Call Me Rebellious

Stamp it on my forehead please. REBELLIOUS-ANTI-RELIGIOUS

I have been labeled as "religious" more than once over the years, and I am OK with that because I know I have been guilty of it in the past. Religion however, kills relationship. Too many times in the past we have gotten it wrong. Church is not supposed to be about giving people a set of rules and new things to feel guilty about. It's about helping them to see who God created them to be. He created each of us with gifts, talents and with a unique purpose. Jeremiah 18 speaks of God as the potter. "Can I not do with you as this potter? Look, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are you in My hand." What the potter makes depends on the quality of the clay. What God makes of His people depends on their response. The clay can frustrate the potter's intention and make him alter the vessel. The quality of a people limits what God will do with them. It is not up to us to mold people into the "image" we want. God does not want cookie cutter Christians. The church needs to have a garage sale. It's time to clean house and get rid of all the "junk" collected over the years that have separated people from God. Church is about relationship with God and others. Religion is about rules and regulations.

Jesus's greatest anger was reserved for religious leaders who weighed people down with guilt and shame. He says to a group of Bible scholars and teachers, "You experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them." He goes on to say that it is possible for religious leaders to actually get in the way of people entering into the life of God (Velvet Elvis - Repainting the Christian Faith, Rob Bell).

Let me clarify something. I am not saying "church" is bad, or a certain denomination is bad. The past twenty years that I have spent in church have been very influential in my life. However, like anything else it has its ups and downs. The recommendation that I would give is this: Don't be a church hopper. It's not healthy and takes away from what matters most - relationship. The relationships we form with others (and by relationship I mean we can truly say we let them into our "messy" lives) is what spurs us on in our relationship with God. If you are in a unhealthy church, or it is not healthy for you, find something else that works. Sometimes that is necessary. In the Bible, the term "church" refers to not a building, but to the group of people who believe in Christ and are followers of Him - the body of Christ. If you do not go to church, at least find others in the body who you can fellowship with. What I have learned the past few years is this: When I visit with my best friend over coffee each week - I am at church. When my girlfriends and I go out to dinner on a Friday night - I am at church. They speak into my life. I speak into theirs. We share a common bond. We are followers of God. It's all about relationship. And please don't say that you don't go to church because it's full of hypocrites, because OF COURSE it is. They are everywhere! Half the population has been married to hypocrites that they are now divorced from. They said one thing, and did another.

M. Scott Peck in his book, Further Along The Road Less Traveled, decribes my relationship with God perfectly.

Stage 1: The Criminal Stage: Our lives are chaotic, without boundaries, and we just grab for whatever we can get.

Stage 2: Rules-Based: We find God. We find church. The church helps us set rules and boundaries. In stage 2 the teachings of the church are effective and help us raise good families. Most people stay in Stage 2. Though not necessarily bad, it's very religious.

Stage 3: Rebellious: We begin to question all the rules we learned in Stage 2. The healthy rebellious kid asks, "What's behind these rules?" Stage 3 is threatening to Stage 2 and you may hear loud cries of alarm. "Lawbreakers!" Stage 3 people don't usually realize there is a Stage 4.

Stage 4: Mystical - Stage 2 is about the answers that were given to our questions. Stage 4 is about experiencing the answers for ourselves. It's about a REAL God who actually is doing REAL stuff in our lives. It's about relationship. It's about tearing down religion.

When you experience Stage 4 you find yourself in a place of not just knowing "about" God, but knowing God. In Stage 4 you not only know you are supposed to love people, but you truly learn to love people. It's about passion.

"I came to love you late, O Beauty so ancient and new; I came to love you late. You were within me and I was outside where I rushed about wildly searching for you like some monster loose in your beautiful world. You were with me, but I was not with you. You called me, you shouted to me. You broke past my deafness. You bathed me in your light, you wrapped me in your splendor, you sent my blindness reeling. You gave out such a delightful fragrance, and I drew it in and came breathing hard after you. I tasted, and it made me hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned to know your peace." - St. Augustine

Wanderlust

If there is one person in my family that I feel I identify with the most, it is my grandmother. It is from her that I get my predilection for travel, or insatiable wanderlust from. Wikipedia describes the term wanderlust as "an ache for the distance." When I was a child, my grandmother would travel and send me piles of postcards (which I still have to this day) and bring me back souvenirs from all the far-away places she visited. She went to Disneyworld and brought me back stuffed Mickeys and told stories of riding through "It's a Small World." Almost thirty years later, I made it there with two kids in tow, who made fun of me as I cried while riding in the boat through the little doll world. She also brought me a cotton plant from the fields of Alabama, and described to me the shows she saw in New York City. With every trip and tale my longing grew. It was not surprising that she came to visit me many years later (at almost 80 years of age) when I lived in The Netherlands.

I have been blessed to experience many adventures, and to visit many parts of our country, as well as other countries. I am always amazed at this beautiful world God created. I always feel very insignificant when I am standing before another of His wonderful creations for the very first time. Genesis 1 speaks of how the earth was without form, and void, and then He spoke it into being. Who is the great person who discovered that the earth was round? It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers (Isaiah 40:22).

I have a fascination for water. It would be impossible to live without water. Water is life-giving. In a spiritual sense, you need more than water, you need spirit. John 3:16 states unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. Water stands for the physcial birth. Spirit refers to the spiritual birth that happens when you believe and come to know Jesus. I am not talking religion - I hate religion. I'm not the religious type. That's another story for another day. In 1990, while living overseas, I made a trek to the Belgian coast of the North Sea. I was 20 years old, and had never seen the ocean or sea before. It could not have been a more perfect moment. Giant sand dunes hid the sea from my view. I raced up the hill as fast as I could go. When I reached the top, I gasped as I looked out over the sea. It was what I call a "God moment." That day I not only saw the sea, but I touched, tasted, smelled and heard it. It became a part of me. Since then I have partaken of the Atlantic, the Pacific and other various waterways such as the Rhine River, Lake of the Ozarks, Resurrection Bay in Alaska, and Lake Koningsee (picture attached) in Bavaria. When I am by the water I feel cleansed, and free. I have pictures of my oldest child when she first learned to walk, running on Myrtle Beach. She loves to look at those pictures. She had not been to the ocean since. Two years ago, I took my girls to the ocean for the first time at Clearwater Beach in Florida. I was amazed at their reaction. My daughter lay down in the water and smiling said, "Mom, I feel like I'm home." My youngest was amazed by the shells along the beach. They watched baby dolphins playing in the water. Wanderlust. They are like me.

As an adult, I know I missed my calling. I truly believe that God instilled that "aching for the distance" within me for me to be a missionary. When I see images of Haiti, I long to be there. Let me refer back to my blog about "purpose." Sometimes our purpose involves those things we love and have a passion for. That's ok though, I know He has another plan for me. God is the god of second chances. Someday, I will take my kids on a short-term mission trip. They have that longing and love to serve mankind like me. Wanderlust with a purpose. I also have an aching for that distant place - my eternal home with the God of creation.

Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. Genesis 1: 31

Living Dangerously

Recently I attended a Christine Caine conference in California where she spoke about living "dangerously." I was encouraged by this woman who once very ordinary, now speaks before thousands of people and is the founder of the A21 Campaign, an organization that fights human trafficking.

When I think of living dangerously, I am reminded of the Biblical story of Esther. The story of Esther (a true story) is about an evil man named Haman who is plotting to massacre God's people. Esther is used by God to save her people and leads the nation to freedom. Esther was an ordinary, orphaned Jewish woman, raised by her cousin Mordecai, who ends up becoming a queen. Esther proves to us that God opens destiny to any person willing to follow Him. A famous line in this story is Mordecai's plea to her, "Who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" Esther's response is one of someone willing to live dangerously. "And so I will go to the king, which is against the law; and if I perish, I perish!"

What we need to understand is that life is risky and safety is a myth. Jesus did not die a death of persecution for us so that we can be "nice" and do nothing with our lives. We need to take risks and stop living mediocre lives. We can believe that God has great things in store for us. Why? Because God is not small, he is a great big God. We try to shrink God down through religion, culture, and traditions. He is much bigger than that.

This past year God has opened my eyes to new things such as global social issues. God has purposely created us for a purpose. Psalm 39:11 says our lives are as a vapor. Time is short. It's time to bring God out of the church and our Christian subculture. This year we can make a difference whether it be in our families, in our community, or globally. Opportunities await. It's time to live dangerously!

"We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Years Day." - Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Happy New Year!

It's a Wonderful Life!

I love Christmas and what it represents to me. It is easy, even as an adult to feel anticipation, excitement, joy, hope and peace. For a little while the world seems brighter, better, and almost magical. Christmas always comes to an end though. Life goes on, and we go back to the daily grind of life and routines.

J.B. Phillips wrote, "Nothing can alter the fact that we live on a visited planet." He urges us as we daily tread through life on the surface of this planet, to reflect with confidence that, "My God has been here, here on this planet!" With that in mind, we can choose daily to live with joy, hope, peace and anticipation. Don't get me wrong, I have bad days. There are days I live with sickness, sadness, fear and loneliness. However, I have to choose daily to overcome this. There is truth to the fact that we choose how we want to live. What kind of legacy do you want to leave? I want my children to know that life is fun, wonderful and worth living, despite the challenges.

I have been reflecting on how short life is, and how quickly things in our lives can change. Sometimes what seems important at the time, can mean nothing in an instant. A few years ago when packing to move, it suddenly hit me how ridiculous it was that I had cabinets full of good dishes. I vowed that when I unpacked, all my fine china and crystal would never be hidden away again. Today, we daily use these things, crazy as it may seem. We choose to live differently.

What changes can you make in your house to live differently today? Maybe this Christmas season you can establish new Christmas traditions. I have found that it is our traditions that have held us together through difficult times. Even when everything else in our life was different, there were certain things that we made sure remained the same. This has been important for my children who have a hard time with change. Here are some of our family traditions:

- hot chocolate on the first snow day
- the Duluth Christmas parade
- watching Macy's Thanksgiving parade on TV
- baking Christmas cookies at Grandma's
- drinking eggnog while decorating the tree
- attending church on Christmas Eve

Yesterday my friend and I drove to Duluth for our fourth annual Christmas shopping spree. I shared with her how much our yearly trip meant to me. "It's tradition," I said. It has been like a shiny star on a dark night. It led me through my first Christmas season as a newly divorced, single mom and years of exhausting school finals, as simple as it seems.

Don't underestimate the power of tradition, and the power of how you choose to live. Life is short. I do not believe that God created me to live an ordinary life. It's time to live an abundant, extraordinary, wonderful life!

"Wake up to the sunlight with your windows open, don't hold in your anger or leaves things unspoken, wear your red dress, use your good dishes, make a big mess and make lots of wishes. Have what you want, but want what you have, and don't spend your life looking back. Turn up the music, turn it up loud, take a few chances and let it all out. 'Cause you won't regret it, looking back from where you have been. 'Cause it's not who you knew, and it's not what you did. IT'S HOW YOU LIVE!" (Point of Grace - How You Live)


Matthew 1-2 ...Wise men from the East came to Jerusalem saying, "Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have see His star in the East and have come to worship Him."

I Believe in Miracles Because She is One

As the heat from her forehead meets my hand, I feel fear rise up in me. The fear that can so easily wrap itself around a mother's heart like a tightly grasped fist. It brings me back to the first days after she was born.

She was born on May 10, the day before Mother's Day. I remember the moment she was born, as the Dr. exclaimed "Happy Birthday little girl!" She was so incredibly beautiful with her long, dark, wavy hair sticking out in all directions. No one could have prepared me for how I would feel. It was love at first sight. Two days later, as we were preparing to leave the hospital, the nurse approached me and told me that they discovered she had an irregular heart beat. Fear as I had never known before gripped my heart. I had to stop nursing her, because she would become too relaxed and her heart would slow to almost a stand still, and the alarms would sound. She was attached to various heart monitors. The next couple of days were spent learning infant CPR and learning how to manage the heart monitor. I remember thinking some strange and erratic thoughts such as, "I wish I could just put her back into my body. She was safer there." We left the hospital with an appointment scheduled to take her to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Once in awhile, I am asked why I believe in God. My reply is, "How can I not?" I didn't plan on this life. I sort of stumbled upon it. The funny thing about it, is that I never saw Him move in my life until I decided to follow Him. He is after all a gentleman. I didn't know I signed up for a supernatural life. It didn't take long for me to see Him start moving and aligning things in my life. Now I look back and see His big fingerprints all over my messy life. He works in wonderous and marvelous ways with what sometimes seems like no rhyme or reason.

So as I left the hospital that day, knowing my God was a great big God, I decided to take my baby girl to church. It was prayer night, and there were only a few people there. I walked to the front of the church and lay her on the altar. I gave her to God, and we prayed that He would heal her.

Two days later, we made the trip to Duke University. We had an appointment with a pediatric cardiologist. Upon arrival, I reached into the back seat to remove her infant seat from the car. As I looked into her tiny face, I was overwhelmed with love for this child I had just recently met. Fear overtook me and I started to weep. The Dr. spent the afternoon taking tests and studying her records. He finally came to us with his diagnosis. "Well, either she never had anything wrong with her, which I know is not true from her records, or God healed her." I looked at him and said, "Yes, you are right, God healed her."

That was almost 13 years ago. It's didn't stop there. Dr.'s spent the next year or so trying to figure out what had happened to her. When she was over a year old I was tested for Lupus because her pediatrician said that they find slow heart beats in babies born to mothers with Lupus. I tested negative for Lupus.

I have seen and experienced my share of miracles. Sometimes like this one, I have asked for them. Sometimes I have not asked for them, yet received them. Then there are the miracles that I have begged and pleaded God for, and have not received. That is when I have to choose to trust, because I believe all things are in His timing, and He holds the master plan.

1 Thess. 5:18: In all things give thanks....

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I need to be thankful in good times, and bad. This Thanksgiving may we remember that though we may lack, we have much to be thankful for and we can be confident that He knows what we need and that He has a plan for our lives.

Psalm 76:10-11: And I said, This is my anguish; but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High. I will remember the works of the Lord; Surely I will remember Your wonders of old.

Tenacity of Weasels

There was a time in my life that I thought I knew what my future held. I could see it, and I could almost touch it. And then it vanished. Life became new, uncertain, unfamiliar and without clear purpose.

During this time, I sat one early morning in a cafe, sipping my usual latte, surrounded by the buzz of customers and overwhelmed with all the studying I had to do. Exhausted from many late nights, I opened to my latest assignment and groaned as I read the title, Living Like Weasels, by Annie Dillard. "Weasels? Ridiculous," I thought. And then I began to read one of the most profound things I have ever read. It had to do with the tenacity of weasels. Tears streamed down my face as I read the words.

Weasels are obedient to instinct. They bite their prey at the neck. They either split the jugular vein at the throat or crunch the brain at the base of the skull, and they do not let go. Annie shared a story about a man who shot an eagle out of the sky. The dry skull of a weasel was fixed by the jaws to the eagle's throat. The belief is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and he nearly won. Her reflection was this: We can live any way we want. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender spot and plug into that pulse. Yielding, not fighting. Grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part.

It was in this place that I realized that I was exactly where I needed to be. Sometimes in the midst of what we see as nothing, we find everything. It was time to grasp onto my one necessity, my faith, and not let it go. I needed to stalk my calling, or purpose. The eagle to me represented my faith, and purpose. I decided I would not sit and hide under His wings, but I would soar with Him high wherever He might lead me. He is all that I need. I will refuse to let go, surrendering to wherever He takes me, hanging on with the tenacity of a weasel.

Beautiful Messy Garden

Spring is here and I am looking forward to getting my hands deep down in the dirt. Gardening, like blueberry picking is therapy for me. Colorful cosmos, perky pansies, and poppys are my favorite! I love to take that clean slate of dirt and create something beautiful out of it. Watching it's progress over time brings me satisfaction.

This past year I read The Shack, a novel written by WM. Paul Young. The Shack is a story about a man named Mack who is mysteriously invited to a shack, a place of painful memories for him. At the shack he comes to terms with the horrible death of his daughter, as he has an incredible experiece with God. Can you imagine having coffee with God out on the porch, or lying on the dock with Him, while looking up at the stars that He created? This amazing book had me both laughing and crying. My favorite part of the book is when Sarayu (The Holy Spirit) asks Mack to help her in the garden.

As Mack approaches the garden he is stunned. He expects a perfectly manicured garden. What he discovers instead is a crazy, chaotic beautiful mess. Vegetables, herbs and fruit trees are randomly planted among a dazzling display of flowers. It is an amazing array of wild colors and patterns. Mack assists Sarayu with preparing ground by digging up roots. When he is finished, he steps back to survey the messy, but beautiful garden. He realizes there is still more work to be done. At this time, Sarayu reveals the secret of the garden to Mack:

"Mack, this garden is your soul. This mess is you! Together, you and I, we have been working with a purpose in your heart. And it is wild and beautiful and perfectly in process. To you it seems like a mess, but to me, I see a perfect pattern emerging and growing and alive."

I love this story because it reminds me that despite the mistakes we make, we are a work in process. I am a mess and God sees it as a lovely mess! Everyone has made mistakes. Being a "good" Christian, if there is such a thing, does not mean trying to follow all the rules, especially rules imposed by others. If one is truly seeking God he/she will have a desire to become the person God has created them to be. You can't expect a caterpillar to fly. It has to be transformed over time. He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ. (Phil 1:1) If you have made mistakes, let them go now! God is the author of forgiveness. They don't have to define you. There was a time in my life that I tried to act like a Christian and I did what I thought was expected of me. Let me tell you something, God does not want counterfeit, cookie cutter Christians. You are an original work of art. Pleasing others or trying to be like others will consume you. You will lose your passion for God. Walking in the land of religion will leave you feeling empty and feeling like you should do more. Aim to please Him. And better yet, don't judge others. Their walk is not going to look like your walk. It is frustrating when I hear people complain that they don't want to go to church because they feel like they aren't like the others there. You don't have to be, and maybe you are not supposed to be! Your beautiful messy garden of life is unique, created by the Master Gardener.

The Lord will guide you continually, And satisfy your soul in drought,

And strengthen your bones;

You shall be like a watered garden,

And like a spring of water,

whose waters do not fail.

Is 58:11