things, a bunch of things

I was thinking the other day about stories, specifically testimonies, about God and Jesus and how He's changed someone's life. I remember the first time I had to share my testimony, I mentioned to someone that I wasn't sure what exactly to include---and what to leave out. The reply was, "Put all of it!"
Perhaps it is just the geek in me that wants to say, "You cannot put all of it; storytelling in itself is limited to choices and limitations." But I must not get academic about it.
I recently discovered a quote from the singer Jason Gray, which goes as,

"I think the best thing that can happen to us is to be 'found out' for all that we are, our religious and human pretenses stripped away to reveal our sin, pettiness, and weakness. Then we can devote our energies to better endeavors than the constant masquerade of sufficiency. The added benefit is that people are able to see how God's grace works in a real person's life. When we come clean about our brokenness, Christ becomes the star of our testimony and not us."

What was meant by "Put all of it!" was not to censor for the sake of protecting my name or saving me embarrassment, or making me look like the hero. I really really love the Gray quote. Life really is all about Jesus.

When you grow up in a Christian household, when you've gone to church longer than you've gone to school, when you've learned the songs to memorize the books of the Bible before you knew all of your multiplication tables, if you got saved when you were young and not even aware of your own vulnerability to sin, only faintly understanding you are sinful---sharing your testimony can get pretty tricky. Not because it happened so very long ago. But because, at least I find this in my own life, I have to, in the present, remind and be reminded of the gospel and what that really means for my own life now. My testimony is continually happening.
When I wrote up my testimony for the first time, it was six pages long, single-spaced. I got saved in the second sentence.

I was reminded only recently of my way back past. I got saved when I was in 6th grade. I don't remember the date, but I remember the night and what led up to it. Before that, I had "said the prayer" and "walked down the aisle" at kid's church. I think I was six. I remember in sixth grade I didn't want to, didn't really know how, to tell someone my testimony because I thought I was quite old for just getting saved.

And I remember poems. I wrote them mostly when I was mad. I was always mad. But I also wrote them to somehow dissolve my anger. I feel like God use poetry to teach me things in a way that made sense to me.

This post is kind of all over the place. I will end with one of the earliest poems I wrote.

(note: I was really into the sonnet form then. This particular poem is not set in a consistent meter. Obviously it is a metaphor, and I'm sure you have heard this analogy before.)

Sonnet No. 3

Like a healthy ray of light You came in.
But You didn't just shine, no, You contended
to make the flowers grow, intended
to heal them when they were so thin.

I loved the sun. I loved to bask
in Strcngth exceeding the strongest strong.
But I thought You were wrong
when You made it rain. I rang my voice to ask

of Your move to send forth thunder, to
damp the brightest morning with the sending of the storm,
to drown the living, and to cool the friendly warm.
I cried out to sue, but God already knew,

"This is your trying, my child, your gain
for flowers can't grow without rain."

Back

And here I am. Writing another blog post. It's been quite a while, but I think that should be ok.

Galatians 5:4-6
4You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. 5But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. 6For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.

Last Sunday night I went to a concert in Southern Florida. Jimmy Needham was the artist, a singer whom I had only recently discovered.
I'm not here to write a concert review, but I will mention a few things about it. Jimmy Needham is pretty well-known around the country, so I assumed there would be a lot more people than there were. It was just a tiny conference-style room. We were there 45 minutes early and had the closest seats, right behind the reserved chairs. So we got the full experience. They started out with some worship by the home church's band. It was incredible, not because they were stunnily talented (they were, but I only half noticed it), but because it had been a long time since I had been in that kind of environment, live music, in a crowd, all of us singing to Jesus. A few months back I had thought about how truly amazing it is, just to have so many people using their energy to sing to God. And there's a difference, singing to God and for God and because of God. All three happened.

And then Jimmy came and sang/spoke for an hour and a half. What particularily stayed with me was his explanation of his song "Forgiven and Loved." He explained that it started out as a journal entry. "Tell me I'm forgiven and loved." Jimmy spoke of the God of his earlier years, the God with a "disappointed" sign plastered across his face.
I have been struggling this probably my entire life. It is my flesh and my insecurities that claim God is not pleased, that God's wrath remains against my sin, that I do not deserve love and that I cannot please God.
There is a lot of Truth in those feelings. That is probably why I feel that way---there is something broken in my communion with God, there is something broken about me, something actually ISN'T right.
But Jesus makes it right. He made it right and is making it right. Romans 8:1 says, "Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." None. At all. Jimmy kept repeating that that is the craziest verse in the Bible. It really is. It goes against my instinct. I want to work for it, but God says I absolutely, never ever can.
See it like this:
All of us have become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
Isaiah 64:6

And then:

...in all these things we are more than conquerers through him who loved us.
Romans 8:37

How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!
1 John 3:1


"We cannot trade empty for empty, we must go to the waterfall, for there’s a break in the cup that holds love, inside us all."
David Wilcox

"But how much more could we enjoy each other if instead of trying to get them to fill us we walked with each other toward the waterfall?"
Mike Donehey

I need the waterfall.