On Trust

How do you trust God when you don’t trust God?

For the past two and half years, I have struggled with spending time with God. Not the kind of struggle for time that I was used to. It wasn’t about finding time to spend time with Him. It was that I absolutely did not want to spend time with Him. I knew it was because I did not want to hear what He had to say to me in those times but for the life of me I could not figure out why I didn’t want to hear from in that setting.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with Him at all. I still very much looked forward to church services and worship nights and conferences where I knew His presence would show up. I still received prophetic words from others and clung to those words. I just did not want to sit alone with Him and hear what He might tell me in those moments.

Thoughts on Singleness Pt 2

As I proceeded on this journey of restoration, healing and discovery, I was completely content in my single status. I had no need, nor any desire to be in a romantic relationship. I had friendships with people of both sexes that fulfilled my need for community and connection. I was learning so much about myself and about God and a romantic relationship was the furthest thing from my mind.

I moved around A LOT in that time period, spending no longer than 9 months to a year in one place. Even if I had felt a desire to be in a romantic relationship, my lifestyle all but excluded the possibility of that happening.

And, I will be quite honest, after my last relationship I was downright terrified of becoming that emotionally intimate with another person again. I avoided emotionally intimacy at all costs. Even with girls whom I considered to be close friends. Emotionally intimacy was not a safe place for me, so I thought. It opened me up to more hurt and pain and I did not want to take that risk.

Thoughts on Singleness. Part 1

When I was 19 I became aware of what I feel is a huge problem in our Western Christian Church culture. I saw it, I talked about it, but it didn't really affect me personally. Every now and then it would come up but I was able to dismiss it quickly and tell myself that I was above being affected by it. I told myself that I was too secure in my identity to be influenced by it. I continually brushed it off and moved on, not taking time to sincerely look inside my own heart and see if the seeds were planted, and therefor have the ability to dig them out.

In the past few weeks I have begun to realize that the seeds were planted and I am now seeing the fruits of those seeds. I have been greatly affected by this and have begun to accept it as truth even though I have known from the beginning that is a lie.

Further to Go

In my last post I wrote about how I had been feeling after my surgeries and hospital stay last month. I wish I could say that things are better, that I have turned a corner and now things are looking much better. This, however, is not the case.

I am still in very much the same place emotionally but now I feel I have a better understanding as to why I am experiencing the emotions that I am.

Surgeries and Setbacks

Since being in the hospital I have been experience a wide range of emotions. I dont know how to get this down in one cohesive story with a redemptive ending. Maybe that is because I have not yet seen the ending of this. Or maybe it's because I am still much too wrapped up in the emotions themselves.

I have been trying my best not to think about what has happened, the emotions involved and the future implications of all of this. It is overwhelming and terrifying. I don't know how to process any of this and I am so unsure of how to reconcile everything that's happened with the things God has spoken to me over the past year. 

An Army Unashamed pt. 3

Last week I wrote about how shame from our past destroys and holds us back from being effective. When I think of shame, that tends to be the type of think of but this past week God revealed to me another form of shame I struggle with.

It really started last Saturday. I was hanging out with a friend telling him about how I struggle with telling people about things I am currently going through. I can tell you about absolutely everything that has happened in my past but when it comes to stuff I am currently dealing with and processing, forget it. As I was telling him this he said, "Yeah, I kinda got that. Like how you won't talk about the medical stuff you're dealing with right now."

An Army Unashamed Pt. 2

Last night I had the opportunity to speak at my church's youth group. I had been given about three weeks to prepare which is more notice than I usually have. I began to pray and ask God what He wanted me to share with these kids.

Right away I got one word. Shame. So I began to work on fleshing that out into a message. I looked up scripture verse after scripture verse on shame. I did word studies and read articles and portions of books I have sitting in my book case. I knew this message was going to come together and it was going to be great.

An Army Unashamed Pt. 1

As much as I love writing, I don't write just to write here. I save that for my journals where I can express every single thought and emotion as it comes to me without concern to validity and accuracy. When I sit down at my computer and open a new post document, it is because I feel I have something to communicate that is worth being heard.

The last few years I have been learning so much about humility and giftedness and personal identity and I have come to realize that true humility makes no apologies for the gifts/talents/abilities one has. I don't have to play them down to be humble. In fact, if I were to minimize these things, that would not be true humility at all but rather false humility that is actually an insidious form of pride.

Thoughts on Revival and Church

The topic if revival has been on my mind quite a bit for the past few months. Revival is something that is often talked about in church circles, but not something we actually see. I grew up hearing the stories of the great revivals that have happened in the past.

I loved hearing about Smith Wigglesworth and Jonathan Edwards. I was in awe of the stories that told of men of God like them going into a public place and simply their presence there (or rather the presence of God in them) caused people to fall on their faces and begin weeping and repenting.

When I was 14, I began hearing the stories of the Brownsville revival in Florida and the Toronto Blessing in Canada. I was in awe. I had this realization that revival was not a thing of the past. I knew then that God desired to pour out His spirit in fresh and new ways on the Church here in the U.S.

Dirt, Weeds, Sin and my Heart

Upon discovering that the previous renters in my parents house had put in a garden in the large backyard, I decided that this would be the year that I tried my hand at gardening. It was cemented when  my brother's moved in. For the past few months we've been talking about the garden and what we will plant. We've been dreaming of how we will transform both the front and back yards into a landscape that will not only be visually appealing but will also provide us with most of the vegetable we will need for the year.

None of us have really gardened. Ever. As a young girl I would sometimes help my grandma pull weeds in her flower beds. I learned then that you must pull them out at the root and often times the roots go much deeper than you would ever guess simply by looking at the top of the plant. This was, until now, the extent of my gardening experience. 

Last week my brothers and I made a trip to the store to buy the things we would need to begin. We spent a few hundred dollars on seeds, bulbs, soil conditioners, shovels, gloves, rakes and hoses for watering. I was getting quite excited for this endeavor. 

Today, I decided to get out in the garden and continue the process my brother's had started yesterday of pulling out weeds and tilling up the soil. As I was kneeling in the dirt, hacking at hardened soil and thick roots, I began thinking of more than just that literal act of gardening. 

..... But He is Good

The past few weeks my mind has been wandering back to Turkey. It was almost exactly two years ago that I boarded a plane in Calgary Alberta headed for Turkey. I had no idea what to expect. None of us on my team did. We went with the intent of putting into practice all that we had learned in the past three months during the lecture phase of our YWAM discipleship training school and seeing the Kingdom of God come in a foreign country. Our purpose was to be Christ in this predominately Muslim nation. We didn't know how we were going to do this, and even more so, we had no idea what God was going to do in us.

He Is Not Safe..... (pt2)

I have discovered over the past few years that journeying with God is never boring and sometimes painful. We tend to have this idea that God never causes us pain but I know this is not true. He most definitely brings pain into our lives but it is not without purpose and beauty of it's own.

I remember asking my mom when I was about four or five why God made pain. I wondered why things hurt. The way she explained it me has forever becoming cemented in my memory. She asked me to imagine walking barefoot on a sandy beach. In the sand there are shards of glass. As you walk your feet are being continually cut open by the glass. If we did not feel pain, we would have no idea that we are being cut and could end up bleeding to death. Because of pain, we know that something is wrong. I love what C.S. Lewis has to say about pain in his book The Problem of Pain. He says, "We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

He's Not Safe......

(Part one of my musings on the Goodness of God)

“Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion." "Ooh" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion"..."Safe?" said Mr Beaver ..."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you. - from "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" by C.S. Lewis.

This is one of my absolute favorite quotes. For those of you reading this who many not know, C.S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia books as an allegory about Jesus. Aslan represents Jesus. (Random fact, aslan means lion in Turkish).  What a beautiful and true thing to say about Jesus/God. Of course He isn't safe. But He is good!!! 

When Heaven Doesn't Answer

The past few months have been intensely difficult for me. I've been sick and in quite a lot of pain a large majority of the time. I have been feeling very disconnected from people and unable to build any real significant relationships. Rumors and lies have gone around my church about me and the situation was not dealt with well and left me feeling quite hurt and confused. But the most difficult thing about the past few months is not the situations I have been dealing with but rather the fact that God has been completely silent in the midst of all this.

Because I Have Forgotten How to Speak

It seems that I have forgotten how to really share my heart with people. There has been so much going on in my life and my heart and mind lately, things that I DESPERATELY want to talk to someone about, but for some reason, I can't. Not can't because it's not appropriate to share but can't because I have no idea how. So, once again, I turn to writing it out because my voice is failing me.

I am so horrible at this vulnerability and intimacy thing. I know many of the reasons why this is a struggle for me and this post is not going to be about what I need to share but why I am struggling so much to do so.

Relationships pt2

When you are 27 and single and most of your friends are in serious relationships, you tend to think about relationships a lot. Don't get me wrong, I'm not unhappy in my singleness. I am very comfortable being single and I don't spend much time at all wishing to be in a relationship. I know that it will happen all in good time, but until them, I am, for the most part, content with where I am. There are days I wish I were not single, but those days are less frequent than the days in which I am perfectly happy with my relationship status.

Relationships pt.1

The past few months I have been thinking about relationships a lot. It seems that almost everyone I know is in a serious romantic relationship. Now, I guess that's not all that unusual given my age, but this is the first time since I can remember that every single one of my closest girl friends have boyfriends/fiances. At the 20 somethings group at my church I am one of only three single girls. That can make things a little awkward when there are 10+ single guys.

Rescue is Coming

If there is one thing that growing up in the church taught me, it's how to pretend that everything is okay. I've gotten so good at it that I can even deceive myself into thinking that I'm fine. I honestly don't intentionally lie to people about how I'm doing, it's just second nature to say that everything is fine with a smile on my face. o

Over the past few years I've gotten better about this with the little things but I'm coming to see that is still a problem for me with the big things. I think a part of it is that I get so overwhelmed by whatever it is that I'm going through that I just push it down deep and refuse to think about it. And it works... for a while. But then it comes creeping out around the edges until I break.

The Last Year and Where I am Now

I staffed the lecture phase of the DTS and what a summer it was!  I won't go into much detail because I've already written about it in a previous post. Towards the end of the school I found myself facing another decision. I had been asked to come on staff with the local church I had been attending and help with the coffee shop they were opening downtown and also work as the pastor's assistant. After much prayer and many conversations and prayer times with my YWAM leader, I decided that God was leading me in that direction. And so at the end of the lecture phase I ended my time on staff with YWAM Madison and joined the church staff. 

Working with the church was hands down one of the most challenging work experiences I have ever faced. I won't go into too much detail but two months in I found myself asking God why on earth he had called me to work with them. Nothing was going the way I thought it would or how we had discussed when I first agreed to do work for them. I made up my mind to stick it out with the hope things would get better. 

A Bit of a Recap

Once again it has been a while since I've sat down to write and, once again, it is mostly because there is so much going on inside of me that I have no idea where to start.  Even now and I am staring at these few lines and the cursor on the page wondering how I am going to distill and condense all these thoughts into something understandable and cohesive.

This past year has been a whirlwind of crazy! As usual, I found myself moving multiple times on very short notice but always going where I was sure God was leading me. January of 2011 found me packing up and moving to Kona Hawaii to attend the first ever Church Pioneering School with Youth With a Mission. Those three months were some of the most rewarding, challenging, informative months of my life! When the lecture phase of the school wrapped up, I found myself not going on outreach and not having a clue as to what my  next step would be. At the prompting of some of my friends and leaders I applied to join the cafe staff there. I did not understand why God was leading me to do this because not only did I have no desire to remain in Hawaii for a second longer, I also did not see much value in staying to work in a coffee shop whose customers were all believers and YWAMers. Thankfully God knows more than what we do!