for the first or last time

"look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time."
- betty smith, a tree grows in brooklyn

the paradox of grief

"The paradox of grief is that it is healing, it somehow restores our souls, when all the while we thought it would leave us in despair. Control is the enemy, grief is our friend."
:: John Eldredge

just live your life

"the highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived."
-soren Kierkegaard

Pneuma

Breath

You are as near to me as my very breath. More real than anything I can see. You are my life giver. My source. Breathing life into me, close enough I can feel you, yet nearer to me than I am to myself. You breath air into these lifeless lungs, your spirit awakens the deadness within. Life is only possible because it is given. Everything I have is from you.

I am Yours, she whispers. And you are Mine, He tenderly replies.

I shared with a friend today that my relationship with You lately has been as real as she and I sitting there talking. I thank you for that. For we are not in charge of our own spiritual transformation, it always starts with and is nurtured by you. I’m just here along for the ride. I will come, and you always meet me. We come, you do the work. You meet us.

Continue to breathe.
Continue to be near.
With you I can face all things. I am never alone.
You are always with me. You are always near.
You are always true.
Closer than my very breath.
I hear you. I feel your touch.

The very breath of God within us.
This is simply astounding.

:::

“When we speak about the Holy Spirit, we speak about the breath of God, breathing in us. The Greek word for ‘spirit’ is pneuma, which means ‘breath.’ We are seldom aware of our breathing. It is so essential for life that we only think about it when something is wrong with it.

The Spirit of God is like our breath. God's spirit is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves. We might not often be aware of it, but without it we cannot live a "spiritual life." It is the Holy Spirit of God who prays in us, who offers us the gifts of love, forgiveness, kindness, goodness, gentleness, peace, and joy. It is the Holy Spirit who offers us the life that death cannot destroy. Let us always pray: ‘Come, Holy Spirit, come.’”

- Henri Nouwen

Hand over the gun

"We can be fairly certain that Moses developed some pretty good coping mechanisms for dealing with the pain of his situation, as all human beings do. All of us develop ways of adjusting and staying safe in the midst of whatever danger or difficulty is present in our environment. We develop these patterns before we are conscious that we are doing so, and they become very normal to us.

Because these patterns are formed unconsciously while we are still young, as adults we have little conscious awareness of these adaptations until they start to hamper our current relationships and no longer serve the journey that God is inviting us to."

- Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership

This pretty much defines and captures the need for recovery ministry perfectly, when I read it I wrote a big YES next to it...

It only takes days like the last couple days with experiences with my family of origin to remind me of why I have been called to recovery ministry, whatever that looks like, I’ve been called to be a part of the process of captives being set free, of brokenness being owned and thereby healed, and others becoming more whole.

Unresolved sin and pain destroy lives. They destroy families. Of which I have all too close personal experience. I have seen the devastating effect of sin and its toll, when not dealt with and how it has affected each and every one of us. The pain caused is immense, yet the pain of the one who has inflicted most of the pain is sadly way deeper. What's worse, this isn't unique to just my family, others in my life wrestle with these same realities daily.

PUTTING DOWN THE GUN

“… As we face who we are more honestly, we find that we are finally ready for an encounter with God. The first leg of Moses’ journey as a leader, then, was not to lead anyone else anywhere; it was to allow himself to be led into freedom from his own bondage. Before he could lead others into freedom, he needed to experience freedom himself.

In solitude he was able to let go of the coping mechanisms that had served him well in the past but were completely inappropriate for the leader he was becoming.

(Quick background, Barton spent the previous chapter detailing Exodus 1 and 2 where Moses was found out after killing an Egyptian, his anger getting the best of him as this was his unrefined leadership doing what he thought was needed for the situation. His embarrassment and shame at being found out caused him to flee into solitude with God. As he realized he was no longer in control and his past and his patterns were controlling him. And then we see a change in him, his own conversion and how it changes the soul of his leadership).

Yes, anger and the need to prove himself through the misuse of power would probably always be temptations for him (as we see in Numbers 20:1-13, for instance), but they would never again be his normal and accepted mode of operation.

Now it was time to relinquish the weapons of false security, to come out of hiding and make room for something new to come.

Theophane, a Cisterian monk residing at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, tells a striking story that beautifully illustrates such letting go:

I saw a monk alone in the vegetable garden. I squatted down beside him and said, “Brother, what is your dream?” He just looked straight at me. What a beautiful face he had.

“I would like to become a monk,” he answered.

“But brother, you are a monk, aren’t you?”

“I’ve been here for 25 years, but I still carry a gun.” He drew a revolver from the holster under his robe. It looked so strange, a monk carrying a gun.

“And they won’t—are you saying they won’t let you become a monk until you give up your gun?”

“No, it’s not that. Most of them don’t even know I have it, but I know.”

“Well then, why don’t you give it up?”

“I guess I’ve had it so long. I’ve been hurt a lot, and I’ve hurt a lot of others. I don’t think I would be comfortable without the gun.”

“But you seem pretty uncomfortable with it.”

“Yes, pretty uncomfortable, but I have my dream.”

“Why don’t you give me the gun?” I whispered. I was beginning to tremble.

He did, he gave it to me. His tears ran down to the ground and then he embraced me.”

Today, I was told to hand over the gun.

The anger I seldom allow myself feel, the anger I say is no longer there because I have come to peace with all of my story and forgiveness and redemption have been done and are being done. Yet this wasn’t where I lived today. Today feelings of anger and disgust came and had to be dealt with. Hand over the gun, Mazvita.

If I could use one word to describe my childhood home it would be: chaotic.

This is not a slam, this is a reality I have had to accept today. As recent eruptions pulled me back into the chaos, I was reminded I can not disassociate as I would like to do but take an honest look at this home and how it has wrecked and shaped each one of us. How sin and its devastating effect have destroyed a family desperately trying to pick up the pieces. No one has come out or is still in the fire, unscathed. The debris is widespread, lives in the wreckage of years in the making. More damage coming to light, as sin and its hold cannot be hidden.

Surrounded by brokenness and it reminds me that I have some to own.

I have to accept and acknowledge theirs as well as mine. Say that it was ugly and painful, yet say that it was real. Say that it was wrong and grave mistakes were made, but also say I love you and I forgive you and accept you. Say that as a result I have made mistakes and have brokenness as well, but say I am loved and redeemed and have been given a new life now. I have to own and accept all of my story.

HAND OVER THE GUN

... were the Father’s words to me today...

as He pushed me to deeper places in my heart He wanted us to go today. I remember hearing this part of the book shared by Ruth herself, as she spoke at a retreat I went on last month, and remember how powerful that session was. You could see we all just got punched in the gut and sat motionless, letting it all sink in, all painfully aware of the gun we were clinging to yet desperately trying to hide. And then, I read this chapter about a week ago, this book is one that I wish I could fly through but have to stop to process. It wasn’t until today I was able to hand over the gun.

Part of why I love this book is that it speaks to the recovery journey I’ve been on since January and the power behind allowing our souls to be set free, and how once we get a glimpse of the weight of it all, we see this journey is not only critical for us to take for us and our relationship with our Lord, but as I found and shared with friends one day last semester, this has profound effects and has not only saved my relationship with God, it has potentially saved my career in ministry, it has potentially saved my current and future relationships, and it has potentially saved my future marriage. It’s that serious. And that necessary that I be doing this right now, for my own life and the lives of those around me.

Which is what this books talks about, how critical a leaders’ soul is to their life and the lives of those in their wake. Unattended our souls can do much damage.

“Most of us have a gun—some way of protecting ourselves and making ourselves feel safe, hidden under the robe of our leadership persona. It is fairly easy to keep our gun hidden most of the time, but we know that it is there and that it is incongruent to the person God is calling us to be.

We also know that if it were to “go off” unexpectedly, it would do great damage.

We are uncomfortable living with it, but we are afraid to live without it.

Sometimes we let ourselves dream of being free, of traveling without the need to pack a weapon. Holding onto our self-protective patterns is one manifestation of our unwillingness to surrender ourselves to God for the journey that is ahead.

But there is another desire that is greater than our desire to be safe. It is the desire to abandon ourselves to God and the life to which he is calling us. It is the desire to leave Egypt and journey with others to the Promised Land. Sometimes we hear God’s whisper, “Why don’t you just give me the gun?” We feel ourselves trembling with longing and with possibility, with fear and with hope. He waits quietly, patiently. And as we are ready, we give him that behavior, that pattern, that sin that we have relied on all these years, our tears running down to the ground. At least for a moment, we let ourselves feel what it’s like to be free.”

- Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership

This recovery process has been a journey I will never forget, one that has been worth every step, the painful and the freeing moments, a journey of my soul returning home.

Relentless

“After years of hearing the heart-cry of women, I am convinced beyond a doubt of this: God wants to be loved. He wants to be a priority to someone. How could we have missed this? From cover to cover, form beginning to end, the cry of God’s heart is, “Why won’t you choose me?” It is amazing to me how humble, how vulnerable God is on this point. “You will find me,” says the Lord, “when you seek me with all your heart” (Jer. 29:13). In other words, “Look for me, pursue me—I want you to pursue me.” Amazing. As Tozer says, “God waits to be wanted.”

- from Captivating

The irony is that we have a God that wants to be wanted.

I am realizing that His pursuit is relentless.

I love how the heart-cry of a woman desiring to be pursued gives us a glimpse of God’s heart. And then I’m finding not only can God relate to that desire, but that his intense pursuit of me is teaching me what it feels like and what it looks like to truly be pursued, in the right way, so I will be able to recognize it, though in human form it will be merely a shadow of His pursuit, but I will recognize and have no doubts.

I’ve been realizing this lately because to be pursued means you are the object of one’s affection. I am experiencing that. To be pursued means someone wants to be with you, they want to get to know you, they want to spend time with you, they want to experience you. You get to know someone only by through your experiences of them, so even thought God knows us, he wants to experience us and allow us to experience Him. This is what relationships are built on, a collection of experiences in which trust, honesty, grace, love, and compassion grows.

When you are being pursued, you feel special. You feel chosen. More than a woman's desire to be pursued is the desire to be chosen. This cannot be mistaken. You feel desired and you feel wanted. Not for anything you can do or offer or say, but simply because of who you are. This is a glorious freedom. This is what it means to be in love. And I’m falling in love with my Savior again. He is wooing me with His love and showing me what it means to be loved. And with God it is so mysterious how it works, we pursue Him only because He has first put a desire within us that calls for the pursuit and has already pursued us.

“God waits to be wanted.”

And we also find there, He waits for us to come and show us we are wanted too.

- Photo by Mallory Thomas Taulbee of Avia Photography, a recent engagement photo shoot

Dethroning ourselves

“NO!”

“I can do it by myself.”

“I’ll do it my way!”

“I have no choice!”

“The natural man is a sinner because and only because he challenges God’s selfhood in relation to his own. . . . Yet so subtle is self that scarcely anyone is conscious of its presence. Because man is born a rebel, he is unaware that he is one. His constant assertion of self, as far as he thinks of it at all, appears to him a perfectly normal thing. He is willing to share himself, sometimes even to sacrifice himself for a desired end, but never to dethrone himself. No matter how far down the scale of social acceptance he may slide, he is still in his own eyes a king on a throne, and no one, not even God, can take that throne from him…” – Tozer, Knowledge of the Holy

Whenever the children I’m around make me search for Shepherding A Child’s Heart, my one and only parenting book on my bookshelf, you know we’ve got trouble, as I've heard each of those phrases above way too many times lately.

I picked up that book last summer when I was working a lot of shifts at The Shelter and wanted to learn more about how to parent, as I found although I have no children of my own, that I’m often in situations, either with the families I’m really close to who have little kids or babysitting or working with the kids at The Shelter, that I’m often needed to parent.

While these children bring me an incredible amount of joy in my life, I took for granted that the family I’m closest to and have been around for the last 7 years, the Ingalls, have ridiculously well behaved children. Being around OTHER children now, my parenting skills are being tested to the limit, yet I’m getting a glimpse deeper into the human condition.

Bedtime is always the litmus test. It was my second time babysitting for a family in which I’ve gotten to know well in the last year. There is no sugarcoating this one, the kids are a challenge. By the end of the night I’m at wits end and have tried everything.

After four unsuccessful attempts to put the rowdiest one in the bunch to bed, I tried a new approach.

I could hear his footsteps tip toeing down the hall again and I waited for him calmly in the living room.

He came in, I ask why he’s out of bed.

“I just can’t sleep!” He laments as he flings himself backwards onto the armchair. This is only an hour AFTER he was supposed to be asleep. (This is where pride gets you lol, as I had recently been proud of the fact I'm normally able to get the kids to be no problem.)

I tell him he has to, go through my spiel again, then decide we’re going to talk. I look him square in the eye and give him his options, I start by saying, Here’s your options (a technique I read in Boundaries with Kids)

He interrupts with something that nearly made me laugh because he was so in distress,

“I HAVE NO OPTIONS,” he cries as he throws his hands up in frustration.

“I can’t sleep, so I’m just going to have to stay up. I have no choice! There is no other option!”

Of which he is convinced.

And, in his limited perspective and world, this was very much true. He could see no other options available. And I was seemingly standing in his way of him getting what he wanted even though I was desperately trying to get him to realize I was trying to do what was best for him.

After he went to bed, I was trying to figure out why I was so frustrated.

I realized all night, after bedtime was announced, I was in an all out battle with them to listen to me. I just desperately waned them to cooperate. Yet they fought tooth and nail, with everything in them, to get what they wanted and thought they needed. I suddenly became the adversary in their mind and they had to plead their case. They knew what was right, they knew what they needed and I was only trying to mean, obviously.

No, I wish you guys could see, I later thought. I realized I had spent so much time and energy fighting against them to give them what they needed, not what they wanted.

It was so frustrating because they misunderstood my actions (putting them to bed instead of letting them stay up all night) and felt I only wanted them to be miserable.

Sounding familiar yet?

So they kept demanding.

The assertion of our selfhood starts young.

Man, how children make this so crystal clear.

The more I am around children, the more I understand the gravity of sin and how in my limited perspective, I can think I know better or see more of how things should be... than God. Ouch.

I see it so plainly, God uses them to teach me so much, of his beauty and of our humanity. I see sin in its essence so clearly, as Tozer describes it,

“Sin has many manifestations but its essence is one. A moral being, created to worship before the throne of God, sits on the throne of his own selfhood and from that elevated position declares, “I AM.” That is sin in its concentrated essence; yet because it is natural it appears to be good.”

I wrote ouch or yikes several times in this chapter, as a few weeks ago when I had those experiences and was going through this chapter coincidently, I could see my own sin so clearly, thanks to the children in my life. Oh how I do the same thing with God daily. Oh how I say the same things in my heart, sometimes, unaware. The assertion of self is so subtle because it seems so natural to us. This breaks my heart. It breaks the heart of God. Just as these kids kept breaking my heart because they didn’t trust.

They don’t trust me!

When I realized this, the connections kept flowing.

They won’t listen to me because they don’t trust that I have their best interest at heart.

They don’t trust my love.

They don’t know if they can trust me yet, therefore they can’t listen. They won’t obey. They don’t trust.

There were so many realizations I had with trust and obedience that night that are critical to this fight to dethroning ourselves.

We won’t love someone we don’t trust, and we won’t listen to someone we won’t trust. But all I wanted for them wasn’t just their obedience,

I wanted their trust…

I wanted them to know they could trust my love and that I was working for their good…

Every time I’m around kids, I feel like I understand more and more why people say you learn so much more about the Father’s love when you become a parent…

I can’t describe how much He taught me that night about His love and how much I can fight to believe it or trust it sometimes, not even knowing I am.

I’ve been seeing the weight of my own sin with almost disturbing clarity and wrestling with the weight of sin and its destructive nature in the lives of others around me. Sin is devastating in its effect.

Yet I’ve been experiencing the reality of these words, his kindness leads to repentance. He has loving and tenderly brought me to see my sin in broad daylight, where its me and Him and I have no one else to blame, allowed me to own it and his kindness, not harshness or condemnation has led me to repentance. It was so powerful. So freeing. So loving. I felt so protected. And I felt so loved. To experience His loving corrective nature when so many times I’ve misunderstood this as punitive, I’ve been able to realize and see how He feels when I constantly assert my own way, consciously or not, as I experienced the same frustration with some of the challenges with theses children babysitting or kids recently at the Shelter. I got only a glimpse, only a fraction of what He must feel. But they have been powerful lessons and powerful pulls deeper into His heart.

Here’s more on the theology of sin, from Tozer:

“In this utter dependence of all things upon the creative will of God lies the possibility for both holiness and sin. One of the marks of God’s image in man is his ability to exercise moral choice. The teachings of Christianity is that man chose to be independent of God and confirmed his choice by deliberately disobeying a divine command. This act violated the relationship that normally existed between God and His creature; it rejected God as the ground of existence and threw man back upon himself. Thereafter he became not a planet revolving around the central Sun, but a sun in his own right, around which everything else must revolve.

A more positive assertion of selfhood could not be imagined than those words of God to Moses: I AM THAT I AM. Everything God is, everything that is God, is set forth in t he unqualified declaration of independent being. Yet in God, self is not sin but the quintessence of all possible goodness, holiness and truth.

The natural man is a sinner because and only because he challenges God’s selfhood in relation to his own. In all else he may willingly accept the sovereignty of God; in his own life he rejects it. For him, God’s dominion ends where his begins.

For him, self becomes Self, and in this unconsciously imitates Lucifer, that fallen son of the morning who said in his heart, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. . . . I will be like the Most High.”

Yet so subtle is self that scarcely anyone is conscious of its presence. Because man is born a rebel, he is unaware that he is one. His constant assertion of self, as far as he thinks of it at all, appears to him a perfectly normal thing. He is willing to share himself, sometimes even to sacrifice himself for a desired end, but never to dethrone himself. No matter how far down the scale of social acceptance he may slide, he is still in his own eyes a king on a throne, and no one, not even God, can take that throne from him. (Another ouch.)

Sin has many manifestations but its essence is one. A moral being, created to worship before the throne of God, sits on the throne of his own selfhood and from that elevated position declares, “I AM.

That is sin in its concentrated essence; yet because it is natural it appears to be good. It is only when in the gospel the soul is brought before the face of the Most Holy One without the protective shield of ignorance that the frightful moral incongruity is brought home to the conscience… “Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do?”

This “What shall we do?” is the deep heart cry of every man who suddenly realizes that he is a usurper and sits on a stolen throne.

… “Purity of the heart is to will one thing,” said Kierkegaard, and we may with equal truth turn this about and declare, “The essence of sin is to will one thing,” for to set our will against the will of GOD is to dethrone God and make ourselves supreme in this little kingdom of Mansoul. That is sin at its evil root. Sins may multiply like the sands by the seashore, but they are yet one…

To save us completely Christ must reverse the bent of our nature; He must plant a new principle within us so that our subsequent conduct will spring out of a desire to promote the honor of God and the good of our fellow men. The old self-sins must die, and the only instrument by which they can be slain is the cross.

“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me,” said our Lord, and years later the victorious Paul could say, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

- Tozer