Week 29 --- Psalms 112:7-8

She will have no fear of bad news;
her heart is steadfast, trusting in the Lord.
Her heart is secure, she will have no fear;
in the end she will look in triumph on her foes.

Every once in a while I get this need to make something. It's a need to be creative and I think it's a need to use my hands to craft something. I had a day off this week, where I felt like I was caught up enough on real-life things that I had some time to be the artist that gets put on the back burner a lot. I started with making a fabulous Cucumber-Mango Salsa, and ended with my living room looking like this :)

I like to put a huge drop cloth down over my living room floor and not worry about messes or dishes or laundry and just create. Usually once I start I have a hard time stopping and I start new projects before I finish old ones --- but I'm working on that.

I started a painting about 3 years ago that I finished today. It had so much life built up in it that I didn't want to dig it all up, but somehow decided today was the day. When I started this painting it was supposed to be a gift to someone. I would add sections to it as I had time and as I look at it now I can tell what life looked like during those periods. The top right corner was first, and looks happy and light to me, and ended up looking like sheet music, when I believe my original intent was more of a map like feel. The top left, larger section, I did in the days that I had off after the Westroads shooting. It came out looking so dark and scary that I put the painting away after that because I didn't like the direction it started to go.

I got the painting back out that summer after I spent time with the person I had planned to give it to --- I made it for his office for his new job and after spending a weekend with him I was ready to finish it and gift it away. I added the pieces at the bottom and included his picture in it and called it good. I was never quite ready to part with it though, and always delayed or made excuses about why it wasn't done yet. I also began to doubt whether or not the person was deserving of this art that had so much of my life accidently showing in it too.

A little background on art supplies. :) I put a lot of the mixed medium of this painting together with a polymer bonding agent. A bonding agent is similar to a glue in that it holds pieces together without harming the integrity of the original object. Another 'interesting' thing about a polymer agent is that it will never ever come off. I mean I suppose it could, but removing it would destroy whatever it was you were trying to make. The bottom line is those pictures on this painting, were not coming off.

I think there's some spiritual truths in that somewhere. There are things in our life that are there permanently. Memories or pasts, scars or relationships we embed them in our lives and then are left a little helpless when we want them to come off. We could peel and scrape and claw until we're left just as wounded as we were in the beginning and destroy the art that we could let Jesus create of our lives. That's the answer. And that's what I decided to do.

Some things just have to be covered by grace....

 

It's hard to make out the individual letters but I covered the area of the painting with pieces that spelled out Grace. It's still the same painting that still has a lot of me in it, but I'm learning to trust that Jesus is what makes me complete and his willingness to cover my sins with grace is something I need to accept and trust that he provides.

As I was finishing this up, a verse that I love kept running through my head. The painting still has such a musical feel to me, and I kept thinking of the phrase "I will teach you the rhythms of grace..." that I knew I had read somewhere.

 I looked it up and it was such a fitting and perfect summary of the experiences that brought me to the completion of this painting. I wrote it on the back so I wouldn't forget how it came together.

"Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly."
Matthew 11:28





Do you just LOVE that? He'll teach us the unforced rhythms of grace. Oh I need to learn that! My verse this week was on trusting and having a heart that is secure. I started reading a book on insecurity this past week and I'll be excited to share some of the things I'm learning from that. 

I just love you girls that stop in to read this blog and I hope you all are doing well. :)

Praying for you, Beth

Week 28 --- Ephesians 6:10

"Be strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might."

I knew going into this week that it was going to be a week that required a big decision. And i hate those. My computer crashed last week, and I quickly discovered a lot of life is now done on the computer--- Bills, email communication, viewing new computers to replace the old one, stuff that I needed and wanted to do online but couldn't. I had to buy. Dread.

I don't know when this process became hard for me, but large committments such as contracts or exchanges of money have become my cryptonite in recent years. The thought of spending over 100 requires some serious thought, and then I begin the second-guessing, self-doubting, and over-thinking. And somewhere in there I give myself an anxiety attack and make what should be a fun purchase a source of stress. 

So here's what I have learned in the last week.

• 
  
  I am not a "One Day Only!" sale type of shopper. If you are telling me to get a sale or a special price I must purchase instantly, I will kindly walk away. I am not that person. I just can't be pressured to that extent. 
• 
  
  I need to be an informed shopper. I began my computer search with a "color of computer" in mind. Maybe silver??? 600 dollars seems like a good price for a silver computer..... see the dilemma?? I had no clue. I then called my dad and my best friend's husband, gathered some facts, compared some prices, and had a better base of knowledge. Big deal. I now can understand and evaluate "ram" "processors" "pixels" etc and know what's good and what's acceptable. I am learning. 
• 
  
  I have to have a budget and a plan. I've never ever had trouble spending money in the past, but have since began to spend time with people that pursue debt-free living, and am now conscious of "financial peace". Mercy. 
• 
  
  I have to focus on the fact that I am a confident and capable woman that can make good decisions. Seems simple enough, but I struggle. 

So after toting my best friend and her darling baby to a few electronics departments around town, I was ready to buy! I picked up the little slip and took it to the cash register and repeated over and over in my head "Be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might."

And here I am now! Blogging on the new computer. I have a quilt that was lovingly made for me by my sweet mother pulled over my lap, a mini bag of Lime and Salt Natural Popcorn, a little Pandora for background, and am sharing my thoughts on my smart and successful purchase of a computer. In this moment I'm enjoying a small step towards victory in defeating anxiety and self-doubt. Praise Him! Hallelujah!

I think the portion of decision-making that makes it difficult for me is the fact that I complicate it by feeling like a victim. I struggle with being single and I feel it so excrutiatingly when there is something big to be decided. What health insurance to get, where to license my car, what cell phone company to go with --- these are things that most people have the benefit of sharing the burden with another. I am never short of Godly counsel from my friends and family, but it still really gets me. Sometimes I find myself doing what I consider to be "boy jobs". I kill my own spiders. I take out my own trash. I open my own jars. And I don't get mad at those things, but when open enrollment for health insurance, or my apt lease comes up, I just wish it didn't all come back to me. Ugh! I hate it. But I am learning through a slow and steady process I think. With nice little exercises like buying computers.

“I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.”

Oh Kevin....

Week 27 --- Colossians 1:10-12

We pray that you'll live well for the Master, making him proud of you as you work hard in His orchard. As you learn more and more about how God works, you will learn how to do your work. We pray that you'll have the strength to stick it out over the long haul -- not the grim strength of gritting your teeth, but the glory-strength God gives. It is strength that endures the unendurable and spills over into joy, thanking the Father who makes us strong enough to take part in everything bright and beautiful that he has for us.

I was talking with some friends recently about how a life spent following Jesus has its share of suffering. Seems like really a lot of suffering sometimes. And it's not the first time this has come up in conversation. A few years ago, a friend and I said these same things to each other, and I went home and started praying for her that day that things would happen in her life that would prove this statement wrong. I prayed this verse for her so much that instead of us associating suffering with Jesus (which sometimes may be true) that we would find joy and contentment in loving him more than we would notice the hard parts. And I believed so strongly that God would fulfill this in her life, and I have watched over the last year as that has really come to fruition. So cool. So I've been thinking about this verse this past week as a reminder of how glory-strength is better than teeth-gritting strength.

I found this blog that I've kind of liked reading this past week. I cut and pasted this excerpt that I thought was pretty cool.

Stop being so afraid. You have yourself so wound up that you
don’t resemble anything near free and full of grace. You’re an unopened doll.
Accessories fastened down with rubber bands and hair sewn to the inside of a box decorated with a fake version of fabulous. A promise never kept. A pioneer playing the role of settler. In trying to appear whatever your immediate culture deems ‘right’, you’ve divided yourself and are living in a prison of public approval. If there is a point when all of our secrets are told, then go ahead and get it over with now.

Pull your good intentions out and see how they hold up in the sun. I’ll tell you from experience, a doll whose head has been pulled off a time or two is more useful than a doll who has never been through the hell of losing her head. We all go through trouble and in those times, we look for someone who has been there. Pristine and poised is worthless to the hand sticking up out of the swamp. How can you tell someone their life can be put back together if you don’t bare your own scars from the ripping? Live out in the open. Go through the hell of it. It’s how you find out who you really are.

Read more: http://www.graceisforsinners.com/#ixzz0tsKcD1YH Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives

Week 26 --- Psalms 32:8-10

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go;
I will counsel you and watch over you.

Do not be like the horse or the mule,
which have no understanding
but must be controlled by bit and bridle
or they will not come to you.

Many are the woes of the wicked,
but the LORD's unfailing love
surrounds the man who trusts in him.

I think that we are rarely honest about our "actual status". Facebook is so funny, because it allows us to share with others what we are doing, thinking, saying, feeling --- however I really think we just say what we want people to think about us in that venue. My friend and I were talking about our "actual status" the other day, and here are a few of our favorites:

*Lindsey is in full dress clothes, sans pants, laying in bed eating marshmallows.
*Beth is still wearing a swimsuit from this morning, sitting on the living room floor, eating expired food.
*Beth just pulled a tshirt out of the clean laundry basket that she wore on May 5th and still hasn't gotten around to folding (this one would become FB appropriate if I added "haha too many fun things to do to get to laundry!")
*Beth is PMS-ing and feeling like a caged animal.
*Beth is thinking that if she reads another post about lactating or dilating she may delete FB altogether.

Isn't honesty rare?? I struggle with it, as I tend to side with the People-pleaser team. My fear is if I tell someone what I really think, or what needs to be said in honesty, they won't be happy or like me anymore. Which sounds ridiculous when I say that out loud, but seriously. I've been trying to work on my honesty when I pray too.

God, I feel like you don't care.

the LORD's unfailing love surrounds the girl who trusts in him

God, I feel really alone.

the LORD's unfailing love surrounds the girl who trusts in him.

God, life is way harder than I thought it would be.

the LORD's unfailing love surrounds the girl who trusts in him.

It doesn't matter what we throw at Him, the answer comes back the same everytime. The trust part is the tricky part of that statement.

I've been meeting with some friends to study Ruth this summer, and I told someone this last week that my bible study went for almost 3 hours last night --- and they acted sympathetic, but I was quick to correct and just beaming from how much we got to talk about in that time. One of the things we talked about was weeping or crying, and how that looks in scripture. For me, honesty and crying are so so closely related. Here is what i've decided since hashing this out with my friends:

Weeping is everywhere in the Bible. It's not a bad thing. Our study challenged us to "weep forward" and use the times of sadness to still find God and still keep going.

Crying gets more mileage when you do it with someone else. Crying alone invokes self-pity, and in my experience it just makes me feel the same on the other end, if not worse sometimes. Crying with a friend is a humbling experience, but I think that might be where it counts. I remember one time in college where my best friend and I were living in separate towns, and she came to visit me, and at two totally separate points in the weekend we both cried while we were sharing parts of our lives that were hard at the time. I remember her telling someone else that she spent the weekend doing some crying, and that person telling her she was lucky to have a friend she could cry with.

For me, crying has two factors that make it difficult:

Admittance:

Oh man, here's where it's hard for me. When I get to the point where I feel like crying, I'm usually admitting that something is bad wrong. I'm admitting that I can't fake it anymore, I can't keep up the happy face and I don't even care how it makes me look, I'm going to cry. If you can somehow find someone you trust to do this with, how much more beneficial the process. I think this is what Jesus wants from us. His power is made perfect in our weakness, and I feel like what I just described is really his specialty to redeem. I think if we admit to him that we can't fake it anymore, and we need to show that we feel broken and are broken, His grace and gentleness is so so ready for us at that point.

Acceptance:

Oh man, here's where it gets really really hard. When I cry with someone else, I'm admitting that I need help usually. I've been hurt, or I'm confused, or discouraged and I need someone's support. Accepting support and accepting advice are hard, cause it seems like maybe we didn't know everything after all and we can't do it alone. Here's another part about acceptance that gets me, sometimes when I finally get to a place where I can accept someone's kindness it often makes me cry. There's a woman at my church who can make me cry just by hugging me. Sometimes I avoid her, cause I know if i'm having a bad day, and she hugs me, I will lose it and i just don't have the energy. That woman has hugged me on some really hard days in my life and I know her kindness and understanding are so present and it just makes me cry! At my bible study the other night, my friend told me I had been on her heart a lot, and it just made my eyes fill with tears because accepting kindness and help is humbling, but so so necessary. Jesus' unfailing love surrounds the person who trusts in Him. Accept it. Whole-heartedly.

Week 25 --- Esther 4:14

For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father's family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?


God revealing himself to me through Esther is something I hope will always stand out to me as a turning point in my life. Let me begin by explaining that I have been in a negative relationship for the past 3 years that just would not stop. Mostly because I didn't want it to, but at times I genuinely wanted it to go away, and somehow it would re-surface and pick right back up. I justified, begged, explained, willed and prayed to God to make it work out. I would thank him for how he showed himself to me through this relationship, I would thank him for grace, I would pray for this man in my life, and at the end of it all I would still ask God to work a miracle to let us be together. I feel like through the course of the 3 years God took him away, brought him back, moved things around, kept things the exact same. I was constantly confused.



Let's cut to this past January. I started a Bible study with some friends on the book of Esther. The title of the study was "It's tough being a woman..." Who wouldn't agree with that? I was knee-deep in Seasonal Affective Disorder and just needed something to give me some structure to my time in the Word. The first video message we watch of Beth Moore's lesson, I quickly discover that she has set the scene of this series in a political theme, and more specifically with a Washington DC backdrop. Awesome. My only memory, or knowledge of Washington DC is when I was there with Ryan. I throw an instant temper tantrum with God, because can he just make something --- anything--- a little less painful please???? When I see the monuments that Beth Moore stands in front of to speak, I think of the time when I was there, and it breaks my heart to think of how happy I looked in all the pictures.



Exhibit A:

(I'm not sure if I should have blurred out his face or something, to be less incriminating, but oh well...)

You get the idea. Happy. Hard to look at later. And Beth Moore parks her sweet video series in the exact same spot. Coincidence?.... Providence :)



Check out Beth Moore's video snip-it of Esther here. Bless her heart, she knows how to make a good promo video. The music alone is intense.



You could call the DC backgrounds of the study a coincidence, but I really think that this was God's first nudge to get ready to do some work on this part of your life Beth. I think so many of my conversations with God must sound like whining on my end. Praise Him that he knows how to reach us and how to handle those moments when I am a mess.


So this study was supposed to last 10 weeks. I am rarely blessed by structure :) and I quickly got off schedule. Things had come into my life through work that kept me from attending our weekly meetings, so I kind of just kept doing my homework on my own, but not staying on track or finishing with the rest of the group in April.



In February, we had been studying the portion of the scripture that speaks to fear. Esther is finally accepting what she must do to save her people, and she states "If I perish, I perish" In the Bible study, Beth Moore challenged us to fill in the blanks "If ________, then ________" She spoke to the fact that no matter what we write in the first blank, the second blank will always be God. In my homework that week, and I'm sure there were tears dropping on the page as I wrote it, but I said "If Ryan marries someone else, then God will still be sovereign" That was my biggest fear, and most dreaded thing that could happen in my life on that day.



Last week, Ryan and I had lunch and he let me know that he was getting ready to propose to his girlfriend that he had met in February. I hadn't seen him in quite awhile and just having lunch with him had put me into emotional turmoil. While I was getting ready, i had to stop and sit down and just lift my hands up for help. I remember praying, "this is too big, here, i need to give this to you" Jessi --- this is when you were praying for me, and I can tell you without a doubt in my mind that you made a big difference by doing that for me. It works! Keep doing it! :)


So I leave my lunch, and I am crushed, yet oddly peaceful. In the past I have just crumbled while having difficult conversations with this guy, but I did not panic, and I said a few things I had always wanted to say. The dates of when his life started to change, and when God started to work on my heart were so so similar, that I was so ready to see what was left in the last week of my Esther study that I hadn't finished yet. 1 week of the 10 remaining, for such a time as this.



A lot of people don't know how the story of Esther went down. We know that she won a beauty contest, and we know that she had to muster up her strength to go speak to the King to save the lives of her people that had been destined for complete annihilation. The part of the story that I think they forget to mention in Sunday school is that the king did not reverse the order to kill all her people. King Xerxes gave her permission to write any other proclamation she wished. So she wrote an edict giving the Jews the right to defend themselves when the soldiers came to kill them. Do you know that the Jews came out of that as the winner?? Against the Persian army, this small group of people defended themselves and won?



So I have now finished a lunch that has changed how I thought i would spend my life, and I'm starting to see how Esther is wrapping up. The last chapter of the book of Esther is about the Feast of Purim. I'm sitting at a little cafe table at the Whole Foods the next day, and I start to read this:



"Purim 'was a spontaneous celebration of the joy of finding oneself still standing on the day after an irrevocable death decree was executed. The day of death had come and gone and God's people were still alive! The Purim is in this sense a Sabbath, a joyous rest after the evil and the threat of death have passed"



I went on to read:



"Here you are, Beloved, Satan tried to destroy you along your lifes' path, but clearly, he didn't get his way. You're still standing, aren't you? Instead of falling apart, your lines are all starting to fall together. Piece by piece. Glimpse by glance. What a beautiful inheritance you have!"



Man, God is big. And real. Don't ever let anyone tell you different. As I started to write this out I was getting a little self-conscious that people would think I'm taking coincidences and making them seem magical ---- but that's where providence takes over. One of the more infamous facts about Esther is that the name of God is not written anywhere in the book. It's the only book in the Bible that doesn't include His name. I think there's some pretty serious truth in asking ourselves, "Are we in a season of life where we can't find His name anywhere?" "How do I know he still cares about me, when everything that's happening would say He's not even around?"


Esther is God's message to us, that even when we can't feel His presence, He is there, and He is at work. God's providence speaks to His perfect plan for us, and His purpose and destiny for each of us.

"In other words, every time He shifts us here or moves us there on this earthbound chessboard, He's not just fulfilling His own pleasure regardless of is impact on you. He's also working every detail --- even the dreadful ones --- to your and my good. Providence cancels out every coincidence."


I could talk about Esther all day. I'm thankful that God knows the timing of life, and our needs more thoroughly than we do. Praise Him!