Freedom

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Elizabeth

Freedom.

We value freedom quite highly here in the States. We make it one of our highest goals to obtain freedom for everyone.

Freedom is a noble and worthy goal, isn’t it? It is a good that we as Christ-followers support, right? Even Jesus, after all, speaks of setting us free.

Yes, however…

Many of us who have grown up in the States have become confused about what freedom means. We think that freedom means living without limits, being able to make our own choices, casting off all restraint.

This is not freedom. This is autonomy. Autonomy is a very different thing.

So what is freedom? In the world of Jesus, what does freedom mean?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks about freedom in Creation and Fall, his commentary on the first few chapters of Genesis. He speaks of us being created in the image of the Triune God says that one of the implications of this is that we are meant to be relational beings. Being created as relational beings means that we are dependent. Dependent on God and dependent on each other.

This freedom we are given by being made in God’s image is, Bonhoeffer says, “a relation and nothing else. To be more precise, freedom is a relation between two persons. Being free means ‘being-free-for-the-other’, because I am bound to the other. Only by being in relation with the other am I free.”

Yes, we are free, but free within our relationships. Yes, we are free, but it is a freedom with limits, a freedom with boundaries. It is a freedom that only makes sense within the context of our relationships.

It is the sort of freedom that a cellist in an orchestra has.

A cellist who asserts her autonomy while playing a Rachmaninoff symphony will only cause sour notes and chaos. A cellist who asserts her freedom within the confines of the orchestral relationships around her creates art and beauty. She is free to bring out the best within herself only because she willingly submits herself to the limits of the piece and the limits placed by the conductor.

Insisting on and clinging to our autonomy creates only sour notes and chaos.

Being set free, however, asserting our freedom for those around us…

This.

This gives beauty, peace, joy. This kind of freedom is what brings out our best, most true selves.

Art credits: Bonhoeffer plaque from Wiki Commons; Cellist photo from Amanda Wen

Temptation

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Elizabeth

Temptation.

It swirls around me like a hurricane

sending my intentions spinning into the blackened sky.

I hear the voice of God

I hear Him tell me what is good

Why can I not obey?

My consistency is that I fail to listen

My constant is that I continue to fall.

The ugly truth?

I don’t believe God.

I don’t believe Him when He tells me what is best.

If I believed, I would obey.

If I trusted in God’s goodness, His love, I would always do what He asks.

I would choose love instead of anger.

I would choose compassion rather than bitterness.

I would forgive instead of clinging to my grudge.

I would assume the best rather than enjoying my irritation.

I would think of others and forget about myself.

How can I obey,

how can I root out this ugliness that is deep inside my heart?

I cannot listen when I will not trust.

And yet I remember.

God is mercy and God is grace.

He changes hearts and He captures our gaze.

He is faithful if we ask;

His wisdom He delights to give.

Christ stayed in the wilderness

He faced down our sin

He trusted in God

Trusted God’s love and goodness

Christ conquered to make me a conqueror.

Grace.

It captures my heart and teaches me to trust

changing my nature so that I am now able to believe what God says

And obey.

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Living Generous

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Elizabeth

It is often difficult to be generous. It is hard to give freely of our time, our resources, our hearts.

It is often difficult to trust. It is hard to open ourselves to others, leaving ourselves vulnerable to betrayal.

It is often difficult to see the abundance that is in God, and perhaps this is why it is so difficult to give it all away.

The widow whom Jesus noticed giving up her last coins in the temple could see this abundance. She saw how beautiful and full living in God’s life could be. She saw what we must open our own eyes to see: that we can only be generous and trust God with our lives when we see that our life in God, this kingdom of God here on earth, is abounding in life and love and joy.

Yes, we live in a broken, fallen world, but we don’t have to wait for the end of all things for God’s rule on earth to begin. Something occurred in creation when Jesus was raised from the dead. Something began at the resurrection that begins to bring God’s new life to this earth here and now. Paul speaks of us, among other things, as a new creation in Christ. I am not a theologian, so I do not pretend to understand how this happens or even exactly what is occurring.

Yet perhaps part of what this means is that we are called to bear witness to the perfect life in God, the perfect life of Genesis 1 & 2 and Revelation 21 & 22. We are called to live life in a way that bears witness to the perfection that we as well as all of creation will become, and perhaps simply living a witness kind of life is the way in which we are right now bringing God’s kingdom to fruition in our world.

When we act, as followers of Jesus Christ in the world, as if the limitations of this world set the boundaries for how we can act, then we are…failing in our witness to the cosmic redemption that has been accomplished in Jesus Christ ~ Jonathan Wilson, author of God’s Good World: Reclaiming the Doctrine of Creation

So let us live lives full of generosity and trust, opening our eyes to the abundance of life around us. The very same abundance that is ours in a witness life in Christ.

Art Credit: The Widow’s Mite by James Tissot

Keep Fighting

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Elizabeth

To live life well is hard.

It is difficult to live deliberately, to continue to work for the good of yourself and those you love. It is easier to coast, to react, to let things slide.

For myself, it is easier to let the clutter pile up than to keep our house feeling like a home. It is easier to read mind-candy sorts of novels than to ponder the nature of our God and this universe. It is easier to let my children learn on their own or through their schools, to allow my girls get away with small acts of unkindness and to be passive in the way they discover God than to fight for their hearts and their minds. It is easier to let my relationship with my husband drift, to sit in our separate corners in the evenings than to work to know him and enjoy him.

Often I do not want to fight. I do not want to fight for what is good. I do not want to fight for what is God-honoring and God-pleasing.

Yet I fight anyway. I fight because I love and, in this world anyway, loving requires you to fight.

I don’t fight perfectly, though. I fight in fear of the needs that others have. I fight in fear of my own inability to give anything good. I fight in fear of doing the wrong thing and causing irreparable harm.

But still I fight, imperfect as it may be. I fight in obedience to One who fought for me.

Just like you. You go and you fight. You go to the bedside of the sick or even the dying and you fight. You go to the home of someone who is lonely and you fight. You go to a meeting of a church group in need of volunteers and you fight. You go to the food pantry, the orphanage, the shelter, and you fight. You go to funeral, the party, the study, and you fight.

We go because it is where His way leads us; and again and again we are blessed by our going in ways we can never anticipate, and our going becomes a blessing to the ones we go to because when we follow His way, we never go entirely along, and it is always something more than just ourselves and our own emptiness that we bring. ~ Frederick Buechner

So keep going. Keep fighting. And be blessed because when you go and when you fight, you are never fighting alone.

Art credit: photo of Christ carrying the cross by Asta Rastauskiene

Family

Posted on January 10, 2014 by Elizabeth

Imagine that you are out taking a walk in your neighborhood and you stroll down a street that is a little unfamiliar. The road is lined with sidewalks and trees, the houses are evenly spaced with a bit of yard for each. The houses are nothing fancy, just small, American Dream with a white picket fence sorts of houses. As you stroll along, just as the shadows begin to lengthen and the creeping dusk begins to carry with it the scent of a coming rain, one lighted window catches your eye. You pause and find yourself caught by an image. Young adults, seated around a table with a card game on it, joined by an older couple. Children playing together on the floor. A gray-haired elderly man walks in using a cane. You are not sure why the scene has so captivated you, you really must be getting home before the rain begins to fall, but something about the sight of extended family enjoying each other’s company keeps you rooted for longer than you should have stayed.

What are your thoughts as you stand there, feeling chilled by the damp in the air yet unwilling to walk away just yet? Are you filled with a longing you can’t quite explain? Does it remind you of your own family and the time you had with them just the other week? Do you wonder what bitter fights and disappointments lurk in a room more removed from the street views?

What is it about a family?

We all want one. Even those who say they don’t need anyone around would, I dare say, wish deep inside for a perfect family to love them.

Even the word itself brings a picture of love and peace, acceptance and light. The idea of multiple generations caring for one another is enough to set our hearts yearning for an ideal.

Does family really matter? In this world that would tell us that career is more important than children, that independence is better than living intertwined, is family truly that important?

Yes. Emphatically yes.

Families were designed to bring us back to God. There is much about the workings of a family that draws us in, that points our hearts toward God.

The miracle of the birth of a baby, for instance, turns your mind toward thoughts of God, especially God as Father. When you hold your own baby for the first time, your heart is drawn to mystery, drawn to contemplate the miracle of creation. I just read this in WORLD magazine:

The baby daughter of writer Whittaker Chambers helped to move him from Communism to Christ. Chambers wrote inWitness (1952), “My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: ‘No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.’”

These children are gifts from God sent to turn us back to Him.

Other purposes of family? Those who have been raised in godly families are more able to see the goodness of submitting to God’s authority because they have seen how good life is when we submit to the authority of our parents. Birth and death connect us to God far beyond most other events in our lives, and we can truly experience this connection best if we are surrounded not by institution alone but by those who know and love us best.

Our families are shrinking in size. We think nothing of moving far away from our parents and grandparents. We fill our lives with so many activities that we lose sight of the hearts of those who are most precious to us.

Sometimes these things are unavoidable. Yet if we do not at least deliberate and ponder this mystery of what was intended by the One who created the very idea of family, I fear that we will lose something sacred, some thing that keeps us close to the heart of God.

And anything that keeps us close to the heart of God is too rare and precious to be tossed away careless.

Living in Tension

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Elizabeth

We all live in a tension between seeming opposites, sliding between one extreme and the other as though we were children sliding back and forth across the kitchen floor in our footie pajamas.

We want to accomplish much during our day, and we wish we could curl up on the couch with a book or the remote.

We plead with a good god for help when things fall apart, and we wonder how any god but the cruelest sort could watch while life disintegrates.

We would die for our children, and we feel a strong urge to toss them out any nearby window.

We long to dream big and serve those who are suffering and downtrodden, and we despair that anything we could do could possibly make any difference.

We desire to follow after Christ with all that we are, and we secretly speculate whether He even exists.

Emotions are fickle and are often the source of these tensions that send us skidding back and forth in an attempt to live well. Even on our best days when we yearn to serve God with all of our heart, we feel unsure of what that really means.

One day we think that perhaps we should sell our home and move to the inner city. The next we think that perhaps God wishes for us to love our right-now neighbor whose cat has just dug up our roses.

One day we think that we should create something beautiful that will point millions to God. The next we think that we should write a letter to our uncle who needs to hear about love.

One day we think that God asks us to sacrifice much and preach gospel to those who despair. The next we think that God asks us to be obedient in small ways with the family and friends He has placed around us.

What do we do with these tensions? What do we do with these competing wishes and desires? Does God ask for big dreams and risky sacrifices or does He smile upon small acts of faithfulness and childlike demonstrations of obedience?

I am learning that He gives varying numbers of talents to different people, even varying tasks to the same people in different stages of their lives.

I am learning that He asks us to wait patiently for His call, to take one step of faith at a time, to carry out one obedient act that may lead to more. I am learning that He asks us to continue living in tension, knowing that those who get comfortable are not as easy to move, knowing that those who feel most at home in this world are not readying themselves or anyone else for a perfect home.

I am learning that just living in peace with this tension, taking each next step as He guides, is what we are meant to do, even when it doesn’t feel like quite enough.

How to Give Yourself Grace

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Elizabeth

I’ve written about it before in this space, but since I will never act perfectly until the day I see my Lord face to face, I will just have to continue to write about it in hopes that this act of writing will somehow help me. Perhaps it will help someone else as well.

I want so desperately to follow Jesus without having to fight against myself; I want to do the right thing at the right time without a raging internal struggle; I just want it to be easier for me to obey. Will you join me over at Embracing Grace to talk about the grace God gives us even when we can’t give that grace to ourselves? I’d love to meet you over there.
(http://embracinggrace.net/2013/11/how-to-give-yourself-grace/)

Living by Formula

Posted on November 8, 2013 by Elizabeth

Formulas are nice when you want to control your results.

Living creatively is risky.

Yet the first thing that we are told about this God in whose image we are created is that He Himself is creative. He is a creator.

You can never tell what will come of living creatively. Even many who are courageous enough to practice an art form and share it with the world would prefer to live more formulaically.

Many of our choices in this life can be directly guided by what God says through His Scriptures. Am I angry with someone? I should not kill them. Do I see something I like in a store window? I should not steal it.

Yet there are so many other areas in our lives where we are asked to live as courageously as artists, to be riskily creative with our choices. We ask God where we should live, where we should go to school, whom we should marry, what sort of career we should pursue, how exactly we should parent our children, and we are dissatisfied with the answer that God can use us wherever we are and on whatever path we choose.

There are other, more specific situations, in which we long with all of our being to do the right thing, to obey God, to be like Jesus, yet that right thing is far from clear. This is where we yearn for a formula. We desperately want to be able to turn to a page, a verse, and get a specific answer for a specific issue.

We tell ourselves it is because we want to obey, yet perhaps it is often closer to the truth that we simply do not trust God’s Spirit in us. We do not trust that the Holy Spirit can guide us in the way that honors God. We are too fearful to take the risk of living like an artist.

I have been in the middle of just such a situation this week and have found myself searching anxiously for a formula to tell me what to do. I was attacked by a dog, a dog that is owned by a neighbor with a history of keeping dogs who have to be put down for attacking people.

Whether or not my neighbor knows God, I am not aware. What an amazing opportunity to make God known to her! And I live in a neighborhood filled with children. God asks us to protect the weak, to care for those who cannot care for themselves.

How can I do both of these things? How can I glorify God to my neighbor and protect the children of our neighborhood at the same time? Certainly an eternal soul is more important than any physical harm, yet God also calls us to work toward justice and the defense of the weak.

Part of the trouble that I (and most of you, I would wager!) like to know my path several steps in advance. Preferably enough steps in advance to allow me to see the end. I do not like walking forward when I can only see the space where my foot will land next.

I knew my next step. I knew that God was asking me to meet with the owner of the dog and just speak with her, but that wasn’t enough. I wanted to know what would happen after that. I wanted to see all the way to the end, to know how I would both protect the children and make God known to my neighbor.

God did not ask me to plan out all of my steps to the end. He did not tell me the formula I should use to accomplish both of these goals. He did not give me the task of making certain that everything was ordered perfectly in order to reach His aims.

He only asked me to do the first thing and to trust Him with the rest, to live creatively and allow the Spirit to guide me one step at a time.

So I did. I met with the dog’s owner without knowing what would come next. I took the risk of starting down this path, trusting that God will shine His light ahead when the time is right. I don’t yet know the ending to this story. I don’t know how God will work things out.

So I live like an artist, taking the risk to wait for His light without planning all of my steps to completion, knowing that God is far more able to control the ending than any number of formulas that I might follow.

Even though I still like formulas.

Art credits: God Creating the Sun, the Moon and the Stars by Jan Breughel; Paint-by-numbers photo by Isabelle Bart; Christ with the Children by Carl Bloch; Christ and the Samaritan Woman by Henryk Siemiradzki

Worship

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Elizabeth

Arms raised to the sky

Music swirls around

Voices reach to the heavens

Heaven reaches back down.

Hands cleaning and scrubbing

Words of kindness reach out

Placing others before you

Giving to all those without.

Fingers clenching the blanket

Tears slip to the ground

Head bowed in anguish

Whispers of praise still resound.

All this and more

Is Creation’s purpose

Let all life be filled

With this splendid worship.

I Don’t Want to Be Holy

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Elizabeth

“Be holy” says God.

But we don’t want to be holy. We want to cling to our busyness and our pride and our little insignificant sins that really are more foundational than we would like for them to be.

Yet every once in awhile we surprise ourselves with a momentary longing to be holy. Will you join me over at Embracing Grace as I talk about what this means? I’ll meet you there.

(http://embracinggrace.net/2013/09/i-dont-want-to-be-holy/ if the above links didn’t work.)