Have Cheap Luggage, Will Travel

Satisfaction

2009-02-27T08:09:00.000-08:00

Once I did a Bible study with a bunch of older women about how to balance disappointment in life and your relationship with God. I remember telling them that I had no major disappointments and didn’t really connect with the study. They looked right at me with eyes heavy from years of unrealized expectations and told me to wait a while. They were right…

My mom got engaged this week. That means that everyone in my immediate family will have been married before me…everyone. I can already feel the all too familiar looks of pity from my family that I will have to endure at her wedding.

For a long time, I have wanted to be married and raise a few kids. So, why would God have allowed all of my family that privilege but not me? Also, why would God put a burning desire in me for something that He is barring the path to?

These questions produce two warring reactions in me – anger over my disappointment and a quiet understanding that God’s plan is better than mine. Fortunately, my relationship with God won’t let me jump off the cliff of frustration no matter how much I want to wallow in self-pity. However, it bothers me that I am even asking these questions in the first place because it makes me think about the true source of my satisfaction…

If I am unsatisfied, than what would make me fully satisfied? What about you? I’m sure that we could make a long list together – getting married, better job, even “spiritual” things like becoming a missionary. But what happens when those dreams turn into unrealized expectations?

In the past I have dealt with it by dumping my dirty little life for a shiny new one – moving to a new town, getting a new job, looking for a new relationship, even buying a new shirt…I was constantly searching for satisfaction but coming up empty. My problem in this never ending search is that I followed myself to the next place. We have more to do with our own un-satisfaction than we realize.

So, where then can real satisfaction be found? One of my favorite authors on this subject says it best, so I will default to him.

“We all make gods out of what we take the most pleasure in. Christian Hedonists want to make God their God by seeking after the greatest pleasure—pleasure in him.

We do not mean that our happiness is the highest good. We mean that pursuing the highest good will always result in our greatest happiness in the end,” – John Piper, Desiring God

I am always grateful to discover when my convictions and thoughts don’t line up because it provides a chance for re-alignment to what I know to be true despite my emotional state.

Read: Acts 20:24
Ask: Sometimes looking at the expanse of the course put in front of you can eliminate tunnel vision to the uncomfortable circumstances of today. What do you believe is the course that the Lord has set out for you?

Read: Isaiah 45:19
Ask: If you are unsure of your course, what do you think this verse says about that? Are you really listening and seeking to find answers?

Unexpected Encounters

2009-02-17T06:49:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite parts about people is finding out what makes them who they are. Learning about the parts of their past that have crafted their future and how they understand the world…People are far more interesting and unique than they give themselves credit for. I think one question that always reveals this is asking how they find the Lord in their lives.

Their answers are as different from each other as night is from day but I have never had someone tell me that they find the Lord in church. Instead they usually describe people and places “out in the world” where they have encountered the living God.

Of course these people have experienced God at church, but for whatever reason it’s not special enough to mention. It might be because we have turned church into a regular rendezvous with God where we expect Him to show up like a hair dresser for our previously scheduled appointment. It is instead the times when we don’t think to look for God that take our breath away. The unexpected encounters…

For example, I feel peace and focus consistently in coffee shops and art museums. For some reason God just built me to love those things. I always look for unexpected encounters there.

Last time I went to the Dallas Museum of Art, I found a modern art exhibit that was a room whose ceiling was covered in yellow incandescent bulbs. The all-white room and everything in it was bathed in a sepia colored light that made you feel like you were in a dream. It was so thick that when kids came in the room they tried to swim in the light and people reached out to touch their friends to make sure they were real. It’s hard to explain how cool it was…I stayed in the room for a while watching people’s reactions to the exhibit. The simple beauty of a colored light bulb was incredibly impactful. There is so much of God in the world if you choose to see it.

So, you can learn a lot by asking people where they find the Lord in their lives. I have learned not tap my toe in annoyance when I don’t see the Lord, but instead to always look for Him. You’ll never know where you will find him or worse, where you are already missing him.

Also, I have learned to embrace the times where I don’t see God as a gift. I tell the girls in my home group all the time that you can never know light without darkness. Contrast brings an amazing amount of clarity for me.

All that to say, I think my pursuit of God has gotten easier as I have realized that the promise is not that we would arrive at constant state of nirvana-like happiness but instead that we would get more God as we walk the path laid out for us. I am fully satisfied with that.

Read: Psalm 63:1-5
Ask: What do you think it means to be satisfied in God?

Read: Isaiah 45:19
Ask: What does this verse say the result of your seeking will be?

The Eyes of My Heart

2008-12-23T06:17:00.000-08:00

I really don’t like Texas and have an even deeper disdain for Dallas. DFW culture consists of shopping and big flashy everything. While there are many redeeming parts to our fair city, there is much that makes me want to move into a one-room shack in Seattle.

What’s worse is that on top of its shallow pursuits, it’s just not pretty. We never waste an opportunity to cut down a tree and throw up another strip mall (because we really need another one). Even when you do get out of the city, the woods are nothing more than scraggly sticks surrounded by dirt as far as the eye can see. Not exactly something that inspires me.

Recently in an effort to get away and getting some thinking time, I went camping with some friends darn near the middle of nowhere. Groesbeck, TX. We went to a friend’s land, threw up some tents and froze our rears off in the cold. For some reason, conversation over hot chocolate and a campfire seems that much more fulfilling. On the other hand, there are some parts of the middle of nowhere that are not so cool like using the woods as a bathroom. But more about that later…

The best part of the trip came the next morning when we all piled in the truck to visit my friend’s home church. The trip was a 30 minute adventure through the back country of scraggly sticks and dirt but for some reason that day…it was beautiful.

Everywhere I looked I saw God and it created worship in me. I cried happy tears the whole way there, all the way through the service and even during the cheesy solo that could have been a Garth Brooks song.

After I came back from Groesbeck, it was like I was able to see things in a different way. I saw God in things that would normally start me on my “Dallas sucks” rant. Instead of rolling my eyes, I would venture to say that began things the way that God saw them.

The clouds looked more majestic, people in pursuit of the Dallas status quo broke my heart instead of annoyed me and I just loved being in the world.

I get the feeling that my world was always this way, but for whatever reason, the eyes of my heart were blind to what God was doing around me. I bet that blindness had something to do with my own choices.

Anyway, God is pretty good about letting you get to the end of your thoughts and then showing you how your way is just…dumb.

So I leave you with this thought,

“I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened,
so that you will know what is the hope of His calling,
what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,
and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe.
These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might.”
- Ephesians 1:18-19

Read: Thomas Merton Quote
Ask: What might you be missing out on because you are trying to make the world about you?

Read: Matthew 16:17
Ask: What does this verse tell you about your own ability to open the eyes of your heart?

Read: 2 Corinthians 3:14-18
Ask: What are you doing to create opportunity to open the eyes of your heart?
(Hint: This could be anything from a place, book or a person. God built us all differently and you should look for what inspires you.)

The Dark Corners of My Mind

2008-11-10T09:36:00.000-08:00

Four years ago my life was very different. My life then was about … well, me. There is not one single decision that I made that was not somehow wrapped up in helping me find happiness. Funny how pursuing your happiness at all costs is a very unhappy pursuit.

Since then Christ pulled me out of my gutter and I have happily worked to turn my life into service for others. That single minded approach to my time has kept me very busy. Leading a home group, mentoring a 14 autistic girl, volunteering at an inner city VBS and on and on… My life by design is poured out into others. Service to others creates in me satisfaction that lets me know I was created for it. I say this not out of arrogance but out of concern because I have discovered an unintended problem to a life of service.

When everything in your life is about somebody else, you tend to ignore the monsters in your own head until something comes along to shed light the stuff you didn’t even know was there. Dark corners dressed with the cobwebs of time have been hiding issues that have flown under the radar for years. Their discovery produces an uncomfortable angst that settles into my days as I struggle to find the right choices between two unfairly matched opponents.

The good in me is nothing more than a whisper. Just planting thoughts here and there designed to make me think. Never demanding, never making it hard for me to make the wrong decision. Just asking me to think and pay attention to what I might normally ignore.

The bad in me is more like a roaring lion looking to devour anything good in me that would choose the Lord. This side in me makes it extremely difficult to make the right choice even though I know it is the better one. A quote from C.S. Lewis helps put into words what I am discovering about myself…

"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." - C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I find myself wanted to trade myself in for a less confusing model all of the time. How is it possible to be 30 and 4 all at the same time? What I do know that it is okay to not be okay, just not okay to stay there. Looks like I’m going to start heading back to CR.

Read: 1 Kings 19:9-13
Ask: Why do you think God would choose to speak to Elijah in a whisper?
Ask: How can you apply this situation to your life?
Read: Romans 12:2
Ask: What areas of your life have you not been renewing?

Turning 30

2008-10-10T08:02:00.000-07:00

I’ve been saying that I am 30 for years. Always joking about having one foot in the grave or comparing myself to old ladies. Maybe I was just working myself up to crossing over. Either way, I actually turned the big 3-0 this week. Does this mean that I have to start putting myself in the adult category? Hope not…

The funny thing is that nothing has changed. The morning of my birthday I rolled out of bed to find out that I was not smarter, more mature, richer or poorer than the day before. I was just … me. What a disappointing discovery.

The Couchless Life
Consciously or unconsciously I think we wait for these milestones in life as benchmarks for change. Everybody does it even if they don’t admit it. I knew a girl once that refused to buy furniture in anticipation of getting married. Finally in her early 30’s she got tired of sitting on lawn chairs in her living room, broke down and bought a couch.

By holding your breath in anticipation of the next area of life, you miss today. The problem is that being present in each moment means that you have to deal with the reality of each moment. I would venture to say that each one of us has something that they would love to ignore about ourselves.

Behind the Curtin
But that’s not me, you would say. I have a couch! Think hard. What are you holding your breath in anticipation of?

- New job
- Getting over a death
- Promotion
- Boyfriend
- No boyfriend
- Better relationship with God
- Marriage
- Moving to a different state
- Getting that degree

But what happens when we accomplish these things? We have a peak behind the curtain of marriage or better jobs to discover that we are the same person with different window dressing. So then we make new goals and start repeating a new set of “when that happens” statements.

When will we admit that constantly jumping over the white picket fence to check out the greener grass has turned into an addiction?

The Pursuit of Happiness
What is more concerning is the possibility that the addiction erodes more than our satisfaction with today. This compulsion teaches us that our happiness is tied to circumstances in life. Even if you don’t believe in God, I think we can agree that a new job will not create the perpetual joy that we are all seeking. Maybe, just maybe, we were built for a happiness that has roots in something bigger than ourselves.

So…it turns out that real people not in sitcoms do turn 30 and that my own person pursuit of happiness does have hope. One interesting thing about reaching 30 is that my Facebook ads have turned on me. They switched from "29 and looking?" to "30 and still single?". That's just rude...

Until next time,

Nichole

Read: 1 John 2:15-17
Ask: What does it mean to love life in the context of this verse?

Read: Ecclesiastes 1:1-11
Ask: Do you think you have better ways seek happiness in your life?

Read: Job 1:6 – 2:10
Ask: If you lost everything, would God be enough for you?

My Pile of Broken Dreams

2008-09-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

There as not been a time where I did not carry an overwhelming sense of confidence in myself and in my decisions. In fact while in junior high school, my lectures to my parents usually revolved around the dangers of credit cards and how they were harming our family’s finances by using them. I clearly remember thinking, “I am so over these people”. Those people being my parents. I was 12.

The problem for people with confident assurance in themselves is that typically things work out for them. Everything from jobs to relationships can be obtained by badgering somebody to death until they say yes to maintain their own sanity. My college days were a perfect example of this and my arrogance only grew with each successful decision. And then I made a decision to follow Jesus for real when I was 26.

I’m sure that originally I thought made the decision because it was the “right” thing to do but very quickly found that being a Christian for real ain’t like the movies. When you ask God to be a part of your life, He begins to show you … yourself. Exposing the true motives of your heart like a depressing autopsy. Slowly but surely this truth helps you understand that you are not the center of the universe.

For some this is an easy pill to swallow but it was been much harder for me for some reason. I guess I feel comforted by thinking of the world in concrete terms. There is right and wrong and I just want to know where I find myself. Unfortunately, life is not always that black and white.

Since my college days, I have learned a bit about pride, arrogance and the loneliness at the top of the mountain of absolute principles. I’ve been fired from jobs, relationships and everything else in between because of my unwavering decisions.

So, I would love to wrap this up with some great definitive conclusion that God has taught me but today all I have is a sorted past that would make any mother blush, more questions than answers and a constant struggle to learn the same lesson over and over again.

I guess that is why I love Jesus so much. He died to save me. The me that stands like a proud child that doesn’t know any better atop a pile of broken dreams, tattered cape flapping in the wind and desperately trying to make something of herself. Jesus’ sacrifice covers my sins and makes me like a white night in His eyes. I’ll never understand that one and that is where true worship is born.

If this story falls flat on you, I would venture to say that you have not yet discovered that you are not the center of the universe. Surprisingly that there is great comfort in knowing it is not up to you and I daily work to keep myself in that place.

Read: Colossians 1:16
Ask: Why does it say we were created? How does that make you feel about your purpose on this earth?

Read: Judges 6
Ask: Who did Gideon think he was? How do you know?
Ask: Who did God actually say he was?
Ask: Did Gideon act on God’s will before or after he put out the fleece?
Ask: What does that make you think about your own journey with the Lord?

Inconvenient Faith

2008-08-04T11:39:00.000-07:00

I would like to tell you a story about William Wilberforce. William was a British abolitionist that single-handedly banished the slave trade from the UK through his political work in the House of Commons. He spent his entire life tirelessly focused on making an impact on the world around him by ridding British society of slavery. It consumed his every thought, action, relationships, career… There was not an area of his life that was not affected. Amazing.

Now, I would love to tell you that William lived a life bursting with happiness and fulfillment. That he wrote stomped out a great evil and went on to write tons of bestsellers and give grand speeches to motivate the next generation. Instead he worked his entire life toward one goal that eventually took his health and he died a short three days after his bill to abolish slavery passed. Three days of celebration for a life of work. I wonder if he knew the end of his story if he would have still made that trade off.

But of course slavery is evil and its death is worth fighting for. However, in William’s day it was a common as peanut butter. So, why would a person drive himself to an early grave over such a widespread practice? Here is a quote that might shed some light on the origin of this kind of passion.

“I set out to find happiness and instead I think God has found me…Do you know how inconvenient that is?” -William Wilberforce

His faith compelled him to action despite his desire to pursue comfort or a life of fulfillment. Do we that proclaim to be followers of Christ consider it inconvenient that our souls have been rescued? I imagine instead that we think we have dodged the bullet.

We breathe a sigh of relief and slowly but surely we distance ourselves from the gutter that God first found us in. “Never again” we say and move on to pursue a life of safety, spring break mission trips and lame Christian tracts to fulfill our obligation to our Lord.

Learning about the life of William Wilberforce has made me consider some questions of myself.

* Am I a “real” Christian or am I submitting to the religious mantle laid on me by my parents?
* Has God grabbed my heart where I could not bear to ignore his pleadings to reach the gutter despite how inconvenient it might be to me?
* Would I tirelessly work to abolish evil if I knew a mere three days of celebration waited for me?
* Does my current work for justice for justice’s sake or for the warm fuzzy feelings it creates in me?

Yeah but we are no Martin Luther King or Gandhi you would say. I would counter that the smallest of choices can make more of a difference than you imagine. Choose to take 5 minutes to share the lunch with the homeless man instead of tossing him a couple of bucks. Choose to ask about your co-worker’s life instead of endlessly talking about the weather. Choose to … fill in the blank. You know which choices you are passing up that have the potential of making a difference. Life does not have to be packed to the brim with selfish pursuit.

Here is my point. To us slavery is an easy choice of right and wrong, but our daily lives are not usually that black and white. Life is more like a grey mush that will sucks us into complacency like quicksand…if we choose to let it.

William Wilberforce is absolutely inspiring. His pursuit of God was so real that it inconveniently molded his choices. A champion for justice because he believed in something bigger than himself. We all love to chase the next hero and beg for someone to inspire us out of our boredom. The first place to look is in the man in mirror.

Read: 2 Corinthians 5:13-14, Proverbs 14:12
Ask: Have you ever been faced with a decision that some people would question your intelligence about?

Read: Genesis 9:6-22
Ask: We all know the children’s story of Noah and the ark, however, if God told you today to build an ark in your back yard would you do it? Why or why not?

Read: Isaiah 45:19
Ask: One of our favorite excuses for action is to say that we are not sure if we are hearing from the Lord. What does this verse have to say about that? How will this verse affect future decisions for you?

Self-Made Perceptions

2008-06-08T11:28:00.000-07:00

“Girls should always get married early because as you get older you just don’t need guys. You can pay your own bills, run your lives. Even spiritually you don’t need us. Why would you need to get married at your age?”

A friend of mine was explaining to me his thoughts about relationships and I was so shocked at how wrong he was that I didn’t initially respond fully to his comment.

However, it did prompt some questions for me. Where did he pick up that message? I find it highly unlikely that he came to this conclusion on his own. Is it possible as women, are we the teachers of lessons that keep us isolated and alone? Do we build up impenetrable walls and then sit around complaining why nobody wants to get to know us? I am afraid to honestly answer those questions…

I guess that I think if guys knew what they were getting into with me that they would run for the hills. As a girl with deep seated Daddy issues, I’ve been chasing the elusive feeling of being loved completely by a man since I was young and using relationships as a substitute. Usually they crumble slowly under the strain of having to support a lifetime of baggage. Unconsciously I see the end of relationship roads and think that it’s too much pressure for one person to bear. That is definitely one of the many reasons why I put myself in a position of not needing guys, romantic or otherwise.

As I contemplate my singleness and the role that I allow men to play in my life, my current circle of friends comes to mind. This circle includes several amazing Godly men that have shown me on a daily basis how much I need them. They bust through my pre-established walls of many years by engaging me in real conversations about life, my walk with the Lord and everything else in between. What is interesting about that, is that they get to see the real me and don’t run for the hills.

Being raised in a hyper-religious environment has not helped either as I was raised with the message that being friends with guys is dangerous. Too much temptation I was told. I now realize how silly that is. My guy friends provide a real life example of Godly men so counterfeit men are that much more obvious to me.

And isn’t that what Christ described as true community? Men and women living life together and filling each other’s needs.

These questions are too important to ignore. We need to look inside ourselves for the walls and the preconceived notions that are keeping us from living in true community that God wants for us.

Read: Acts 4:32-37
Ask: Does this sound like the community that you have in your life? If not, what are you doing to encourage that?

Read: Galatians 6:2
Ask: What are you doing to uncover and bear the burdens of those around you?

Read: Ephesians 4:25
Ask: Are you being honest with your community about what is really going on with you?

Beautiful choices

2008-05-22T12:33:00.001-07:00

We live in a culture where we have the opportunity to choose almost anything we want. Job, mate, religion. The list is endless and yet the large majority of the world lives out their lives in choiceless days. So considering this privilege of choice we have, how do we treat it?

A recent conversation with a friend got me thinking about this as she told me her story. After graduating high school young, she jumped into studying psychology right away and the reality of human nature saddened her to the point where she dropped out of school. Her soul has been recovering ever since. Facing the naked truth that humans are disgusting in the very core of us was too much for her. Despite the fact that she is a beautiful, bubbly and extremely intelligent young woman, she has limited her interaction with life as to not be disappointed by human relationships. There is so much evil in the world why try, she would tell you.

My family and I took a trip to the zoo after this conversation and I decided to take the day to field test her theory. We took the DART from Plano to the zoo and my friend’s words clung to my thoughts like a parasite slowly killing the idea that she was wrong. A man sat next us that could have been my grandpa. His nails long and overgrown. His satin red jacket promoted a women’s bingo group and he smelled less than appealing. His life was held beside him in a ratty backpack. The sight of him prompted sadness and yet his eyes held a softness and intelligence that made me curious about his story. How are you here? Why would someone let this happen to you?

The DART train passed several open fields south of downtown Dallas and you could see makeshift tents made out of sheets or pallets of worn blankets tucked into corners of fences. Men and women, just like the man in the bingo jacket, living out their lives ignored and abandoned in trash heaps. Were they somebody’s mom or dad? How could so many people be just forgotten?

When we arrived at the zoo, ridiculous children and their equally misbehaving parents helped reinforce the idea that kindness and the general public has not ever met. Perhaps my friend was right. I listlessly wandered through the zoo becoming more depressed with each step until I reached the elephants and the world softened around me.

I have now idea why I was so enraptured with this elephant but it was like I was discovering it for the first time. The deep wrinkles in its skin, the squishiness of its padded feet, the smallness of the fingers at the end of its trunk. It moved as if time didn’t matter, engaging the world as it felt like it. The beauty of the moment was overwhelming. After that my steps were much lighter.

Here is my point. That elephant didn’t do anything about the homeless problem in Dallas or stomp out any of the kids banging their heads in the glass in the amphibian house, but it showed me that beauty is all around us. I guess what it comes down to, is that we have to choose to see it and carry it with us to the places in the world that need help seeing it.

Read: 1 Thessalonians 5:9-11
Ask: When you think about sadness in the world, how to you think this verse tells us to interact with it?

Read: Hebrews 10:24-25
Ask: How do you think you could encourage someone to find beauty?

Read: Romans 12:1-2
Ask: Do you think your habits bring beauty into other’s lives?

Beautiful Doubt

2008-02-09T14:35:00.000-08:00

For almost 40 years of her 87 year long life, Mother Teresa struggled secretly with spiritual darkness and only after her death did this come to light via a book of her letters entitled, Come Be My Light.

One passage written in 1979 reads, "The silence is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear. The tongue moves in prayer but does not speak."
When this news came out, there was of course a big uproar. Apparently the world’s most well known Christian had trouble with her faith and every cynic within earshot smelled blood.

There will always be those people trying to poke holes in the validity of our faith by attacking people like Mother Theresa and I just don’t care. In fact, I love that we found out about her secret struggle. It makes me feel normal. And on top of that, who said that becoming a Christian means that you loose the right to question?

Unfortunately, that unspoken but generally understood rule in the church has caused many people to weep in dark corners and face Sunday morning with a plastic smile. It is a lie that sucks the life out believers that just need to hear somebody say, “I understand.”

Doubt should be thrust out into the light of day to be examined, discussed and prodded from every angle. It puts us on a path that helps us own our beliefs and brings us closer as people. Doubt is beautiful.

I in no way want to presume that I have the answer to Mother Teresa’s spiritual uncertainty, but I wonder if the story might have been different if her superiors had encouraged her to share with the world her inner battle.

I pray that we always respectfully question what we do not understand, never shun those that do and find opportunities to say “I understand.”

Read:James 1:6
Ask: The original Greek meaning of the word doubt in this verse means “to be at variance between one’s self”. Do think this verse says not to question at all or to question with a foundation of faith?

Read: Mark 9:24
Ask: Is it possible to believe in something but still need convincing?

Read: Hebrews 3:12-15
Ask: What is the difference between doubt and unbelief?

Artist Eyes

2007-12-19T06:55:00.000-08:00

Part of my very extended college career took place at the University of North Texas in Denton, TX and if you have spent any time there you know that it is common to see people with tons of tattoos and purple hair wandering the campus due to the school’s emphasis on the arts. The artists even had their own dorm where humus and sprouts were served in the cafeteria. We always treated them like pets. Cute humans that we smirked at because of their weirdness and put in glass cages to watch from a safe distance.

Lately, I have started to smirk less and try to find a way to the other side of the glass. Isn’t there something special about someone who can see the world past our eyes? They can find musical rhythms in a car motor and sculptures in trash piles.

So what makes them different? How do they see what we do not? Some would say that they are born with a gift and while I think that is true, a real artist will cultivate this unique perspective and we can do the same

I heard a great story on the radio the other day about an artist retreat in New Hampshire called The MacDowell colony. Spread out over 450 acres of woods are 32 studios/ cabins filled with pianos, photography equipment and all kinds of other stuff to help these artists see past our eyes. What caught my attention was not the studios themselves but the simple solitude of the camp. As a resident, you eat breakfast and dinner in common areas but that is the only contact with the outside world. There are no phones, messages are only hand delivered in emergencies and your lunch is dropped at your cabin door without so much as a knock. No interruptions.

One painter described her experience after being there a month as a gradual decrease in thinking. She described her mind when she first arrived as a “laundry dryer full of garbage turning around and around with completely insignificant thoughts”. At the end of her stay she said her hand would move over the canvas almost with a mind of its own and when walking in the woods she could hear the crunch of the leaves under her feet and the rustling of the trees. Sounds that had previously been drowned out by her own cluttered mind.

Here is my point. How often do you think our laundry dryer minds drown out what God is trying to tell us? Our lives are filled with stuff. Places to be, books to read, clothes to buy. The list goes on and on. Artists see the beauty in the world because they take the time to look for it. Do we search with the same ferocious tenacity for the will of the Lord? Are we determined enough to hear it that we would travel to New Hampshire to lock ourselves away in a cabin?

Our culture wars against solitude, quiet, simplicity and all the other things that give us the room to see beauty and the God that made that beauty. So we must war against it with the same level of intensity.

Read: 1 Kings 19: 9-18
Ask: Where do we find the voice of the Lord in this passage? How should we seek Him?

Read: 1 Corinthians 2: 9-12
Ask: Do you personally think it is difficult to hear the will of the Lord? Why do you think it happens like that for you?

Shadows of Existence

2007-11-27T21:06:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I find myself treating my faith like a combination lock twisting and turning circumstances to try to find God. A little bit of prayer to the left…reading my Bible 20 minutes a day to my right…telling a stranger about my faith once a month back to the left and pull! Strangely enough the lock never opens and even more disappointing is that this journey has not brought me closer to knowing my Creator any better.

If you really thought about it, it’s almost like I want God to be my own genie in a bottle appearing upon my prayerful request and grating my wish to know Him better. There is enough life behind me to know that this 3 step method approach to my faith will not work but I find myself trying anyway. To be honest, my faith is the most frustrating thing in my life because way more often than not, I only see shadows of the God I love.

Usually I only see God where He was. A glance back at my life over that last few years for comparison to today to see forward progress, a friend that came to faith suddenly or a sister that professes a deep faith where there was none before. All these things scream divine influence but how did I miss Him when He was there. That moment where nothing in the universe could convince you that God doesn’t exist. However just as quick as He came, He sneaks back behind the veil of mystery and I am left with shadows and nagging uncertainties.

Why be a Christian then? I guess for this reason. I have heard some men say after they have met their mate that they just want to spend the rest of their lives navigating the deep waters of their woman’s soul. To them it is about the relationship not the goal. No one, including our God, wants to be conquered only to be a trophy on a wall. When it is all said and done the process of the pursuit is enough motivation for me because I can remember the moments when He was here.

There are just some mysteries of life that are not meant to be fully understood or unraveled - a woman’s thoughts, the motivation of great artists and our faith in an invisible God. Curiosity keeps us engaged with wonder that would disappear if we had all of the answers.

Read: Matthew 13:10-17
Ask: After waiting all this time to come to this world, why would Jesus teach in parables? Why wouldn’t he be as clear as possible?

Read: Jeremiah 29: 12-13
Ask: This verse seems to indicate a clear path to find God. Why is that not always true for us?

Read: Acts 17: 26-27
Ask: What does this verse seem to indicate about our pursuit of God?

Faith Decisions

2007-11-18T09:20:00.000-08:00

I’m getting a new job and it is killing me. What’s the big deal, you say. New opportunities are a part of life, this is a part of being an adult... The conflict stems from the fact that I know without a doubt that I am supposed to take this job but I do not want to leave my current job at Women of Faith (WoF).

For those of you that do not know my story, I was pretty lost when I came to work at WoF over 3 years ago. Living with a boyfriend of 6 years that didn’t love me, having no desire to get in a church, my circle of friends thought of me only as a drinking buddy and honestly I had no idea who Jesus was. However, there is only so long that you can spend around Godly women before it just rubs off on you and my friends at work changed me despite my strong resistance to it. These women have made an impact on my life that will affect my children and my children’s children…I am so grateful for their friendship and I know I supposed to leave them.

Leaving them means that I have to grow up, stop leaning on others to direct my spiritual life, and learn to lead myself and eventually others. They have been my comfort blanket for many years. I dread the loss of their daily influence and know it is the right decision in the same thought.

Walking into a new situation despite my fleshly desire to stay comfortable feels like taking a step off a cliff into…I don’t know. I guess this is what they mean by the phrase “living by faith” and I got to tell you it ain’t fun.

As hard as it is to make decisions based on your relationship with God, I think it is worse to be bored by life.

As I take this step off the cliff I feel at the same time an intense resistance to my decision and giddy excitement about what God has in store for me. I guess this is how Abraham felt when leading his son to be sacrificed (Gen. 21) and how Paul felt when he was getting the crap beat out of him for the Gospel (Acts 16:16-24) and Hosea felt when he asked the prostitute to marry him (Hosea 1).

Inside the hazy mist exists…a war.
A tournament of wits waged by two warriors,
Both struggling and clawing to triumph,
To win the fight is to control the battlefield,
And the defeated will slink into unknown shadows.
For now, the battle rages on unfinished,
Eventually one will rise from the mess,
But for now, pain, confusion and the night…

Words written by the 12 year old Nichole that still apply to the 29 year old Nichole. They sure don’t tell you how hard it is to follow Christ sometimes…

Read: Galatians 5:17
Ask: Is there a decision in your life that you are in conflict about? Can you apply this verse to your conflict?

Read: John 16:12-14
Ask: Are you comfortable making a decision for your faith where you might not see all of the results? Do you trust that God will show you the outcomes when the time is right?

Read: Proverbs 3:5-6
Ask: Do you trust God to help you make this decision? Why or why not? What is keeping you from trusting God?

Life Blurs

2007-10-22T17:48:00.001-07:00

Being pulled along by the train we call life. Rushing past the destinations of new relationships, a friend’s wedding, a friend’s hospital visit…My interaction consists of rushing off the train to say quick thank you’s and I love you’s, step into a few pictures and then I get back on the train to rush to my next destination. It’s not the stops that build my concern; it is the trips in between. The scenery blends together in a blur of colors with no distinct features or connections. Sigh. I want to fix this, but who has the time…

That’s really the problem isn’t it? To really develop a deep connection with life we have to make choices and sometimes choices between good things. That is never comfortable for the overachiever or people pleaser. I hate to say no to people so I end up saying no to myself. Cutting short my sleep, scheduling dinners to chat with a friend every night, maintaining long hours at work, and drinking way too much coffee to keep going. All of these things eventually wear me down and my body takes me out. Yesterday I stayed in bed with an awful headache unable to do anything productive because my body had had enough.

I usually try and develop intricate organizational systems to tackle to flow of work and people in my life. In my room there are 3 months worth of desk calendars taped to my closet door and they chronicle my overextended life so I won’t forget anything. At work, I made a daily to do list for the rest of the year and the funny thing is, I fully intended on keeping to it. Eventually I have to come up with a new system because life refuses be controlled by me, it gets out of control and my well plotted organizational system fails. The reason, I am not God.

Now, I think we can all agree that life is unpredictable and the only assurance of unwavering consistency we have is a faith in God. However, my vises whisper sweet nothings in my ear until I catch myself noticing the blur between life train stops again. Crap.

So my first reaction is to do something – Quit my job, schedule times of rest for myself, anything! But I have lived enough life to know that different circumstances produce the same result if you are the same. It is at these times that I am so grateful that I believe in something bigger than me because this kind of change is impossible on your own.

The Responsibility Chase

2007-10-09T04:04:00.000-07:00

Do you know when somebody tells you something about yourself that is hard to hear simply because it is true? Your first reaction is always defensive, right? Who are you…I am not…and a whole other list of excuses on why they don’t know what they are talking about, when deep down your first reaction is a cringe of guilt.

A close friend recently shared with me her concerns over my attitude to leadership positions in my life and my desire to avoid them.

“Responsibility has found you if you like it or not.”

-Cringe-

Let me explain how I got here. The main struggle of my life is to avoid the legacy of control left to me by my father. However, it seems that my worst fear has become my reality just disguised as something different.

My Dad and I have pretty much been at war with each other since I was young. He would try to control me, I would refuse to be controlled and many of our disagreements have made a nest of bitterness in my heart where I now attempt to control the leadership opportunities that God puts in my life by not participating in them because I am afraid of being my Dad.

How that plays out day to day is I focus on putting myself behind people to push them forward instead of leading the way. That is exactly why my friend shared with me the quote of my year…

“Responsibility has found you if you like it or not.”

My friend was asking me to be a leader but I was checked out and she had to plead with me to wake up from my complacency. Let’s be honest, committed complacency is control with different pants on.

-Cringe-

Since I have decided to be more open to leadership opportunities, a comforting peace has been infecting my days and I can see where my committed complacency has done more than just make me run from responsibility. I have been running from God’s plan for my life.

So, I don’t know if you have come to terms with your legacy that God has laid out for you but I can bet you that it is scary and will require you to lean on the Lord in order to not screw it up. However, it is not worth avoiding it because it will eventually chase you down.

In conclusion, let us raise our glass in celebration of
…friends that can say I love you but hate you right now
…to the committed pursuit of our hearts from the God of the universe
…and to the opportunity to reshape legacies.

Read: Psalm 66:10
Ask: What does this verse tell us about the origin of some trials? How does that make you feel about some difficult things that you are facing today?

Read: Daniel 11:33-35
Ask: How does this verse help you have grace for flawed leaders in your life?

Read: Jeremiah 29:11-13
Ask: How do these verses give you peace about difficulties in your life?

Just the Facts Jack

2007-09-18T05:46:00.000-07:00

Some friends and I are going through the book of Mark together and one of the most interesting things to me is the style that Mark tells his story about Jesus.

There’s nothing creative about it. In fact it’s not even eloquent. Mark runs quickly through miracle after miracle straight into the crucifixion without weaving even the slightest bit of metaphor through his story.

It goes a little like this. Step one - Jesus performs a miracle. Step two – the disciples do or say something stupid. Step three – repeat. That cycle continues for the whole book which makes me feel a little bit better about my own hardheadedness.

Anyway, I guess you could say that there is not much use in studying this gospel if you are searching for the deep waters of Biblical theology but the simplicity of reminder is something not to be missed.
What I mean is, sometimes even though you were there, you forget what happened. We need to be reminded occasionally as to not to forget what does not need to be forgotten.

Recently I have had a funk chasing me and I am just getting tired of being me. But after reading through Mark, I think I just need to remind myself of why I am here and would like to share a part of that with you.

- The Lord was always a part of my home growing up but I always kept Him at arms length, more interested in myself. Despite that, I saw His hand for the first time in college.

- Once, my car died for real and I needed to replace the long block in the engine which was going to be a couple thou and I literally had $20 to my name. All of a sudden, an old employer popped up and asked me if I would work for them over the summer. They offered me $10 hour cash, paid for my car repairs on their personal credit card and let me work off the debt. On top of that, they gave me their car to drive while the repairs were getting done.

- Apparently the education system in Texas frowns on you taking out financial aid for 6 years of college and will eventually cut you off. I found that out the hard way and one semester was faced with having to drop out of school with now way to pay. A friend’s family called and wanted to pay the bill no questions asked. They even took me to New York on vacation to celebrate.

- At the tail end of school, I worked on a contract basis for a company called Women of Faith during but never considered working there full time. A few years later, I was juggling 2 jobs to try to make ends meet and needed help. I called a friend on staff at WoF to see if she had any job leads in other companies. That friend I called told me how glad that she was that I called because she was moving and they needed somebody to start in 2 weeks. She was looking for my cell phone number that very moment I called. I had not talked to that girl in almost a year. That job has now affected almost every area of my life.

- I had a friend that wasn’t a Christian and pretty much violently opposed to hearing anything about it. So we never talked about my faith, but about a year into our friendship out of the blue God hijacked my prayer life. I could not pray about anything else and my friend’s soul lay heavy on my heart. So I prayed. The next week she asked me if she could go to church with me – she started asking if she could come to my home group – I gave her a Bible and she read the Old Testament in 1 week – on and on. That girl is a Christian today and her life is completely different, out of nowhere.

Just the facts jack. There are so many more but here are just a few examples of miracle after miracle that God has done in my life. Did you know God is real? My funk may still be chasing me but the simplicity of reminder prompts me to look beyond tomorrow. Be encouraged by your past and take the time to write down your own Mark story. You never know when you might need it to pull you out of the pit.

Read: Psalm 139
Ask: This Psalm was written by David who was named by God, “a man after my own heart”. (Acts 13:22) Despite that call on his life, David lusted after a married woman and had her husband killed so he could be with her. There are some of you who are not encouraged by your past but are shamed by it. How do David’s words in this Psalm make you feel about your past knowing David’s past?

Read: Mark 6:30-44, 8:1-21
Ask: The disciples saw amazing things happen in their time with Jesus but they still seem to doubt his power when faced with trouble. Even when the situation seems exactly the same as in the passages above. How do you react when impossible situations emerge in your life?

Read: Jeremiah 29:11-14
Ask: God reminds us of His ultimate goal for our lives in this passage. Can you see the truth of this scripture in some difficult times in your own life?

Surprise - It's Just Not About You!

2007-09-10T08:50:00.000-07:00

I was in Anaheim,CA for a Women of Faith event this weekend and overheard several comments that got me thinking.

“I hope I am able to expend every bit of energy I have for the things I believe in.”

That was how one of our special guests, Nicole C. Mullen, responded to a journalist who asked her if she ever got tired of how much she traveled on top of having a family.

“What should have been a devastating tragedy in my life has put me in a position to lead an amazing prison ministry and more than anything this tragedy makes me lean on my God because I have nothing left personally to give.”

Carol Kent, whose son is prison for 1^st degree murder with no possibility of parole, now co-leads a prison ministry with her son. She was talking to a journalist about the beauty of a broken spirit.

“I’m afraid to marry a woman from the states. They want to get married for themselves, for their own pleasure - not because they want to raise a family. Americans are beautiful people but they are never happy because they are so self-indulgent.”

This last comment is from my Iranian cab driver on the way to the airport. He was talking about how he has lived all over the world and loves to hate Americans because it is frustrating to watch them be so close to happiness and still manage to keep themselves from it.

All of these comments basically reminded me about how life is just not about us but we still struggle to try and make it that way anyway.

Maybe that is why so many of us get divorced. We get married to fill that hole in ourselves with a person but in the end that never works because there is nothing fulfilling about pursuing your own pleasures. Essentially, we just keep one upping ourselves and needing a better toy or relationship to fill our void.

For example, I have a friend that is always putting himself in debt to get another four wheeler, jet ski, boat, house and the list goes on and on because he is bored with his life. I always say that he is just entertaining his eyes until he dies. People! We were meant for something greater than this.

Living your life for your own pleasure will eventually get you to the end of yourself and it is a shorter trip than you think. I was glad for the reminder that life is not about me – especially because I am Christian.

Read: Ephesians 1:11-14
Ask: Salvation is often talked about as a very personal event but is it possible we are not the main for God’s work of salvation? What does this scripture indicate is the final goal of salvation?

Read: Philippians 1:12-26
Ask: As Paul wrote this, he was being imprisoned for preaching the gospel. How would you react in the same situation?

Read: Galatians 6:7-10

Ask: This verse talks about pleasing our own sinful nature and how that leads to destruction. Can you think of a time where that statement was true for you? What does the verse say about our opportunities?

My Heart’s Desires at Arms Length

2007-09-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

Life is molded by different things for different people. Mine is molded by my interactions with others. People make up my motivation for everything from work to my spare time. Which makes a conversation I recently had all that more confusing.

“I know the superficial stuff about you but I don’t really know you. Will you just let me get to know you?” This was said to me by a guy I’ve known for 14 years. That affected me on several of different levels.

- It’s been a while since the last time anybody asked that of me.
- I can never think of a time that a significant other asked that of me.
- How could my love for people get lost enough for a friend of 14 years not to know me?

Celebrate Recovery has helped me immensely but the best influence it has had is my new found ability to see my own contribution to a situation. In almost every situation that frustrates you, except abuse, you have contributed in some way to the undesirable outcome.

I can hear you screaming now – Not true! So and so is an absolute jerk and I did nothing! Is it possible you are so offended or hurt that you can’t rationally asses that? I digress…

Anyway, it would be easy to say woe is me, nobody understands me or loves me like they should, but CR won’t let me get away with that anymore.

So, how can a person I have been friends with for 14 years know me but not know me. If I was honest about it, I would say that I don’t let people get close enough to help me. Asking for help means that you are dependent on another person and on top of that you have to be vulnerable enough to admit that you don’t know it all. I’m not good at that, so I get close enough to people to help them but not let them help me.

It even comes out in small things. Right now one of my tires needs air and I have this weird fear of putting air in my tires. A visual of me putting too much air in the tire and getting blown to smithereens pops into my head every time and I chicken out. Easy to fix right? Just ask for help. It’s been low for a month now.

"Hello, my name is Nichole and I live on a self imposed island of isolation."

The worst part of all that is that my island is not biblical. All through the New Testament it talks about the first church and the benefits of living in true community.

One of my heart’s desires is to have a good group of friends that I can live life with (mostly dudes as I am up to eyeballs in godly women at work) and have been really frustrated at my ability to find them. Here comes my contribution.

I think I have held my desire away from me at arm’s length because of my inability to be vulnerable. The problem is not that I can’t ask somebody to air up my tire, but the problem is the attitude that would keep me from asking for help with my tire. Nobody is looking for one sided friendships. I am afraid it is infected more of my life than I thought. In case you would disagree with me, talk to my friend of 14 years.

How funny that the path to my heart’s desire starts with a tire. The first step is admitting you have a problem right? So….can somebody help me air up my tire?

Read: Luke 15:11-23
Ask/Journal: Can you think of a time where swallowing your pride lead to a surprising outcome? Can you think of a situation that you are currently that you need to swallow your pride about?

Read: 1 Corinthians 12:12-31
Ask/ Journal: In reading this passage, can you see how God designed our world and relationships to be interdependent? Is there a person in your life that does something for you that you can not? Are you that person for somebody else?

Read: Romans 12:4-8
Ask/Journal: Do you think striving to do it all yourself helps or hurts God’s plan to help other discover their passions?

"The capacity to express vulnerability is a great human strength. We sometimes wish our vulnerabilities would disappear so we wouldn’t have to worry about hiding them. Without these pesky vulnerabilities, we could convince the world that we have it all together, that we have no unsatisfied needs that we can care constantly for others and never need care ourselves.

It is hard to let people see our vulnerable parts — our fears and insecurities, our sadness and shame. To express vulnerability requires courage. Only in exercising this courage, in bravely showing our 'weakness' to another, do we achieve a form of real power — the power to ask for help when needed." - Sarah Parsons, A Clearing Season

Filling holes

2007-08-19T15:49:00.000-07:00

I ventured outside of my bubble last night. A close friend invited me to a birthday party out on the town. Just to be clear when I say out on the town, I mean we went to a club, some boys in our group almost got into a fist fight with the bouncer and dudes were coming at me all night with the “Hey, girl - Let me get that number,” stuff that never works. It was interesting.

People just don’t realize how much of their emptiness they wear on the outside with no subtlety to it. Their screams of “Look at me!” and “I am special and unique!” are almost audible and play out in barely covered breasts and indoor sunglasses.

I look at all that and remember myself playing that same role of an “empty on the inside/ will take any kind of attention you give me” girl looking for anything to fill that emptiness and my heart breaks for these people that don’t know I can hear their screams because I understand.

Life is different for me now. I think I am starting to discover my purpose and that emptiness in me is disappearing. If you know me at all these days, you know that rediscovering my God has changed everything for me. The funny thing is that I can look back on my life and see where God was always around just waiting for me to get to the end of myself and try something different.

All that to say, I’m not any better than the people that I met last night who are still searching for stuff to fill their holes – I’m just lucky because the distance between us both is much smaller that you would think.

Last night did not leave me with annoyance but I left with a broken heart from the empty hearts I met. I also have a renewed desire to be around people like that more because maybe they can hear my story and hear hope.

The Living Dead

2007-06-28T14:17:00.001-07:00

My friend Jennifer has had an introspective week and I think that it is rubbing off on me.

Oh, praise the one who paid my debt and raised this life up from the dead

We sang a song at church this week and the lyrics from the song have kept rolling around in my head long after I left. I love that song more than others because I really understand how close I was to death in my life.

My death was going to be an active one. I wasn’t really going to die you see, I was well on my way to living a life without life. An empty loveless shell of a thing devoid of purpose and direction.

Death to me is being comfortable. You don’t often hear somebody tell their story of hitting rock bottom and them not wondering if there is more to this life than just living and dying. Traumatic circumstances usually produce action. Also, you often hear people talk about having everything they want in the world, finding it unsatisfying and looking for something more. I was headed for a life in between.

Having just enough money to live in the suburbs, drive a moderate car, have a moderate marriage and kids that don’t get in too much trouble is mind numbing. You have enough to keep you from getting desperate but not enough to let you know that the stuff you seek will not fulfill the longing in your heart.

I pray all of the time for God to keep me uncomfortable because it will keep me looking outside of this place for my fulfillment. That is no small thing to pray and it makes me nervous to ask that of God. Just read the book of Job.

I’ve said this before but it is important enough to repeat. I was very much seeking a path that would have led me to the death I described above. I was not looking to find a real God in that life but he was looking for me.

There is a death that is much worse that simply not breathing anymore and it wants us. But the creator of the universe wants me more and that is all that matters.

“Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.” Psalm 63:3

I am runner

2007-06-25T07:55:00.000-07:00

I consider myself an intelligent person and not easily swayed to become a “joiner” based on group think - except for my ipod purchase - but for some reason I found myself signed up to run in the Susan G. Komen 5K with several of my co-workers.

Let me preface this by telling you that I am not a runner. I only occasionally work out and running ain’t part of the routine. So, I am not sure what I was thinking.

Several of my friends at work had been talking about their recent experience running a ½ marathon and how great it made them feel. It did peak my interest. Now, I only had a month and my intelligence tells me that starting from 0 and working up to running a 5K in a month will be very hard but I confess I wanted to be a joiner. Let me explain why.

I have gone to cheer on friends of mine at races before and if you have never been, I recommend it. There is a whole underground community of runners that know each other and even if you don’t know anybody, there is still the mutual bond of having just ran the race together. Also, the sponsors are usually shelling out all kinds of free goodies in a very festival type atmosphere. When you are there, it is very intoxicating and I admit that I wanted to be a part of that.

So race day kept getting closer and only one thought kept coming up in my mind. What was I thinking? Race day and the phrase impending doom seemed synonymous for a whole month.

The morning of the race my stomach was all fluttery with excitement. We got there with no problems and started running at 8am. Man was it hard. I started praying around mile one.

As I am pouring out my desire to the Lord to be able to run the whole time, I notice that Fergie is yelling in my ears via my cool-according-to-the-world ipod about her lumps and my praying is getting all lost. So I switch over to worship music and it made all of the difference in the world.

I have never felt alive like that before. As I ran, the music reminded me the things that I believe deep in my soul. I became acutely aware of nature around me and how grateful I was to be in it. Another benefit of being a very slow runner in a Susan G. Komen race is that people put who they are running for (in memory of and celebration of) on signs that they pin to their backs. As people passed me I got to be reminded again of how grateful I am that I am alive.

As I got closer to the finish line, people lined the sidewalks cheering me on. “Go runner!” they yelled. “You’re almost there! Keep going!” It felt really great to be a joiner that day. I felt like Maximus in ancient Rome defying his individuality to be called gladiator. That day I had no name, but the crowds acknowledged me as runner.

Also, in case you are wondering, 36 minutes. Pretty dang good for my first 5K I think. I’m not sure why they call them “fun runs” because it was NOT fun, but the experience was worth everything and will keep me coming back for more.

Frustration

2007-06-07T15:52:00.000-07:00

I am what I hate.

My experience with Celebrate Recovery has not been what I thought it would be. I started going to this recovery group because I knew that my issues with my Dad were impeding my growth spiritually and as a person. So went thinking that it would cure me of my daddy issues. Not so.

Actually CR, among other things, really helps you see how you contribute to situations and to view blame in a different way. Relationships and conflict are not black and white entities and fault is better viewed in degrees than “it’s all your fault”. Unless the case deals with abuse inflicted on you by another, than your contribution to unresolved conflict is more than you probably realize.

The first stage of this group is dealing with your denial. Not me, right? Hmmm… It is funny how much you can lie to yourself without ever knowing. How this is playing out for me is the thing that makes me the craziest about my Dad - his over the top control about all things - is something that I share with him.

I have been catching myself recently in the middle of telling my mother how to run her life, trying to push boys into liking me (a really funny and embarrassing story attached to that comment that I might get the guts to share in the future) and trying to make my co-workers operate in the same style as me.

Now to some these things might not seem like emergencies but unchecked what people term as “this is just how I am” turns into habit and that habit can turn into destructive behaviors. Don’t fool yourself. My Dad one day long ago didn’t alienate people the way he does today but he started building these habits somewhere. Today I am seeing the beginning of that road in me and I want more than anything to stop it.

This control is something I share with many generations or men on my Dad’s side of the family and it is not leaving quietly or quickly. I am having a really hard time changing me. How do you will deep seated habits within you to be different? Impossible, without God.

The good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that I don’t have to rely on myself to change these things, but the creator of the universe wants to help me in my quest to be more like Him. Also, the other good news is that I am not alone in my frustrations. One of my favorite passages in the Bible is in Romans where Paul is describing my life almost like he knew me. It gives me so much peace to read this and I hope it does the same for you.

Romans 7:14-25
I can anticipate the response that is coming: "I know that all God's commands are spiritual, but I'm not. Isn't this also your experience?" Yes. I'm full of myself—after all, I've spent a long time in sin's prison. What I don't understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise. So if I can't be trusted to figure out what is best for myself and then do it, it becomes obvious that God's command is necessary.

But I need something more! For if I know the law but still can't keep it, and if the power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help! I realize that I don't have what it takes. I can will it, but I can't do it. I decide to do good, but I don't really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don't result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time.

It happens so regularly that it's predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God's commands, but it's pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge.

I've tried everything and nothing helps. I'm at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn't that the real question?

The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different.

Caffeine: A lover scorned

2007-05-20T19:14:00.000-07:00

I get up everyday around 5:30 or 6 to read and drink coffee. My mornings are always great. I even wish I could get up earlier because I love them so much.

One of my friends quit drinking coffee last week and the way I found out is she literally threw herself on the floor of my cube complaining of nausea and headaches. The only way I could help is sprite, 2 aspirin and a good back rub. As I was nurturing my friend back to health, it occurred to me that I could be in the same position if I tried to quit drinking coffee. So, I decided to find out.

I am now on day two with only one small relapse of a ½ caff vanilla latte last night. Let me tell you, I understand what was happening to my friend. My neck is killing me, I have a constant dull headache and I have this nagging feeling of wanting to go back to bed all the time. Weird. I had no idea my body was this in love with caffeine.

Just for grins I consulted Google on the side effects of consistent caffeine intake. Nervousness, irritability, anxiety, muscle twitching, insomnia and heart palpitations. Hmmm…Here are even some people that are campaigning to have caffeine withdrawal classified as a psychiatric disorder.

Well, at least I know why I am crazy today.

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The richness of friendship...

2007-05-06T19:22:00.000-07:00

My favorite prayer is to thank God that this is my life and to ask that those words will move me 50 years from now as much as it does today. Sometimes when I pray that, I can’t stop the grateful tears from streaming down my face.

In case you think I am crazy, I was not looking to find a real God a few years ago but He was looking for me. Through a series of events that I can only explain by attributing it to divine intervention, my life now is so full that I can’t hardly believe that it is mine and this is just the beginning.

I think about this a lot but I thought about it almost every second of this weekend. Some would say that true friendship is hard to come by but I seem to have an overabundance of wonderful people in my life.

I spent the whole weekend knee deep in some thought provoking conversations and some conversations that made my cheeks hurt from laughing so much. I haven’t laughed that much in a long time.

I have seen some pretty amazing things happen over the last year that will not allow me to ever deny the existence of a real God but this weekend reminded me that he cares about all things in my life, including the desire for some really great friends.

So let’s tip our glasses to great friends that make your brain work and your cheeks hurt. If you don’t have friends like this, get out there and get some because it is not worth missing.

Drawing lines and the dangers

2007-03-27T16:07:00.000-07:00

We are always trying to draw lines in our lives to create order and stability and use these lines to understand our surroundings. The problem is…life. Life is dynamic and refuses to be dictated by what we think it should be because it includes things that can’t be controlled like people and God.

So back to lines. The biggest problem I have with lines is when we draw them to include and dis-include people in our lives.

The Blasphemy Challenge is a crafty word-of-mouth marketing campaign cooked up by a documentary company that recently released a documentary arguing that Jesus Christ is just a conspiracy and he never actually existed. They promoted this documentary by asking their followers to go on You Tube, record a video of themselves denying God and the Holy Spirit and send it in for a free DVD. So people by the thousands loaded their videos practically daring God to strike them with lightening on the spot. Below are links to some I found the most interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpS0B11mEBk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA1bETsBrl0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAeARb1UY6k

So back to lines. After watching those, I am sure that your eyes widened, you shook your head and started drawing some lines in your head about those people when maybe we should be thinking of these people in a different way.

One of my Celebrate Recovery principles is a good reminder to constantly re-evaluate what I think I “know”.

1 Corinthians 10:12
If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall.

Some common reactions to this video are that the blasphemers had better be afraid of what the Lord thinks about that, you’ll eventually have to answer for that and that of course I am better off with the Lord.

So back to lines. Before you draw lines to define “my circle is holier than your circle”, take a second to make sure you not lukewarm to the things of God which scripture clearly states is worse than denying the Lord on You Tube.

I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

Are you a show up to church once a week and nothing else person? How do you spend your time, thoughts and money on a daily basis and does that bring glory to God or does it terminate on yourself?

Maybe instead of pointing fingers, drawing lines and shaking our heads in disappointment for these people, we should wonder why our hearts don’t break for them and get us up off the couch to see if we can’t find some people like them to tell them the truths that have changed our lives.

Also, the reason that I wrote this blog is because finger pointing and line drawing was my first reaction.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

2007-01-01T22:01:00.000-08:00

My dad and I do not have a good relationship. I understand people by understanding their pasts and I understand why my dad is the way he is. The wonderful man that I know to be my grandpa to be is not the person my dad grew up with and that has very much influenced the man my dad is today. Nevertheless, the less than loving relationship that my father and I shared as a teenager is now plaguing my life as an adult. It comes up at weird times.

My little sister got married recently and I had to do some scripture readings during the ceremony. Which included this phrase…

“Forgive others as I have forgiven you

Snap. I instantly start crying because my father is sitting on the front row. Everybody thinks I am so sweet for being upset over my sister getting married and all I can think of is not right now God. Not a good time to talk about this. The question remains, why am I so upset about my dad?

I am beginning to understand how much a father’s relationship with his daughter will affect her self esteem and her tendency to be co-dependent which is where my self assessment has arrived at after a week off of work alone with my thoughts.

What does co-dependency look like?

- My good feelings about who I am stem from being loved by you
- My mental attention is focused on protecting you.
- My self-esteem is bolstered by solving your problems.
- I am not aware of how I feel.
- I am aware of how you feel.
- The dreams I have for my future are linked to you.
- My fear of rejection determines what I say or do.
- My social circle diminishes as I involve myself with you.
- I put my values aside in order to connect with you.
- The quality of my life is in direct relation to the quality of yours.

I can pretty much insert my ex-boy friend’s name into every you listed above and really I guess my dad as well. This where you end up when you don’t deal with you daddy issues until you are almost 30.

So what is next? Something called celebrate recovery at my church. It is a step program set up like AA. Hopefully it will help but I am worried about what I might dig up. Anyway, here I go. Maybe this will be a year of healing for me after all.

“Hi my name is Nichole and I struggle with co-dependency and low self-esteem”

Lessons from Okinawa and Nichole

2006-12-17T21:31:00.000-08:00

After spending the last 9 days in Okinawa, Japan (a small island south of the mainland), I have so many blogs that are rolling around in my head but I will try to consolidate them to a collection of concise thoughts for now.

What I learned about Okinawans:

They pave their road in asphalt made of sea shells - They are surrounded by one of the largest coral reefs in the world and have a ton of it lying around. The Japanese know how to be efficient that is for sure.

They take a 2 hour naps in the afternoon – The crazy thing about their napping is that if they are working outside, they just lay down on the ground right there.

America nearly killed everyone on the island once – Being in Okinawa was really embarrassing for me most of the time I was in town because I was an American. First off, my brother-in-law is a Marine and is stationed there. 75% of our military presence in Japan is on the island of Okinawa and Okinawa constitutes less than 1/10 of the land mass for Japan. So basically, Americans have over run the island which is only 65 miles long. The worst part of this is why we are even there in the first place.

In the battle for the Pacific during WWII, we bombed the crap out of that island in order to get a foothold to attack. When I say that I really mean it. In the first 24 hours of the Battle of Okinawa, we dropped almost 4,000 tons of artillery shells on the island. More than 1/3 of the civilian population of Okinawa lost their lives. To be sure they took many of our soldiers with them, but it was still daunting to see.

I visited the underground tunnels where the Okinawan military made its last stand. They had a museum there that had pictures of the villagers that were maimed by the bombing. There were a lot of kids. Most of the 4,000 soldiers that made their last stand in those tunnels committed suicide over their defeat. I put my fingers in holes blasted in the tunnel walls from grenades that helped with those suicides. I felt a little bit like a Nazi visiting a Holocaust museum.

What I learned about me:

I want to be a mom worse than I knew - My sister has a 6 month girl and 4 year old boy. Sometimes when we would be running around, I would have my niece on my hip with my nephew’s hand in mine and I loved it. While I was there, I changed poopy diapers, kissed scrapes, made food. I tell my friends all the time about how I can’t wait to be a mom but that feeling just multiplied by a million.

I love my sister more than I knew – On the plane back home I felt what can only be described as intense sadness. I missed her and her family so bad that I wouldn’t let myself think about them for fear of bursting into tears. More than once while I was there, I considered what I would have to do to just stay over there. Running through scenarios of how I could dump my life in exchange for a life with them made me realize how bad I want her to live by me.

There is more to come but this is the stuff I needed to get off my chest right away.

Maddening blackness...

2006-11-25T22:23:00.001-08:00

My sister almost died when she was a teenager. She took a bunch of Tylenol and drank a quart of vodka but still woke up the next day.

I must admit after it happened, I was shook up but the realization that I could have only had one sister instead of two only hit me a few years ago.

On Friday my dad told me that he thinks that my sister took a weak pill like Tylenol because her suicide was “a fake” and she only wanted attention.

- No matter that most people that commit suicide with pills use Tylenol along with other drugs.

- No matter that suicide is the third leading cause of death for teenagers.

- And certainly no matter that my sister told me that she intended on dying that night.

I thought that when you had kids that you were on their side no matter what. Apparently I was wrong about that.

I am mad. Mad at the blackness that exists in this world but mostly mad that it has found its way into my family.

What is the matrix?

2006-10-24T14:44:00.000-07:00

I don’t believe in accidents or coincidences or purposeless people. We were all created as individuals with our quirkiness for a reason.

My mother’s whole life is about her kids. When she was growing up all she ever wanted to be is a wife and a mother. She’s never said this, but I think that she only wanted to be a wife because the end result was kids. Everything revolves around me and my sisters in her life.

It can wearisome sometimes for me as one of the kids but I realized the other day why is has been so hard for us lately. My mom hasn’t had a job in her niche in a long time. She is a leader but not the figure-head-follow-me leader. She leads you as she is walking right beside you. Sometimes you might forget that she is even there which makes her an excellent trainer for businesses and she hasn’t done that kind of job in a long time which is why the overemphasis on us kids lately. She has no outlet for the stuff that she was created to do.

So what is my purpose? I really couldn’t tell you to tell the truth. True to my Google lovin’ self I googled, “What is my purpose?” First thing that pops up, “Do you feel like a looser?”…Maybe I should stop. Next thing that pops up, “Find your purpose in 20 minutes.” That’s not going to do it…Next thing, “Rick Warren’s answer to Purpose.” Okay, I really give up now.

Google didn’t help so I spent some time rummaging through my own knowledge library in my head. Things that I thought were important a year ago, even last week sometimes, are not important to me now. So what now…

I think I am at the conclusion that to understand my purpose or why I was created, I need to start with my creator. What does that mean?

The God I believe in is a personal God who cares about me as an individual. So for me to get to know Him is not within a book or study class but simply hanging out with him in the quietness of the morning, over coffee of course.

Maybe you don’t really believe in God or his plan for your life. Maybe you think we are all an accident and you believe that you will come back as a tree when you die. But in the words of Morpheus, My beliefs do not require you to believe, and that believing disbelief in your purpose won’t prevent you from discovering it, just as a lack of belief in gravity won’t prevent you from tripping.

"The Man" vs. the enablers

2006-10-07T04:19:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine at work had a panic attack last week at a conference. It was really unsettling to me because he has been one of several people at my job to have panic attacks in the last few months.

Most of my life I have griped about my jobs. The only job that I can think of that didn’t make me crazy was my 4 year stint as a sandwich artist that was housed in a local gas station. Even as I write this I am starting to realize what made me love it so much. It wasn’t the job so much as it was me. I was in high school but I was balanced in the things I was involved in. I worked a ton, but I had drill team. I did a ton of drill team stuff, but I had great friends. I hung out a ton with my friends, but I spent a lot of time making sure I had good grades. So I had balance in all things.

It is very difficult to have balance at Women of Faith and it only gets worse the higher you are in the organization. Now that I am older I am starting to see the bigger picture and that people are not always victims of “the man”. There is usually a well functioning system of abusers and enablers. At my current job, too much is asked of my superiors and they ask too much of me. The problem is that people never say no more. They just quit. Or have panic attacks.

When will it be enough? Well, I am not waiting for somebody else to yell fire. FIRE!!! I am on fire and I need help! I am not so sure that bitterness or a panic attack or a new job is not waiting for me down the road because I won’t say anything.

You guys can pray for me because I don’t imagine that this conversation with my boss will be a fun one. Maybe it just is what it is, but I guess it’s not very fair to not give my job a chance. I wonder how she will react. “Hello, I’m on fire. Can you help?” :)

Treading Water

2006-09-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

My life is making me want to give up lately. I think that when you are young that you never think that 30 is a real thing. Maybe in my mind 30 was like winning the lottery. It only happened to people on TV but would never happen to me. Turns out I was wrong and it looks like 30 will come if I like it or not.

Even thought I never thought becoming a quasi-adult would never happen to me, I - true to little girl without a Daddy format – imagined quasi-adulthood as a married woman. The question for me now is what if that doesn’t happen, what do I think of myself?

To tell you the truth, I really have no idea. What bucket do I fit in? Where do I belong? I always had this idea of how life was going to go and it is not going according to plan.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not sobbing in my pillow every night. I’m just confused. Do I wait for the circumstances in my life to create who I will be when I grow up or do I charge ahead to make my own circumstances?

I have this vision of myself straddling several fences right now.

I have one foot in my church world which I love but I don’t want to get too far from where I came from because I am afraid of loosing the rawness of the real decision I have made to follow Christ.

I have one foot in my work world which I also love but I don’t want to put both feet in because I lived too many years letting my life revolve around work and know what a dead end/ revolving door/ black whole life you can create for yourself when you are a workaholic.

I have one foot in friends’ worlds which I need but they have their own lives, so I am always fighting for their time with boyfriends, work or anything. Except for my friends Bryan and Jen who are always there for me no matter what.

So as I watch myself tread water in all these worlds, I wonder what it will take to push me over the fence and at the same time get completely sick of doing nothing.

At my job, we have been working on a conference for teen girls and the funny thing is, those girls are asking the same questions and they are 15. I guess this wondering never changes but one thing you can be sure of is that I will not tread water for long.

Beautiful pain and gooshy outsides

2006-09-09T08:14:00.000-07:00

I met a girl today that said she wanted to teach film/photography in college because the students are always sad and she gets to love on them. Not that she loves teaching so much but that she loves broken people.

I have always thought that same thing but I just thought it was because I was a little messed up myself. Which has a lot to do with it but after some deep introspection over Starbucks, I really think I like broken sad people because to be broken and sad means that you actually have to care about something - to have passion. I bet that film students are all like that because it makes them better at their craft. Who wants to watch a movie that the director felt okay about? Maybe summer blockbusters fall in that category but I digress.

Passion and sadness. I bet that most people would not put the two together but for me being passionate means that you feel deeply about things and you are not afraid of that feeling whatever it is. People often hide their sadness because we humans look on sadness with pity. Why? Sadness to me seems like a great opportunity.

Can you ever really be known by people if they only know the happy sunshiny parts of you? More importantly, can you ever really know yourself if you are never challenged by the circumstances in your life?

To embrace sadness and be comfortable with it is to wear your insides on the outside. All gooshy and getting all over everybody. Kinda uncomfortable in a vulnerable way. I have some friends that are insides-on-the-outside people. They spend a lot of time in their house away from others because too many people have hurt their gooshy outsides – mostly Christians actually which confuses me because for some reason they want to be friends with me.

But you know - they know who they are. They wonder about careers and kids and all the stuff that the rest of us wonder about, but they do not wonder about WHO they are. Makes me jealous. I guess the lesson here for me is to be comfortable with my sadness around others and to be comfortable with my friend’s sadness without trying to fix it because it is beautiful.

The land beyond the lamp post...

2006-09-01T06:14:00.000-07:00

I sometimes forget how small my existence is in the scheme of things and am usually rudely jerked out of my inwardly focused trance with a blog in mind.

Vancouver is a beautiful place. When I first arrived, I walked along the harbor observing my surroundings. A flock of geese grazed to my left and in the harbor to my right, people were kayaking and tossing balls in the water for their dogs to chase. A handful of sparrows jetted in front of me and all around me were groups of people playing with their kids, grilling out and chatting over local wines. The area was full of people enjoying each other but it was 5 PM which means that they all had to get off work early to be here by now. My first glimpse what kinds of ideas frame this place.

The skyline is littered with tall condos and all of these buildings far out way the office buildings. So, the question is, were do all these people work? I imagine that you can find them at Starbucks, restaurants, manning gas stations as well as in the office buildings. While I was there, only one young person served me my coffee or brought me my breakfast. I guess they think that your job doesn’t define you and that careers aren’t the main focus. Weirdos.

The city is nice but it isn’t new. Most of my meetings were in buildings that would be considered run down in Dallas. In fact, my first meeting was with the Canadian Country Station of the Year for the last three years and when I walked into the lobby, I thought I went in the wrong building. They obviously built the building in the 70’s, moved in and have never renovated. There is nothing really wrong with it. It just smelled musty and everything is orange and peeling. Almost all of the buildings are like that.

I watched a man dig through the trash behind my hotel, but he wasn’t looking for food. He was foraging through everything that we threw away and organizing it into piles. Glass bottles here, cans there. He was making a living off what we threw away. While he was digging, a ton of other trash fell out of the dumpster on the ground. When he was done, he cleaned all of the extra trash up and made sure that it looked like it did before he got there.

Life is just different there. White people are the minority. Homeless people are considerate of their surroundings. People care more about what they are doing after work than work itself.

At the end of my trip after I had observed all of this, I felt really weird. Like I had stumbled past the lamp post into some fantasy world that didn’t really exist. Was I the weirdo? Were my ideas of life shallow? Was this the real world or was the world I came from real?

As I considered staying in this place and abandoning everything that I previously knew to be true, I settled into my seat on the plane flying direct back to Dallas. And then I was jetted back to “reality” by conversations flowing around me.

“Your shoes are so cute, where did you get them……I am going to e-mail George and let him know that I saw his name in the paper…….I don’t give a –bleep- if we missed the numbers, they are just going to have to deal with it.”

Ah, Dallas and real life. The question now is, do I tell my klan about the world I saw beyond the lamp post? Will they call me a hippie and roll their eyes? Will they send me back there? But more importantly, will I be different? I hope so.

Now, not when

2006-08-18T04:10:00.000-07:00

I am feeling a bit listless as I sit in the airport on the way to give another one of my Friday nights to Women of Faith. And maybe bitter.

One of my friends recently wrote an amazing blog about how we should learn to love where we are now – not 5 years from now. I got to tell you, it is really hard to love working too much, very few friends, no boyfriend which means no prospect of marriage any time soon which means everyday I am increasing my risk of having deformed babies according to my sister.

Or is it loving how much my relationship with the Lord has skyrocketed in the last year or the amazing group of girls that I found in my small group at church or loving how supportive and fun my team is at work or loving the idea of the guy that I will end up with next because of how different my standards are now?

It really comes down to attitude. You can choose to wallow the circumstances that you think are awful or wake up to the fact that if God knows everything and works it all to the good of those who love him – than where you are today is no accident. I think I recently realized that I can spend all my time dwelling on the stuff I hate or learn to see the silver lining that God wants me to see.

In case you are not inspired by my words, please be inspired by the Starbucks cup I am drinking from right now.

“You are not an accident. Your parents might not have planned you but God did. He wanted you to be alive and created you for a purpose. Focusing on yourself will never reveal your purpose. You were made by God, for God and until you understand that, life will never make sense.”

Homeless

2006-07-24T08:03:00.001-07:00

I don't really feel like I have a home. You know that place where you can know that you can just be comfortable in and that you can say, "This is home."

We moved around quite a bit when I was growing up. I lived in 7 different houses in two states before I turned 18. The house that I spent most of my junior and high school time in was sold when my parents divorced when I was in college. Since then both of my parents have lived in several different places and will probably not stay very long in the one that they live in right now. In fact, my Dad basically flips houses for a living.

So, I consider the apartment that I am currently living in my home. The problem is that something always comes up and I seem to move every year. To make it worse, most of the time when I move it also includes a roommate change.

I really hate the moving time because it is a reminder again that I have no home. I leave my pictures up on the wall until the last possible moment before moving. Until I started writing this, I didn't realize how hung up I am on it.

Anyway, I am in the process of moving again but am actually homeless right now as my lease doesn't start until the 1st. So, my sense of instability is in hyper mode right now hence the reason for this blog.

Instability - I guess that is really it. As I creep up on 30, I guess I am really craving some stability. That is probably why I have been thinking about marriage so much lately and evaluating all the guys I meet against the "could I marry him" yardstick. And yes, that means that if you are a guy and I have talked to you in the last year, I have already evaluated if I could marry you or not. :) Like marriage is an inoculation against instability, but in my single mind it sounds pretty good.

My craving for stability is something like I haven't eaten all day and I just have to eat something which kinda scares me. In those moments when you are starving and just have to eat something no matter what it is, McDonald's even sounds good.

Instability. Cravings. Ramblings. As I ride back "home" on a plane alone, these thoughts cloud my mind. Hopefully I will have something new to worry and ramble on about soon.

Love you guys.

Disclaimer to my mother This is not a slam against your parenting. I knew that you might think that and I thought I would nip it before it was an issue. :)

Vanity

2006-07-16T13:27:00.000-07:00

Every wonder why you always meet 20 year olds that have all the answers to life and 30 year olds that feel like life has a leg up on them? I think it is because the older that you get the more you realize that you have no idea what you are doing.

Well, here I am fully admitting that I have no idea what I am doing and that the life I have is not the life I planned. I never thought that by the time I was closing in on 30 that I would not be married, still living pay check to pay check and not have a 5 year plan. So were did I go wrong? Let's see if we can figure it out.

I can't help but laugh when I think back to my little 18 year self setting out with huge plans and knowing that the college world that I was entering into was in for the shock of its life when it got a hold of me. Well, turns out that they were doing fine before I showed up and after I spent 7 years there, turns out that they are also just fine without me. So I learned my first lesson - The world doesn't need me.

Okay, how about a job? That is a smaller mountain to tackle than the world. When I got my first job out of college, I remember thinking that they had no idea what was in for them (even though I had already learned lesson number one.) I made a huge impact right away and eventually when that ended, turns out that they are still in business. Who knew? Lesson number two - Work does not need me.

So if my jobs don't need me, than maybe I can find a person that needs me. This also is good for a laugh or some pity if you think about it. I met a very nice guy who had a fine life without me and after 6 years that ended, turns out that we are just fine without each other. Life goes on. Lesson number three People don't need me.

I think my problem has been that I have been waiting on something else to depend on me to define my existence when the Lord was just waiting around for me to depend on him to define my existence. We talked this week in church about Ecclesiastes 1 (below) and I think it is the reason for my thoughts.

"Vanity of vanities! All is vanity." What advantage does man have in all his work which he does under the sun? A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. That which has been is that which will be, and that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one might say, "See this, it is new"? Already it has existed for ages which were before us.

I think what I am saying is piddling around in the vanities of life (since everything outside of the Lord is really a vanity) and not really leaning on God is where I went wrong. So - I am a 28 year old, un-married, un-wealthy person who has no idea what she is doing and I think that is a good place to be.

Bird poop and service

2006-07-02T08:57:00.000-07:00

Lately, I have been volunteering through with my church in downtown Dallas by partnering with a church that has literally transformed the crime rate in their area by buying buildings that used to be crack houses and turning them into ministries like half way houses and pregnancy centers. All this with a staff of 2 people. Very cool stuff.

When I have gone down there to volunteer, I have meet people that are incredibly receptive to hearing about Christianity and people that are much nicer to strangers that I ever am. Interacting with these people has really changed me personally and I have become addicted to serving because it is somewhat of a high. Everyday I see that the Lord is after balance in my life because I recently saw that my service for the Lord isn’t always going to be such a fairy tale.

In my latest trip to volunteer for the downtown church, we were painting some houses in the neighborhood that the pastor had started making relationships with. The houses were old and we had to scrape several layers of paint off before we could put some new paint on them. The girl I was working with was up on a ladder which was broken so I had to stand underneath it to brace it. We got to a spot that apparently birds loved to roost on because it was caked with bird poop. So she had to scrape off the bird poop and since I was bracing the ladder, it was coming down on me. As I was getting showered with little flecks of dried bird poop, I thought what a different experience this was for me as opposed to the other times.

The true heart of local missions is finding a way to really connect with somebody on a regular basis to be Jesus to them and the best person in this situation to be that for the people in these houses was not me but the pastor of that church. My service was allowing him to become closer to the lost in his neighborhood.

So service can change you but it isn’t all about you. It took a shower of dried bird poop to teach me that.

People and their stories

2006-06-04T13:44:00.000-07:00

Anybody who has been reading these blogs knows that my life very recently has made a drastic change for the better. I have had an encounter with the reality of a relationship with The Lord and it has revolutionized everything about me. Have you ever had something like that happen to you? Don’t you just want to tell everybody? Your friends and family, the guys behind the counter at Starbucks – But do you always tell people?

I think it is rare to find a person that does not have one of these stories, but most people think things like, “My story is just like everyone else's” or “It takes too long to tell” or “People don’t want to know that stuff about me”. They never tell their story unless you through them in front of audience to give their testimony.

At Women of Faith, I have seen thousands upon thousands of women become Christians because the speakers from stage tell their stories of how God wooed them out of their junk with such brutal honestly you can’t help not being moved. For me the biggest place that I see Jesus in my world is in other people’s stories. The power of story is so amazing.

Here is my point. I think that this the biggest mistake that we make when interacting with one another. Never really honestly connecting. Talking about superficial nothingness until we are blue in the face because it makes us tired to think about getting into a deep conversation.

So tell your story every chance you get. You will never know whose life you will change.

Ask people about their stories. You never know who is just busting to tell you something that happened to them and you never know how it could change you.

And thanks to Jeremy who fearlessly had a deep conversation with me this weekend and reminded me of all this. Your story changed me.

Adulthood

2006-04-07T08:34:00.000-07:00

When does a kid turn into an adult? Maybe it isn’t an age or a certain place in life. Maybe it is when you brain starts to change its thinking. Like, when did changing yourself or learning something new get so hard?

I find myself coming across habits that I have and wonder why anybody really wants to hang out with me. For example, I think I drive my roommates crazy with my incessant cleaning. It is not like they are dirty or anything, but I apparently can not stand the sight dishes in the sink. Or shoes in the living room. Or clutter on the counter. Does that sound familiar? Aghhhh! I am my father. When did that happen?

Anyway, I really like my roommates so I have spent the last month trying white knuckle my way through not cleaning the house every single day. It is not working. When I wake up in the morning, my first thought is dirty dishes. How sad is that?

Here is another one. I had discovered that I am a shameless flirt. Yes, yes. I like boys and boy attention and basically everything about the opposite sex. (Perhaps there is a reason that God placed my in an all female organization? :) ) I have really made a concerted effort lately to just be around boys instead of badgering them with my constant requests for attention. And… it’s not working. Every time I travel for Women of Faith, all of the crew is guys my age and I am sure that they have a good laugh about me over the lunch table because I flirt with them all.

I wish the Matrix movie was real life. Then I could just type into a computer, relationship skills. Press enter and wham! I could jump up with one fist in the air proclaiming, “I am confident in myself and do not need to flirt with guys!”

Why can’t life be that easy? Why does changing your self get harder every day? How can we stop ourselves from becoming our parents?

This is real adulthood ladies and gentlemen. The realization that life is hard and that you need something bigger than you to fix you.

Do you know Jesus?

2006-02-23T06:18:00.000-08:00

My favorite books are those that make you think above and outside yourself. For most people this is not a comfortable place to be but it is by far my favorite place to be. I just finished a book that did just that for me and I want to tell you about it.

The book is called Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller. In the book, Miller talks about how he believes that Christians might be spending their whole lives focused on things (Sprinkle vs. Dunk – Priests vs. Pastors) that aren’t even that important in the grand scheme of life if you don’t tackle the basics first. The basics being, do you know who Jesus is and do you have a relationship with him? Maybe this example will help explain the reality of the situation.

My friend Anne is the most balanced person I know when it comes to opinions about other people. Too often when I am around her and talking about how one of our co-workers is making me crazy (basically throwing them under the bus). Anne is so quick to bring out their perspective and remind me that there are things under the surface that maybe I couldn’t see. She would never have an unkind word to say about another person - ever. So if somebody told me that they met Anne had she went on and on about how much she hated this person she met at church or something, I would tell you that we must not be talking about the same person. You see, I have a close relationship with Anne and know her so well I can predict her behavior. I know who she is. Do you know Jesus like that? I sure don’t.

I am a learner. I love to read and attend lectures and learn everything I can. The hard reality that I am realizing is that I can not learn how to have a relationship with my creator but I do have to try. If you were married and only hung out with your spouse every other day, would it work? Nope. Same rules apply here.

What is really profound about this stuff is that the God that created the whole universe cares about you as a person and deeply desires a relationship with you. He is just waiting for us to pay attention and that relationship will change everything about the rest of your life. Don’t believe me? Just wait until it happens to you.

So, go take a walk and chat with God. Tell him the deepest secrets of your life or just tell him about aggravating co-workers. Either way a life changing relationship awaits you…

Death of a Relationship

2006-02-05T09:05:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school, my grandparents on my dad’s side died and I didn’t want to go to their funerals. My parents didn’t make me – huge mistake. That was almost 10 years ago but I still get overwhelmingly sad about their loss sometimes.

My major in college was communication studies and I learned a lot about the stages of grief.

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

People usually float back and forth between the stages until they get to acceptance and then they are able to move on with their lives. By not attending my grandparent’s funerals, I trapped myself in the denial stage for several years. It is not a fun place to be because you will always have this cloud hanging around that colors your world until you are able to deal with it and move on.

The reason that I bring this up is that I recently broke up with my boyfriend of 6 years a few months ago and we saw each other for the first time since he left last night. It was a horrible but wonderful experience.

Basically, I love him so much but do not want to marry him and he feels the same way. So because of that continued mutual love and respect, after breaking up we still talked all the time and continued being friends. After seeing him last night, I realized that I was trapping myself in the denial stage again! I was just hoping I could keep him in a jar on my life shelf to pull out when I needed someone to complain to or cry to or share my day with. Can’t happen. My relationship has died and I feel the same way that I felt when I lost my grandparents.

So, I now know why God says to guard you heart. It isn’t protection against somebody that would hurt me, but from somebody that would love me. If you think breaking up with a boyfriend that cheats on you but you love him anyway is hard – try breaking up with one that you love and he loves you back.

Estrogen Fest

2006-02-05T08:21:00.000-08:00

My life is has been swallowed by a sea of femininity in the last year. I work in an office with 99% women, travel for work to conferences where there are thousands of women, just recently broke up with my boyfriend and live with 2 girls. The lack of boy interaction is really starting to get to me.

For the past six years I have had a boyfriend around on a daily basis and now that it is gone, there is a huge deficit that I didn’t even know that I needed. If you think I am just yearning for another boyfriend, it is actually worse than that.

Last week in church, a very nice looking 6 foot tall guy sat next to me. The seats aren’t that spacious so when he would move just a little bit during worship time, his arm would just brush mine on accident. It would totally yank me out of the zone every time it happened. This is ridiculous.

And to make everything more frustrating, I believe that God has my perfect guy out there waiting for me. So every time a boy walks by, a million question run through my head.

Is he “the one”?
If he is the one, does he know he’s the one?
Did I put on makeup?
Does my one care about makeup?
Am I loosing it?

AHHHHH!!!!

I am way too old to be freaking out about boys. OR is this a problem that plagues all women to the end of time? I hope not but I fear I may be wrong…

Are you Christian? Might not be as easy a question to answer as you think

2006-02-05T08:17:00.000-08:00

I have gone to church and considered myself a Christian my entire life. So, why when I started working at a ministry (Women of Faith) did most people that have been in my life for a while, including my parents, give me a funny sideways look?

Here is what I think. Accepting Jesus as a part of your life is only the first step and only one of many steps on the path in really becoming a Christian. Calling yourself a Christian, going to church every week or living a good life doesn’t save you. There are plenty of people that live life by what most would consider Christian principles that are not going to heaven.

If you are a Christian, than people should be able to look at your life and not miss the fact that you have The Lord in your life. I am sure that people looked at my life in college (living with my boyfriend, never going to church and getting drunk every weekend) and said if that is Christianity than I have it too. Yuck.

Until someone can look at your life and see something different, be very cautious about applying the term Christian to yourself.

Gut Checks

2006-02-05T08:06:00.000-08:00

Ever been gut checked by a 21 year old Navy guy? Not something that most people can or want to brag about but that is exactly the way I felt when I checked up on my cousin Chris’ Myspace page the other day.

If you have read any of my recent posted blogs, than you know that I have been undergoing a little Jesus revolution in my life. I am getting on everyone’s nerves with my new found passion for faith and life is good. Everything is making sense for me and I felt like I am doing a good job of centering my life on God. Or so I thought.

If you visit Chris’s page you can’t miss the constant references to Jesus and the wording that hits you in the face with the severity that his love for the Lord carries in his life. Let me tell you what I mean. Here is a quote from his “about me” section.“I love Jesus more than anything as you will find through out getting to know me, if you don't already… I still love Jesus like tomorrow will never come…I'm a military man who loves Jesus Christ.”

Now when was the last time that somebody talked to you like that? When was the last time I talked to somebody like that? (Here is where I encountered the virtual gut check) I’ve been in church my whole life and I can’t remember the last time I saw passion for Christ like that. Not even most ministry people talk like that.So, what does it mean to be a Christian? I think Chris (a 21 year old, Navy guy, not raised in the church, and for sure no seminary student) really gets it. If we really come to terms with the fact the creator of the universe cares about the details of our lives and has wonders beyond our imagination waiting for us after we die, than we should all be so grateful that we found this truth that it leaks out of our very pours, just like Chris.

Now instead of just sitting at the feet of the great Bible teachers of our time and feverishly taking notes in church on Sunday like you learning a Spanish lesson, combine that with taking a clue from my cousin and consider that the shear awesomeness of our Lord should create such passion in us that we can’t keep it from leaking on all those around us. Even on your Myspace page. Thanks Chris.

Spare Tire Christians

2005-10-14T07:21:00.000-07:00

I think I might be a spare tire Christian. Here is what I mean.

I love food. Eating out in nice restaurants is my favorite thing to do, my passion if you will. If have seen my butt lately, you know what I mean. :) When I have plans to eat out, I think all day about where I am going to go, what I am going to wear, and what I am going to order. I get consumed with the excitement of my favorite pastime. Food is a driving force in my life and my faith has never been anything like that to me. It has been more like a spare tire than a steering wheel.

My parents raised my family in a church ever since I can remember. I know all about the story about how Christ died on the cross and us from ourselves, blah, blah, blah. Until a few weeks ago, that story had as much impact on me as an inspiring late night TV show. I never really made God an active part of my life and therefore the significance of that story never really hit me. When you really think about it, it can almost be too much. Would you send your child to die a horrible death for me?

When the reality of what was done for you sets in, that is where the passion for God (just like my passion for food) begins to bloom. I know that I always rolled my eyes at those crazy Christians get giddy at the thought of church or studying the Bible. What weirdos. Or are they?

If we look at the grand scheme of life in the perspective of everything that God does for us, than does anything else but spending the rest of your life thanking him really matter? All of the raises, new cars, great friends, family and food (for me) are so stupid in the light of the creator of the universe caring about me as a person. Does your faith matter to you like that? If not, what really is more important? After coming to this realization myself, all I think about is how can I possibly go back to living my life the way I did before? I can’t.

Lessons From a Sandwich Artist

2005-07-22T09:31:00.000-07:00

I used to be a sandwich artist. Don’t laugh, it’s true. My first real job was making Subway sandwiches in a gas station in Sherman, TX and I have to say to date, it was the best job I ever had. Let me tell you why.

Do you remember your first job? If it was anything like mine, you were elbow deep in mayo and bread dough on top of dealing with an ungrateful customer that could care less about you as a human. Now how does an emotionally taxing environment such as that turn into the workplace utopia that I so fondly remember? It lies solely in the efforts of the two women that managed me, Diep and Jenny.

They didn’t have impressive degrees or lots of experience or any strategic plan to whip the teenage rabble that they managed into shape. But they did understand the one thing that will produce success when you have people under you. The difference between a manager and a leader.

Mangers know that they are excellent at the job that they are teaching you to do. When they walk into a room you know it and know that they are in charge. They spend lots of time organizing and directing their staff and the focus is on them and their skills that they bring to the table.

Leaders are also excellent at the job that they are teaching you to do, but they let you discover truth yourself instead of telling you how it is. They are not in it for the glory. So when they walk into the room, they will blend into the crowd. The focus for leaders is their employees and are comfortable letting the spotlight fall on them.

The distinction between the two can have a tremendous impact on your staff. Diep and Jenny were leaders hands down. They set a great example for me that I still try to emulate until this day.

Now, one of the best things about this story is that those women still impact my life today and they ran a gas station. Point being, you don’t have to be a manager in a huge company or even in a leadership position to be a person of influence. Look around you and be more mindful of people you encounter. Try to practice leadership characteristics and not management in your daily walk. I bet you are surprised how influential of a person you really are and didn’t know it when people start thanking you for the impact your have made.

So lesson for the day, find a leader in your life that you respect and spend as much time as you can with them. Be a leader to someone in your life and spend as much time as you can with them. And be nicer to your sandwich artist next time you go to Subway.

Comfortable brokenness...

2005-06-11T16:09:00.000-07:00

I used to have this wall hanging basket that had two ceramic rabbits in them that my mom gave to me and I have dropped that thing with those rabbits about 1000 times and keep gluing them back together. You can still make out their mangled shape is but uneven cracks and dried glue are all over them.

Have you ever kept something to the point of ridiculousness? Just kept it because it has always been around and it doesn't feel right to get rid of it? I discovered this week I have been doing that with brokenness in my life. Let me explain...…

My life, as I am sure most peoples has, has not worked the way it was supposed to. I grew up in a nice Christian home that stressed values of going to church and all of the warm fuzzies that come with that. Things were coasting along just fine. Then, in between the ages 17 and 20 a close family member attempted suicide and my parents got divorced after 23 years of marriage. Until then it never occurred to me that really bad things like that happened to Christians. God was supposed to keep that from happening, right?

I bounced back okay from these tragedies on my own and in the process of recovery determined that life did not fit into the nice neat box that God intended. It therefore also made perfect sense to me that going to church and hanging around those people that still believed in the "box" was a waste of time. After a while, I became really proud of my new approach to faith. I was so enlightened and the church going crowd was blind the realities of life.

That belief has stuck with me that until this week. I was talking to a co-worker and remarked that I was glad that most of the people that work at Women of Faith have had life give them a kick or two along the way because it makes us real. She said that it helps, but that it didn't have to be that way.

At that point I felt like those rabbits, broken, flawed, and hanging on my cracks for dear life. Even to the point of wearing them like a badge of honor. That counts as ridiculousness.

I realized through the words of my co-worker that God wants to spoil us with whole lives without cracks and tragedy and by hanging on with pride to our flaws we can keep him from spoiling us.

Needless to say I am in the process of getting rid of those personal cracks. As for the rabbits? I got rid of them too. Sorry mom. :)

Un-Social Butterflies

2005-05-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

"A stranger is a friend I haven't meet yet" - Will Rodgers

I love my job. I work for a inspirational women's conference called Women of Faith. We are the nation's largest woman's conference and typically host about 30 conferences a year all over the country in areas. Each conference averages about 15,000 attendees and I get to travel to most of them. And I get to spend a good portion of my life in a sea of strangers.

Now, you would think that since my job is public relations for the event that I would be a social butterfly. Just think of your typical image of a publicist. Slick, prepared, always smiling, and networked in with famous people. By looking at the quote above, it's a good bet that Will Rodgers could have been the founding member of the PoweR Girls team on MTV if he was around to endure this era. I have to admit I want to be the opposite of that.

According to Rodgers, there are tons of friends out there to be made. The guy next to me on the plane, the woman that I met at a conference, and the list goes on. I don't want to have a 1000 friends and to know the people "in the know". I want to invest my time in a very few friends and family.

Why do we move far across the country from our family and not give it a second thought? Why do we make a new sets of friends every time we change jobs or move? Why can't we as a society (or me) spend more time investing in a few great relationships and family?

We get so busy with our lives that we forget what is really important. My boyfriend has had the same friends since high school. I often tease him about it, but he might have something.

My theory might have a touch of anti-socialism but if that is wrong, I don't wanna be right. :) So, I dedicate this day to knowing what my two sister's favorite colors are, taking my Mom for a leisurely lunch, and other such activities that will make me an un-social butterfly.