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."

quotes from piper

"May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucifies to me, and I to the world." Galatians 6:14

I'm rereading a book called "Don't Waste Your Life." Written by John Piper. I won't get into details too much on how awesome this book is, and how much I love Piper's writing. I won't tell you how gusto it is and how desperate and serious the message he is trying to convey is. You will have to experience it yourself.

On the bus ride home yesterday I read the chapter entitled "Boasting Only in the Cross."

"The opposite of wasting your life is living life by a single God-exalting and soul-satisfying passion." (43)

"How serious is this word 'single'? Can life really have that much 'singleness' of purpose? Can work an leisure and relationships and eating and lovemaking and ministry all really flow from a single passion? Is there something deep enough and big enough and strong enough to hold all that together? Can sex and cars and work and war and changing diapers and doing taxes really have a God-exalting, soul-satisfying unity?" (43-44)

"Oh, that God would help me waken in you a single passion for a single great reality that would unleash you, and set you free from small dreams, and send you, for the glory of Christ, into all the spheres of secular life and to all the peoples of the earth." (48)

I could end there. There is so much to speak about those three quotes!

I have found the phrases, "unleash you," and "set you free from small dream" to be one of the most true things I've realized this year. All of the dreams I could have for myself, for advancing myself, for 'a good cause,' for entering schools or performing or writing or personality or anything else is, in actuality, a no-dream, a phony. They only drain my energy and delusionate my mind and starve my longings.

Ah, what could my purpose be?

Philippians 3:4b-14

If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.

7But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. 10I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

12Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. 13Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

Matthew 16:25

For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.


Oh Lord, I want to find my life in your cross, I want to value your grace above anything. do not be my number one, but my only one.