “I exalt thee” comes on. I LOVE this song…simple, perfect, magnify God worship.
Before I knew it was caught up in reverent worship with tears streaming down my face and a freedom of expression I haven’t felt in a really long time.

After it was over I tried to remember when the last time I felt such a flood gate of sincere liberating worship and I am sad to say it was FOREVER ago. It was at a Mercy Me concert. What?! Why? When was the last time before that?
You gotta be kidding me….a Toby Mac concert last winter. Ugh, something is not right here! Before then…ah, having a hard time pinpointing it.

I remember that Toby Mac concert and the fervency in which I worshipped. I know what your thinking…worship to Boomin’ out your stereo system. Yep, maybe not that song in particular but “Made to love you”, “Jesus Freak”, or “Lose my Soul”. There was such a liberty in the Holy Ghost there…how? Maybe because the people there didn’t really care that the only expression of worship was a hand clap or foot stomp or jumping down in one little spot only. They were “worldly” and they danced before the Lord. Their dance probably looked more like the dance David danced before the Ark on its way back to temple then what we express every Sunday night.

Walking away from that experience I knew that my worship up to that point had been capped off and shallow compared to I had just had liberty to do. Think I am strange? I have one other example of a true liberated expression of worship. And up until that point I had NEVER felt such freedom.

I was at a prayer meeting at Landmark. There were about 20 of us there. We were in the sanctuary. Spent hours there…towards the end of evening someone put on “God is a Good God” it was dark with only the night light shining in through the windows above and from what I can remember and from what I could see Worship exploded in that place…there was such a liberty to dance before the Lord and to make a joyful sound. I had never felt so euphoric before in the presence of the Lord. I was giving him my all and everything that he had given me I gave back to him.

After that night I yearned for such liberty again in my worship. I began to have “private sessions” of worship before God in my basement with my kids. I longed for that rawness of emotion and expression before the Lord but I had no liberty to express it within the confines of a Pentecostal service.

There was a time during a community group; when I felt the power of the Lord but no one else seemed to and tears of worship poured out but I felt ashamed as everyone looked at me. I noticed after that instance I never again let on again to the anointing I would feel in worship and I stifled it. So the instances became fewer and further in between…a Toby Mac concert last winter and a Mercy Me concert a few short months after several months last Saturday driving to Park Meadows…So much time has elapsed.

The reason I can not fail...

Acknowledgement

Happy to say that had a brief glimpse of what depression can look like and decided not to hang around and visit. I’m not who you say I am. I am more than a conqueror, I am bought with a price. I’m filled with Living water that flows out and touches the lives of those around me. I am a light in a dark world pointing others to Christ.
I will no longer allow you to bully me or intimidate me. Or cause me to doubt myself and the living God in whom I serve. I will not allow you to condemn me nor persecute me.
I will live above your influence and strive to do what God has called me to do. I will no longer be catergorized by your walls of humanity. The legacy I am striving for; come hell, come high water, come pain, come failure is to be someday called a Christian...someone who really is Christ-like. I will make it. I will be changed. I will become.

I am tired of waking up and not feeling well. I tend to feel hopeless lost and filled with despair. I try to ignore the achy feeling deep in my gut and most of the time I successfully achieve this. However I would be foolish to believe that my ignoring has made it go away.
I’m not sure how to fix this…I know all the “right” answers but they just don’t seem to be the solution to the problem. It seems to be that no matter what my actions are I am going to experience some degree of despair, hopelessness, emptiness, and un-fulfillment.

For quite some time now I have been going through a process that has me walking the line so to speak. I am tired of the establishment, I am tired of the man, I am tired of religion, and I am tired of my complacent self. I would love to see change and reform to the way things are done and handled. Because of this I am fighting cynicism, complacency, bitterness, and even rebellion.

To get to the brass tacks of what I want…. I want nothing more than to be in the presences of God, doing his work, loving and helping others discover Jesus. This seems to be the hardest thing to achieve for me. To me, it seems like I run into barriers of man and their opinion and their control on how things should be and can be done. We let humanity govern Christianity rather than letting Christianity govern our humanity, therefore snuffing out the true potential of the church and its ability to reach the lost effectively and keep the saints healthy.

It’s been in the last couple years that I have seen and understood the true meaning of Christianity. Please don’t get me wrong I probably only see a small fragment of what it is and I have leaps and bounds more to discover and learn. But one thing I know for sure is that what I “knew” before was wrong. I did not exercise my Christianity in love. I lacked compassion and therefore relevancy to the broken and hurting.

I handed everyone I knew who was going through something a clinical “textbook” answer and I never knelt down and got my hands dirty and helped.
I stoically stood there with my spiritual scrubs on, my face mask, my gloved hands and stared down my nose at people as I handed them a rope, tied it to a tree and walked away saying a prayer. It ticks me off to think about how much of a religious jerk I have been.

I’m afraid that most Christians are like this. I can testify for myself now. Being on this side of the fence, it has helped me see who I was and how I can never be again. And now that I need someone I have found there is no one to be found. Most people are look at me standing behind a 10 foot pole making sure they don’t breathe the same contaminated air I do.

I see the look on your faces as you walk past me. I see the language of your body and your darting eyes. I hear your calculated words and detached tone. I feel the emptiness of your half hearted hug. I see you tie a rope around a tree and breathe a prayer in some distant corner for me as you walk away.
I can’t say I blame you. I was taught the same thing you were. Believe me, I know what its like to be on your side of the fence when I tell my daughter she can’t hang out with a kid because they are going to be a bad influence on her…I’ve told her she can’t breathe the same air as them because I didn’t want her to be contaminated.

On this side of the fence though I have to say…wow, does that hurt. I had to recently hear the words come out of my daughter’s mouth that someone has told their kid they can’t come over anymore because they aren’t sure about the decisions we are making. As I choked back the lump in my throat and held back the tears in my eyes I had to be strong and look my beloved in the face and say…its okay. God knows where we are. We don’t need man’s approval.

Problem is…we need man’s approval. We need their seal of recommendation to live out what God has given us. The church is suppose to be a place where saints and sinners alike can draw strength from. Where the blood of Calvary flows freely and the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost. Where the world knows we are the children of God because we love one another. Instead, being on this side of the fence, it’s a cold, dry, lonely place where you are beat down and neglected because your issue is visible, well all the others have theirs hidden well beneath the layers of “holiness”.

I can testify that this process has been a difficult one. I have seen my humanity in all its shapes and sizes. I have seen how I let it lead me to believe I was a better Christian because I knew when to lift my hands and stomp my feet on the right beat. I see how my humanity led me to believe that I had my Christianity down pact because I believed I had a corner stone on truth and on holiness. Now I see my humanity in a whole different light…Woe is me! For I am undone. I have unclean lips and I am filled with iniquity. I finally see myself in the true light of Calvary. I finally see myself in need of redemption. I need grace and mercy to be save me from myself.

I’ve heard it said that “you need to be the seed of change that you want to see grow”. Slowly and very deliberately now I am making sure I become the very thing I need. And maybe somewhere in the process I can be fixed. I am learning to love others despite who they are and what they have did. I am learning to be compassionate and caring towards others. In all my faults; during this process of life, I am reaching out to the hurting, the broken, the wounded and I am offering a hand to pull someone one to dry land even though I feel like I am standing on sinking sand.

I have not and will not give up on the absolute truth of the Word of God. But I can’t say I am not struggling with man’s interpretation of it. As much as I would like to say I have “studied and rightly divided the Word of Truth” I have not. For too long I have lent a hand to someone else seeking out my salvation using fear to cause me to tremble. I do not want to take away credit for a man of God in my life by any means. But at some point I need to start taking full ownership in my walk with God and the choices I make. I need to live my life for God and not for man.

Umm, so this past weekend I have made a concerted effort on change, really striving to be better and more alert. Its Monday morning and I still feel like crap. I did all the “right” things and still feel at loss...SERIOUSLY!

If I give my life, if I lay it down can you turn this life around can I be made clean buy this offering of my soul. Can I be made whole again?

Comfortably Numb

I’ve recently discovered something…its kind of a revelation to me. I’ve disconnected. I think I have pinpointed the time and the place Presbyterian St. Lukes, Just a week or so before October 16th 2007.

I walked up to my Papo and I told him that the doctors were taking off the feeding and oxygen tubes keeping him alive. From that moment on I disconnected from any real emotion…from any real sensitivity. From that time until present I have been walking around comfortably numb…as Pink Floyd so eloquently put it.

I realize that I have been one throughout my life that has always kept my emotions at bay, being more logical than emotional. The answer is always easy when you approach it with cold hard factual truth. Yes, there have been times when I let my emotions get the best of me but they are few and far between.

I am not saying that for the last 2 years I have been completely void of emotion but they have been glazed over with a thick dose of lethargy; complacency perhaps…Since the passing of my Papo I have seen a lot of loss. I am sure there are people who have experienced more hurt and pain but this is my blog…

I lost my faith in church and the leadership. I have lost my faith in hope, in doing the right thing. I have lost my faith in my marriage. I have even lost my faith in the Word to some measure. I lost my grandma, losing my house, losing my grip on who I am and what I want to become. And I can honestly say that the bare bones of what I haven’t lost faith in is the Love of Jesus. It’s His Love for me that is keeping me afloat and that’s something I can’t lose.

I ask myself in all sincerity if it took all of this to get me where I am completely reliant on Calvary. I hate to say it but I know that at some point I had thought I “arrived” not to some high social status or a corporate ladder but I had pitched my tent on the corner of…”I’m married, I have a wonderful husband, great kids, two dogs, a great house, money to spend, friends to fellowship with, a great church, several ministries, knew the Word, knew how to pray, when to pray, when to worship, how to worship, and all the stuff that comes with that”.

Then it all slipped away.

I’m not so happily married, my husband is still wonderful, my great kids are fighting, my dog is peeing, I lost the house, money is tight, all friends are gone, the church body is failing to show brotherly love, I resigned from all but one of my ministries, I still know the Word but now it stands as a sword that I use to cut into the humanity of others, my prayers are weak, when I do pray, and my worship is shallow when I do worship.

I have always drawn strength from the Word of God. I know how to do that…growing up I learned the Word, I put it away in my heart and mind so I wouldn’t sin against it. I studied to show myself approved; I put on the whole amour of God. I was baptized in Jesus name, spoke in tongues when the Holy Ghost came…but somewhere when I really depended on it to keep me “safe” it failed. I guess I kinda thought that if I did all the right things, practiced the formula that I would not have to struggle with my flesh…isn’t that what’s preached all the time? Pray, fast, read the Word and you’ll overcome. WHAT DID I MISS???

I am pretty sure that all my works and all that stuff were and still are as filthy rags…my need for Calvary and for redemption have completely gone unnoticed by me until these last few months. Now I desperately need the love of Jesus and Calvary’s flow of grace but I am I chained to these feelings of inadequacy and failure. Now I don’t want to go to church, now I don’t know what to pray and I don’t know how to get to “back to good”.

I walk through life being happy on occasion but no joy. I spend time with my husband and kids but in this detached state of mind. Sometimes I stop and I notice that my mind is in a completely different place. I have been told several times recently to live in the moment I am in…it’s like I can’t focus. I go to church or listen to preaching and I can’t latch on to anything. I have no peace, no patience, no loving kindness, no meekness…no fruit of the Spirit. What the heck is wrong with me…I can not for the life of me seem to get it together.

I heard a preaching called “Don’t let you Samuel die”. Samuel representing spiritual sensitivity…I think on that day walking up to my Papo and seeing that look on his face I lost my spiritual and my emotional sensitivity to life.

I pray that I can find it…

"Give me words to speak don't let my spirit sleep. Cause I can't think of anything worth saying" Aaron Shust

Adrift

This moment keeps on moving. We were never meant to hold on.
This was a scene worth waking up for when I woke up.

Two thousand and nine might not be my favorite year...endless trouble. I pray it gets easier

Life

Today is the first day of breathe at the age of 32 years. I’m grateful for all that God has done for me, what He hasn’t done for me and what He will do for me. It’s been three months now into 2009 and the year is developing just fine.

There are a lot of changes over the horizon that I am looking forward to. Will and I resigned from being facilitators for community group. It just wasn’t working out as well as we hoped and it seems like Will is going to be helping out more and more with counseling with his mom. Which means Wednesday nights for him; will start to be filled with work. Ideally another office will open up and Will would be working there full time. We’ll have to see what God has in store.

It looks like we will be moving soon. Our house will be going up on the market in the next couple days. The house payments just weren’t working out for us anymore especially with today’s economy…so we thought we would cut our loses and go. So I’m pretty excited about our next little place where we can rest our heads and call home.

Jereme-Ashlee and I have taken the dive…She had been experiencing terrible headaches everyday for several months. We eliminated all causes, going to the dentists, eye doctor, caffeine, water…ect, ect, to no avail. It seemed like all signs were pointing to the length and weight of her hair. With advice from Pastor we talked with a chiropractor, which was quite helpful. It seems like there is a misalignment with her spine that was causing headaches…Finally relief. However, confirmed yet again by the chiropractor this time her hair was too heavy for her and when the adjustment would be made it would only aggravate it again. So my poor dear daughter got her first haircut at the age of 13 years old. She cried.

I am so proud of Jereme-Ashlee she has always been such a remarkable girl. She has handled the situation in such humbleness and humility. We are both praying that God’s grace and mercy be abundant and that the spirit of rebellion or pride doesn’t get any kind of foothold in her life. I can’t imagine the weight that she is carrying right now knowing that people are judging her and most of them are judging the situation wrongly. I pray that God will help her tread through the criticism and look towards Him for approval and acceptance.

I’m still striving to stay focused and not let outside influences have an affect on my walk and relationship with God. I intend on being in this until I hear those words “well done”. I just got to keep my head on straight and keep my heart pure. I’m striving to daily take a moment and recognize the greatness of God’s love. To give Him all of me…if anyone has mastered this please let me in on the secret. I find myself picking up my living sacrifice and trying to manage my life on my own. Grr.

Recently I have purchased Shawn McDonald, Jeremy Riddle, and Tenth Avenue North…all which have really ministered to me and helped me focus more. Some day I will become a song writer and learn to play the guitar and maybe my songs will help someone draw closer to God. I’m grateful for little brooks of encouragement from people who don’t know they are feeding me life. It’s amazing how God sustains us even in dry desert places. I’ve come to appreciate the ministry I am once again. In serving I am being fed. God is Good. I look forward to what he has planned for me and my family.

I love the season change; and boy am I ready for it. What happened to a good old white powdered winter. I live in Colorado right? I prefer my sun filled days to have vibrant color, pleasant scents and a slight breeze tickling my skin. Not drab shades of gray and brown with a violent wind tossing trash, sand and my hair around.

I'm ready for spring, the fresh new life of flowers, grass, and trees. I'm a sucker for spring; by far its the best season in my opinion, but then again I am taken with Autumn and well, I like the look of freshly packed snow. Honestly summer may be the only season I can do with out WHAT? (I know thats what you are thinking.) I hate being hot and I'm not one much for tanning or sweating. But I'm sure I can think of something nice about summer too. Yea, here is flip flops and T's.

Anyway...

I was thinking that I needed to bring my thinking into a different season. To reach for a mental picture before the actual evidence comes along. So Spring...new life, fresh view, happy, light, birds chirping and flockling in the tall grass spinnning and singing "the hills are alive with the sound of music"...I'm looking forward to you.

God is such a good God. Much like the seasons of the year He brings our lives through seasons. Just knowing that the violent winds of pain and the dark drab colors of a snowless winter won't last forever brings a smile to my face. Because the very next season is spring...life. Isn't it encouraging to know that what we are going through now won't last forever. (OMG haha, ironically I am listen to, get this Israel Houghton's "I lift up my hands". If you know that song on the cd he speaks about a new season. Couldn't have planned it better...)

"You serve a God of season and every season has a purpose"

2009

2009 has been good to me so far. I am excited to start a new year and accomplish new and different things. I get to start my year off with a new car. Which is great. God knows I needed one and He hooked me up! With the new year I now have a teenage daughter. Yikes! Thats really hard to say. I don't think it has much to do with my age but more of my inexperience on how to raise one of those. I'm confident that me, Will, God, and Jereme will work through that though and come out triumphant!
I say this with oodles of conviction but I fear that I may have to take it with a grain of salt. This year is going to be the year of my west coast vacation with the family. We have to make it happen or else time will get away from us and we'll lose out. Its just a matter of moments before Michael is a teen as well. Ah, time is so precious and boy does it fly!