All in Faith
I keep waiting for that breakthrough moment. Like the cinematic magic of Will Hunting’s emotional realization that its not his fault in Good Will Hunting, the moment in every rom com when the guy/girl realizes they can’t live without love as they chase it down in a fantasy filled music montage scene, or the pinnacle of sports movies when the underdog finally defeats their grossly outranked opponent in the championship game.
Don’t you just love the English language, how we can so easily turn a word from a simple definition into a cultural cuss word. As soon as you hear the word clique I’m sure vivid images come to mind, whether it’s a memory of a moment you felt excluded or maybe a scene from Mean Girls is playing in your mind. In rushes waves of feelings, and usually not pleasant ones.
Sometimes I just want to scream, “ENOUGH ALREADY, I AM DONE WITH ALL THE CONVICTION!” As I press the rewind button and review how its all unfolding I realize I am swiping up, dismissing the Holy Spirit, and falling back into the trap of comfortably doing it alone. In the Psalms David gives us a grave warning about this, “You refuse my discipline and treat my words like trash.” Ouch, I send God to voicemail so often my mailbox is full!
Confession time, I wear my heart on my sleeves. I am unapologetically full of drama. And I can go from one feeling to the next as quickly as the weather can change in west Texas. Joy, sorrow, contentment, disappointment, anger, bliss, these are all emotions that make us fearfully and wonderfully made. The more I swim in the waters of Jesus the more I feel free to be me. To boldly live in this wide range of emotions.
When our rally cry for our political agenda or social injustices is louder than our message of the redeeming love of Jesus, then we are getting it wrong. We can’t let our desire for our voice to be heard, be greater than the voice of Christ. When we start down that slippery slope, we can forget what is important. There is urgency to this message because of the instantaneous access to information. We take in an overabundance of information at such a rapid speed. Just as quickly as we receive information we feel the overwhelming need to not only form an opinion, but also share it for the entire world to hear. We have to take a holy pause before we click like, share, or comment.
It’s the season again, for many of us the crisp autumn air means that warm familiar taste of the infamous pumpkin spice latte. The feeling you get when that first sip hits your tongue can be intoxicating, filling your body with a warm pumpkin hug. I am guilty of indulging in the PSL craze just as much as the next person, but as I found myself yesterday in the drive thru once again only to be filled with disappointment as the barista glumly tells me, “we are out of pumpkin spice.” I started to make some hard realizations. My internal reaction was like that of my 11 month old unable to find her beloved Minnie Mouse doll. My day felt doomed and my heart felt empty.
Maybe you’re like me, it takes God bringing you to your knees to begin to understand that the holes in your heart you are filling with fleeting things will never fully satisfy you. For the first time I am embracing this season. Instead of praying for God to move the mountain I am asking him to help me climb it. Depression is a battle that strikes the depths of the soul.
I love when people pose a question or a thought that just makes me slam on the breaks. Here I am foot firmly on the gas and they toss a ball into the road of my thoughts. Its in those hard asked questions, those thought provoking statements that I dig deep into who and what I believe in. Over and over this week God has been putting these conversations in my path and its really got me thinking about quality over quantity.
We are so guilty as a society of craving quantity over quality. We consume, consume, consume and then want more. We use our bank account to measure the success of our business, we use a number on a scale to measure our physical worth, we use the number of social media friends/followers to measure our like-ability, we use the amount of possessions we own to measure our worth, we use the number of women in our mom tribe to measure our value as a friend. A constant math equation is calculating in our minds to reach the final number we long for, yet we always come up short.
There is a reason why they are called “grand”. Every time we are around my girls’ grandparents I sit back in awe. They are so patient where I am irritated, so gentle where I am tough, so calm where I am out of control, so in the moment where I am distracted.
The faith of my youth was filled with fiery passions of church camp, mountaintop experiences on mission trips, and candlelit youth worship nights that left me weeping in an unrestrained fire for God. The faith of my adulthood looked more like a tiny candle flame than the wildfires in my youth. My adult faith was adding one brick at a time to my foundation in obedience. It was going to bible studies when my all I wanted was to go home and lounge in my pjs. It was actually reading the bible, even the parts that I didn’t understand. It was saying yes to a church invitation when a Netflix marathon was calling my name instead. In His faithfulness, God is filling the rooms of my home with wisdom…
