Sara – Page 17 – Our God is a consuming fire

Dust bunnies and Christmas trees

Posted on November 30, 2019December 3, 2019 by Sara

It finally all caught up with me.

I mean, you can only hide the dust that is threatening to engulf your home for so long before it rears its ugly head and exposes you for who you really are.

pigpen

Because even though we all may prance around like Lucy from a Charlie Brown episode, pretending to have our stuff together, if we’re honest with ourselves, sometimes we feel a little bit more like the dust-embattled “Pig Pen” of the series. Literally.

Let me explain. Some people use Thanksgiving as their gauge for the appropriate time to break out the Christmas decorations. In my little world, it comes the day after Halloween. After a month of dealing with ghosts and ghouls haunting the aisles of every store I walk into, I can’t wait to throw up the tree and string the lights! (Thanksgiving looks extra good in the reflection of Christmas lights … we don’t skip Thanksgiving in these parts, we just “accessorize” it!”)

So this year I jumped right in. Only, to my horror, I suddenly realized that this wasn’t going to be as much fun as I thought. It has been an exceptionally busy few months, and though I have maintained the “mandatory” cleaning of laundry, dishes, and the necessary loathsome toilets, I had blithely ignored the dust gathering in all the corners and surfaces of my home.

Until the lights came out and suddenly I could see it all. Everything ugly shone forth in shocking brilliance. And my dreams of glorious decorations stopped short in the depressing realization that I needed to put on my big girl pants and clean.

Truth is, I’ve been struggling with the thought of Christmas this year. I want all the joy, I want all the celebration, but sometimes it just feels like a lot of work, and I’m tired. It’s like I’m bursting at the seams (literally and emotionally) and then we take all these lights and decorations and songs and expectations and pile them on top of all this other stuff going on. And it starts to feel heavy and busy and cluttered.

Kind of like my house with decorations obscured by dust.

Sometimes it’s hard to see the beauty through the chaos, isn’t it?

Don’t blame Christmas. It’s holding out it’s arms with the promise of wonder and beauty … the opportunity to pause and remember. To put up impractical decorations just because they shine and make us smile and to give unnecessary gifts just because we love someone. To remember those important things that we build our lives on, but allow to get squeezed out in the business of life. The problem with Christmas lies in our capacity to receive it. We don’t know how to make space for it, so it just starts to feel like more work, more stuff, more than we have space for. We’re putting the beauty on top of the mess of our lives and it all dulls into incoherent clutter.

So I pulled out my dust rag, and I started to wipe. And as my home started to sparkle a little more, I felt the space around me work a surprising miracle. It was like the literal act of wiping away dust was starting to clear out the dusty corners of my heart. As the spaces around me cleared, I looked at my boxes of decorations and suddenly felt excitement grow over filling these spaces with lights and beauty.

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Are you feeling this with me? Is your soul feeling a bit cluttered these days? Do you have those spaces too – the ones that have been ignored too long and when you let your gaze linger, all you see are those stinking dust bunnies staring back at you? Has the calendar pressed in on you so that you no longer see the moments around you and only hear the ticking of the clock? Has the hurt that’s been done to you hardened your heart so all you hear when you call to God is your own voice echoing back? Are the necessary bills piling so high that every responsibility is just something else you can’t afford? There’s that diagnosis, that relationship, the drama that swirls around us and sucks the joy right out of our hearts… What do we do with all of that? Especially when Christmas comes along and tells us to put up the lights and rejoice and how do you do that when you can’t really find yourself in the middle of all the crazy?

It’s just easier to ignore it all and go on with the daily necessary requirements of life, isn’t it?

But then you hear the echo of that song and it feels a little different …

“Let every heart prepare Him room”… but if I’m honest, there really isn’t room most days.

Maybe what we need this Christmas is a different perspective. Maybe instead of trying to lay baby Jesus in His manger on top of all the other things in our lives, we could try inviting Him into that messy place? Maybe we could hold open our hands and simply ask Him to hear the cry of our hearts.

We all want to move a little slower so we can take it all in, but until we can, let’s “prepare Him room”. Maybe we can dust out the corners of the heart, release some resentment, soften some anger, forgive a hurt – and let Jesus in. Recently I found myself needing to utter a simple, “I’m sorry” to the God of the Universe who I had unwittingly shut out of my heart. Hurts in various form had caused me to want to protect myself and those I love and so I let myself grow hard – and God can’t be heard when the walls of our heart turn to rock.

Maybe this Christmas season, we can string the lights and remember the Light who scatters our darkness. (John 1:5)

manger cross

To hear His precious promises – and truly believe them!

“He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
    to proclaim freedom for the captives
    and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
    and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
    instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
    instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
    instead of a spirit of despair. – Isaiah 61

Maybe with each twinkling light we see, we can take a deep breath and see the face of Christ – “For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made His light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.” 2 Corinthians 4:6

Oh how my soul needs to hear that truth! Pig Pen and I have some work to do around here! But we’ll have the Christmas music blasting while we do it…

Living this Life

The bell still rings for me…

Posted on November 9, 2019November 11, 2019 by Sara

I rode the Polar Express the other night.

Not by myself, of course – that would have been weird.

My family all jumped aboard with me – we dug out the Christmas PJs and Santa hats and braved the cold to ride the train. We sang the Christmas songs, drank the hot chocolate and ate the cookies – we met Santa, saw the elves, and let ourselves feel the magic of the story.

But as I sat in the middle of all the merriment – I looked around at all the other families sharing this moment with us and thought – this is all so bizarre. There is the man up there, with his arms covered in tattoos participating in the same experience as me. And in another car, there is the big family wearing matching giraffe costumes – I still don’t know what that has to do with the Polar Express or Christmas, but they looked cozy and happy. Surrounding me are people of all ages – wearing all manner of PJs and random Christmas attire – every walk of life, sharing this moment, this story, this child-hearted experience.

And I can’t stop thinking about it.

Whey do we do these things? We drink lukewarm hot chocolate, eat cheap sugar cookies, and listen to a story we’ve heard over and over … and we LOVE it! The incongruity of it all makes me think that something much more important is happening in our spirits and maybe we just don’t have the words.

If you’re anything like me, this grown-up world can spin you upside down. And if we’re not careful, the harsh winds can form a crust around our souls until we stop feeling. Maybe what we all need this Christmas season is a taste of childlike wonder to wake our souls up and help us see beyond ourselves.

Chesterton says it like this: “Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

Is it possible? Do you think that this is what we’re all really craving but don’t know how to say it? A taste of the kind of wonder that we’ve all somehow forgotten? So we slip on our jammies and ride Christmas trains and whisper “do it again” because we all need to wake up our slumbering souls and savor the wonder again?

What about when it ends, and we wake up the next morning, put on more appropriate attire, throw in the next load of laundry, take the kids to school, and go about our workday, shuffling along in the apparent monotony of life. What about those days that unfold into weeks until we start to feel like robots in a factory?

I saw a man yesterday who had been through mind-numbing physical pain. He was a strong, active man – but sickness recently claimed his foot and part of his leg. As I saw him being helped on stage, with what remained of his leg wrapped and hanging out the bottom of his pants, my heart broke a little. Then he spoke, and my heart swelled. This is what he said about his pain – “it’s been a great adventure. All this pain – it’s worth it to simply feel.”

Maybe we spend too much time trying not to feel. We avoid the pain, numb our spirits with technology and diversions. We escape the monotony by running somewhere else in our minds, wishing we could be anywhere but washing these dishes again. We see other lives on social media that seem so much more interesting than ours and we forget that they start and end the day the same way we do – maybe we all need to ride the Polar Express and remember how to feel the wonder again.

To do it again with hearts awake! To let the magic pour out of the air around us and soften the crust around our souls. “All around us, magic is overflowing and running down the streets. Do you really live on a ball spinning in circles through the stars? Does the heat from the closest star really make trees and grass and moss out of the carbon dioxide in the air? Have [they] really pulled black ooze up from beneath the earth’s skin, mixed it in their lairs into something that explodes, and made us magical metal boxes than can race around on roads, riding on those explosions? Are you bored with that, yawning in your seat belt? Is lightning real? Tornados? Does the big spinning ball beneath us always suck us down, and are we really talented enough to constantly balance on our feet? What kind of creatures are we?

Sit Moses and Beowulf down, and listen to their stories. Sit Bilbo down and listen to his. Do you disbelieve their tales? Are they made up? Are they fantasy? Now tell them your stories. Have you flown through the sky in a giant metal tube? Do we have boats that can sail to the very bottom of the sea? Have we thrown men all the way to the moon?

A hobbit would laugh at you. To him, your world could not be real. Your stories would be fun to read, beneath a blanket on a rainy day. He might look out of his window and sigh, wishing for a more magical world of his own.” (N. D. Wilson)

Whatever you have ahead of you today, this is the only day we’ve got! Let’s be brave enough to stop the hurry in our souls and let the hardness fall off. I know it’s not all starry eyed happy – I know pain often hovers or threatens to consume. But when Jesus said “let the little children come to me”, He was talking about you and me. In the middle of all we have before us today. He said the kingdom of heaven belonged to them – to us! This is not just future tense, this is our foretaste of the kingdom of heaven now.

“Taste and see that the Lord is good;
blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.” Psalm 34:8

Living this Life

He knows that we are dust

Posted on May 27, 2019June 23, 2019 by Sara

I have a confession to make … I’m not very good at following rules. I don’t mean to be rebellious, I just float through life doing things my way and don’t pay attention to inconveniences like “exit only” signs (much to my oldest child’s chagrin).

So here I sit, thinking about the 10 commandments. I take the Word of God very seriously, and even in my fickle ways, I know that holiness and purity matter in the Kingdom of Heaven. Not being much for legalism, I tend to lean towards the “heart” of these commands, as Jesus addresses in Matthew 5. In spite of that, there are some of these famous 10 that we take very seriously – “do not murder, do not steal”, while other commands we find it easier to fudge a bit – “do not covet your neighbors stuff”. And since I can’t stand inconsistency in life, what gives? Why do we value some of the “big 10” while blowing off others?

This came to a head in my personal life when I was recently challenged to take the Sabbath a bit more seriously. To incorporate rest into my life on a regular basis. In my family, we tend to live an ebb and flow lifestyle – much of it out of necessity given the ministry God lets us be a part of. This means that we go all out for a few months until we can barely pick ourselves up off the floor and then we try to get away to refill and restore for the next “all out” season. This works – but I’m beginning to realize that there might be a better way.

In fact, this is not God’s original design. Jesus often refers to “how it was in the beginning” – so let’s go back there.

In the beginning, God designed a breathtaking creation – filled with intricate minute detail and overflowing raucous extravagances of creativity. This didn’t tire Him out – He is God and this is just the overflow of who He is. But nonetheless, on the 7th day, He modeled for us a day of rest.

In God’s top ten list of commandments, He says, “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy” (Exodus 20)

I don’t know about you, but for much of my adult life, that “keeping it holy” part has meant “go to church”. But I’m wondering if there’s much more here that I have been missing. So come down this road with me a bit – I’m excited about what I’m discovering!

Our modern evangelical world tends to celebrate breaking from tradition. It wants the freedom and freshness of interpreting Scripture “personally” rather than following the age old traditions. It’s not wrong to embrace some of that freedom, but I think we often miss out because we don’t take the time to explore the traditions that we are a product of. Understand them. Follow the links to the original story to find the richness and the ways they feed the souls of generations.

We miss the beauty in verses like these: “Then He said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-28 – emphasis added). In our passion to break free of the legalism of the past, we miss little words like “for” – this Sabbath rest, this seventh day, this holy space is a gift from a Creator who knows we are dust and has provided a way for us to walk strong.

And then this! The echoes of our glorious future that God weaves into our present. The promise of what is to come that gives us strength for today. In speaking of that future day when we who trust in Jesus will rest all our sorrows, release all our burdens, lay everything at His feet, the writer of Hebrews says this: “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God” Hebrews 4:9.

It would seem God is weaving into the weekly fabric of our lives the great promise of eternity! In Ecclesiastes 3, Solomon tells us that God has set eternity in the hearts of man – is this part of it? Looking forward to the wonders of eternity by purposefully choosing rest one day a week?

But I mean, let’s be realistic – I’m a mom. 3 kids (and one very handsome husband) want to eat regularly. And I guess ice cream for breakfast doesn’t cut it. So whenever I have thought of “Sabbath-ing” in the past, I have shrugged it off as an unrealistic expectation that obviously doesn’t apply to mothers – or anyone else with regular responsibilities in life. And so I subconsciously resented those who might suggest I should try, wallowing in a little self pity while I’m at it.

I guess that’s why this recent wake up call has captured my imagination. Because what if? What if there was a way to purposefully make this happen? So I’ve been trying to think more pro-actively. Letting creativity have a bit more reign in my schedule. Saying “no” a little more often. And here’s what I’ve discovered over the last month.

It’s not as much about “not doing” as it is about “doing the day differently”. This speaks to a different place in each of our lives. In this interview with John Piper, he suggests that we approach the Sabbath as celebrating a different part of life than we get to live every other day of the week. (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1upfCmBy-kA) If your work requires you to be at a desk all day, then go outside! If your work is as a farmer, construction worker, someone who is outside in the elements all day, then sit on your couch and let your body rest! Take a break from the normal so that the different can speak to your heart. Our lives are all unique and each season requires different things from us – the day we take, may actually look like only an hour or two when you have a newborn. The point I’m trying to get at is how to find a window to be purposeful about making your day of rest a priority!

My typical days at home are filled with cooking and dishes and laundry and decisions. So where I used to say “I can’t just stop doing all that”, I now ask myself how I can plan ahead so that for one day a week, I do less. That Sunday morning rush is my undoing – so I’ve asked my family to let me find a different way and not make a breakfast that morning. Sometimes I plan ahead and buy muffins or something they can grab that’s special. Sometimes it’s just a frozen waffle – but it’s something that won’t make a mess I’ll have to clean up later, and it’s something that I don’t have to make.

I pick out the kid’s church clothes the night before.

I spend an extra half hour Saturday night emptying the dishwasher, cleaning up the sink, taking care of details so that I won’t be drawn to handling the mess at all on my Sabbath – it has a place to go and I can deal with it again on Monday.

I am a putterer. If I have to walk to my bedroom, I will clean 5 things on my way and then forget why I was going in the first place. I have a terribly hard time sitting still – my kids sometimes have to remind me to just be with them and not do something else on the side. This one day, I let myself sit. I watch my kids play. I play with them, and when that voice in my head tells me to take care of the dust bunnies under the couch, I let myself smile and say, “tomorrow, dust bunnies – tomorrow”.

I rest from my phone. That random little game that I unwind with some nights. Those check-ins on the world of facebook and instagram – all the things we just “have” to do can suddenly wait. It’s about curbing impulses to cultivate a quiet space. I’m finding that part harder than I had expected, but it is so freeing!

I light a candle that I love. A candle that is special and I save for just this day. The gentle smell reminds me of beauty and makes my soul breathe. It’s an echo of the age old Jewish tradition of lighting the Shabbat candle, and it makes me smile. (http://www.jtsa.edu/the-meaning-of-the-shabbat-candles)

These are things I do to remind myself that God cares. He cares about our work and He cares about our rest. He cares about rhythm and balance and peace. He cares about our health. And so I want it to matter to me as well.

The irony of all this is I sit here on a Saturday plunking out these thoughts on the verge of our busiest 6 weeks of ministry in the year. Tomorrow is my Sabbath, and then it will be 6 weeks before I get the opportunity to practice this again. I needed to write this today – so I could be reminded in August that this matters.

Since this is all a new focus for me and I feel like I’m experimenting, asking God to show me new things, I’d love to hear if this is something important in your life. How do you set the Sabbath apart? I’d love to learn more!