I’m trying to figure out how so many people I know do a full time gig while entertaining their passion business on the side. Within the in-betweens of their already swarming beehive of a life. Maybe it’s just me in my weakness, but I really don’t like living an unhealthy life because of the need to fill my life with aspirations and money. I really want to do this thing in a way that I can say to my grandchildren some day, “I went for the real thing. I didn’t compromise where it counts.” I want them to see me for a failing human, who took risks, and gave into the mystery that is life. That’s a scary thought though, to trust in the unknown. That’s a world where I say: “God dictates my steps. Not society.”
I see it often.. I hear it often even more. We fill fill fill fill fill our lives with pastimes instead of silence, because God forbid we grieve the silence. Women become girl bosses because they cannot or choose not to have children or choose to be super busy while being full time moms in order to prove they can have it all. Men climb to the tippy top of the food chain in order to seem strong. The passion of isolation is one of the only places we truly get to learn what it is to be like Christ, to understand even an ounce of what He put himself through. There is grace in surrender. There is grace in sacrifice. There is grace in giving up things. Jesus let people murder him.. He is God. He chose to leave earth because He knew there was a better way. In the garden you saw how much He didn’t want to.
If you can evaluate your life right now, would you say that you have cultivated a forest of greed or of gratitude? Many of us have these huge taped together over-malfunctioning- but-clean-but-shiny- gardens of greed. Greed, like lust, is not always connected to money. Greed is the wanting of more. Always more, more, more. It’s the enemy of gratitude. It’s the opposite of grace. In fact it refuses to let grace take over, because grace can only be realized when we surrender into knowing that we cannot do this life apart from Christ. Greed actually leads to lust. Lust is the specified greed in our life. You can lust after someones body, but you can also lust after how they live their life.
Again, when I write it’s from a place of contemplation in my own life, where Christ is moving and changing me. For the past couple of months I knew He was stirring in my heart to quit the beloved cafe I had been a part of since the first day it opened. I had found a sense of security in keeping busy every Friday and Saturday night with a schedule. By keeping myself busy within a setting I could logically tell myself that I’m making money because I need it in order to keep going, but I was very subtly avoiding the fact that I just didn’t want to feel rejected when no one asked me to do something on the weekends. I didn’t want to deal with the space that I knew I needed from the world, in order to delight in God. To delight in Him more than my wounds that I’ve learned to shine up and make into something that someone would see and want in their own life. I even need to take responsibility for making people lust after my successfully busy life. It’s weird to know that we can create lust for others through our own greed come to reality; when we do get what we want and the way that we allow ourselves to spin it to others.
God knew what it was like to feel rejected. I mean hey, don’t we all reject Him at least once a day in our lives? The guy is the King of Rejection. Because He knew this feeling, this hopelessness, this pain, He created the commandments; or the Law. It was all created so that we wouldn’t feel the sting of say someone cheating on us, or someone taking something of ours that was not theirs to take in the first place. By following these commandments we learn the Beatitudes, the blessings and the beauty of life amongst the pain what was opened up from the moment we chose against our Maker. The bible I’m learning is an open translation, a conversation, and it is also a process. Its this great encyclopedia from logic to love. And isn’t that just life? We start with what we know and stay for what we don’t.
I’m learning to surrender wholeheartedly into the silence. In this I am asking more questions than I ever have before, without desolation when the answer does not reach me right away. I found my calling as a painter, more so stumbled into it with practice, but it’s the road I’m on now. Now is the part where I give room to listen. Now is the part I stop clinging so closely to the fear of rejection and I move on from it. And I’m in that process of transition. Who knows what I’ll be up to on the weekends now, but luckily I know it will be more on track with where He needs me to be and go, and there is so much freedom within His boundaries and obedience.
So I feel like any of you more scatter-brained people (or as I’d like to call us “good at multi-tasking”) in the world will be able to really relate to what I’m about to throw down. Have you ever paced around your apartment or house looking for your keys? Getting really frustrated because you can’t find it right away? Jumping up and down.. letting out a few choice words in a fit of self-hateful rage. It escalates like that somedays no lie! One minute you’re just amped ready for the day, feeling good, looking good- then. Wait. Where are my keys? Where are my keys?? Where are my keys?! WHERE ARE MY KEYS? Where. Are. My. Keys. Slowly you realize you’re actually melodramatically taking your emotional rollercoaster through the 5 stages of grief. Oh come on, you know there are situations you do this too. It may not be when you lose something you need, but this moment of unexpected detour in your life was NOT invited to the celebration of your great day.
To keep this illustration alive, I was driving towards Red Cliff, AB from Medicine Hat so that I could find another good God filled nature area to spend some time being thankful for my life with Jesus. Of course. Socality. So hip, so real. Nature. Go outside #liveauthentic. Judge me. Go for it. I invite it. Anyways I was meandering down the highway and took a turn too early and realized I couldn’t get back to the highway without going around this loooooong, very unnecessary bend first. And immediately I could feel myself starting to get frustrated. At something so small as having to just spend some more time in the car. Really though, anyone one of us can admit that we tend towards frustration when we’re reared off the direct path to the destination that we planned for ourselves.
It’s not like you spent all that time dreaming up this perfect future for yourself to just
decide to have it all change drastically last minute and take you away from where you wanted to go. Guess what? If you’re a follower, God is probably going to make most of your life like this. We were never suppose to live in a state of security within the world. That security was meticulously created to be within the divine relational designs etched upon every tree trunk in the garden of Eden. Our lives were suppose to be a day-by-day love walk-a-bout with our Creator, with Him revealing to us the layers upon layers of our trees and the rings of character He made within our very being. Our original designs. Somewhere along the way we decided the world’s views/labels and cover-up would be good enough for us though.
Lately I’ve actually started submitting my off course daily doings to the Holy Spirit. I just walk around my apartment partnering with Him to help me find what I lost, or asking Him what His original intention for my day/path/drive/process was, and how He can work through it. I mean if you take the heart posture of seeing something that is “frustrating” you as something not as a finish line, but as an opportunity for God to show His glory, just imagine all the light-filled damage you can do on this broken planet. Your battles, your thoughts taken captive, your humanism will all be over-taken by the Creator of the universe. It’s going to get wrecked with gold. Wrecked with flowers. Wrecked with the master-planned beauty of living out God’s holiness on this earth. He knows all anyways, so why wouldn’t I ask him? Seems logical enough. And do you know what He does for me when I choose to ask Him into all of this mess? Because He’s so good, He responds! He shows me what I lost (in this case my keys) which are always in the most obvious of places (see I didn’t lose it in the first place), or He gives me a word of understanding in why I took off on the wrong path in the first place. He does it with such humble, gracious love, and shows me back to His doorway (mercy, me, oh my). When you invite the Spirit to fill you He replenishes/replaces/refills any lost part of you. You become your original design.
There is no cage keeping you from His love, His mercy, His light. None.
Detours lead us to asking for help and repentance, repentance to forgiveness, forgiveness to mercy. Mercy really just looks like love. True, pure love is always God.
“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.” Romans 8: 22-27
Did you know that you don’t actually have a finish line until Jesus comes? Or you die? Weird huh. Our lives are to be lived on this earth like we’re already in eternity. So with that in mind, why are you so frustrated when you make a mistake? When you go off the path of the righteous? Is it because you have to lay down your pride and repent in order to get rid of all that junk you just let into your life? Guys. The junk isn’t worth your time. The cross is. The overwhelming feeling of release from all of the shame and guilt you’ve placed on yourself by having one step in and one step out has no place in your life anymore. I declare that. Love has taken your place. Love has left little bread crumbs (each beautiful word written in the Good book) for you to follow back on the golden path to Jesus-dum. In reality those bread crumbs were blood drops, and your golden path was the dirt laid behind, engraved by the burden Jesus dragged to the cross for you. But He washed that all white as snow and left you with a golden path with baby bread crumbs to lead you along this narrow road, this incredible field of decisive vision to true beauty.
“It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows.” Galatians 5:13
So let’s not let these detours no matter big or small deter us from eternity with our incredibly benevolent Father on earth as it is in heaven. I push this because how you treat your days here spiritually and emotionally will probably be the way you will act and breathe and do in heaven. If you don’t start reading your Word everyday on earth here, how will you all of a sudden start loving it in heaven? Not gonna be a thing, guys. Sorry. Think about it. When you’re dating someone with the intention to get married to them you can’t just say “Well I’ll start acting (or thinking) like that when we’re married.” Huh? Do you really think that’ll cut it? Heart postures don’t just miraculously start changing (unless it’s God’s design) once you enter into something new, it’s a task, it’s a choice, it takes work at the beginning to make something into a habit. Once something becomes habit like that, it becomes second nature (but, ACTUALLY, according to the Word it becomes our first nature, as we look, act and sound more like Jesus). “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” 2 Corinthians 5:17. Beauty.
“My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God’s Spirit. Then you won’t feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don’t you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?” Galatians 5:16-18
Dear Jesus
Oh Lord thank you for today. Thank you for the breath in my lungs, I feel it all around me. I can’t imagine my life without you, and I never will. I imagine all the possibilities with you instead. I partner with your every thought of me, and my day, and those you place me around. Thank you Jesus. I pray that I would learn to never take a passive seat in my life when things seem to have gone into detour mode. I ask you to direct me in those periods of time so that I can build my life into love that I can lead to those around me. Jesus I ask you show me the path to righteousness. Lord give me the strength to leave behind me the dirt of the work I’ve done within the world, and wash it clean with your showers of love. Lord I ask you to make me humble, kill my pride, vindicate me of anything deterring me from your beautifully golden paths. Lead me to clear areas of your Word that speak life into what you whisper to me in my day. Lord you are good. Your responses are mighty, and always within my hearing range. Thank you. Lord I ask your Spirit to encourage me so that I may encourage others. Always bring my heart back to you Lord. Through every detour and every struggle, every lost part of me. Lord fill it with you, sustain it. Live for me Lord, because I have died to let you come. Let heaven come. In the name of Jesus I pray this out.
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