part of grace

Several days ago my summer ended. And last night the fall 2013 semester started at the place where I have lived for what seems like so long. I wasn't there and this thought gives me mixed emotions.

Chapters ending in my life and new ones starting.

I had a lot of expectations for this summer. Which is always very dangerous because expectations don't always pan out and sometimes bring you to a rather disappointing place.

Did I expect for death to happen four times over? Perhaps yes, after all I worked in health care at the local retirement center, but still when I saw the family roaming about the halls for hours as they waited for death I inwardly cringed.

Never does one expect to check facebook one Monday morning and find that a national tragedy has struck so close to your heart. Never do you expect that the gospel will be preached so clearly to so many through a friend's death. Sometimes though your trying to understand the reality of pain and the watching of others in pain. I lose words. Not knowing what to say and how to say it, so I pray for grace and hope somehow to be the comfort and not the irritant.

Death was one of the themes from this summer, but death wasn't the only trait of this summer. Learning things in each in every hour. Realizing my depravity and my need of a Savior.

I will thank God for this I scribbled in my journal as I sat on the hardwood of the hallway. Little things happen and they pile everywhere till its seems the rooms in the "house of my life" are disastrous mess.

I didn't quite accomplish what I intended to this summer and this is discouraging to me.

The grace of God does not discourage me. I failed to meet my own expectations, but did I fail God's? Honestly yes I did because I wasn't always faithful in everything I was given this summer.

Summer is over. The mistakes made cannot be undone.

Do I look back with despair or do I thank God for grace and move forward?

Life is dozens and dozens of tiny steps of learning God's grace. Sometimes its slipping backwards, so you can be carried by God alone and not your own actions.

Its all part of grace and I need nothing else.

The Words we should say.

I'm so tired.

Discouraged.

Struggling to have a good attitude about...

Christan fellowship.

Sigh...

Sometimes I wonder about my tendency to be such a deep thinker. About the longings and cravings for deep conversation.

Wanting conversation to go beyond comparing how good our weeks are. I'm sick and tired that seem so shallow you barely get your toes wet.

Still I never start anything deeper. When its been established that we both had "good weeks" or maybe they were crazy weeks but we laugh it off,  and say that it was okay. Was it okay?

Then I comment about the weather. Sometimes most embarrassedly I must admit I will talk about the weather to 7 different people. Blush...

I'm the one tired of conversation never going anywhere, but I'm the one quickly hoping on the merry go round of "safe conversation". The conversations where its easy to hide the struggles and the needs for spiritual encouragement.

"therefore encourage one another and build up one another, just as you also are doing" 

Paul commended the Thessalonian for their constant building up of one another. I wonder if he would give me the same "gold star" for encouraging those around me.

I am the one with stuttering words and sometimes feeling awkward when I open up my month and say something other then "well look its raining again".

A sweet friend called me this week. In the 10 minute conversation she blurted out her struggle and I spilled my confession.

We both promised to pray. When we remember to do so because we have trouble doing that sometimes.

When the cell service cut me off. I felt as if I had dropped out of the zone of thin air and into the world where air easily available to breath.

I typed words into instant chat that went far deeper than the silly jesting that can be so fun to do and admitted something.

Frustration cannot define my life when I'm not willing to be the one to say anything different .

I wonder if we were designed to look past the outward crust. Ignoring what we see and going straight to the heart. Ignoring my preconceived notions...judgments.

Its not fair. Not fair to the person to assume something they have not had a chance to prove otherwise.

Not fair to myself when I miss out on a conversation that could teach me far more than I ever could ever expect.

And it doesn't take much. Just words. The williness to edify. The willingness to love those I talk too. The willingness to let my words  to bear the aroma of Christ. Not the flavor of my seemingly weeks.

"edify one another"

Oh my why does it come so hard? Praise the Lord for His grace that gives me words to speak.

By His grace alone may I be able to to have a conversation that strives for something deep.

Broken

The circle of friends. They were tight like nothing else. Weathering the storms of the ups and downs of college life. Loving to debate theology for hours on end and not always having the same opinion on such matters.

Incredible humor and the love fun characterized them. Siting at the round table in the cafeteria it was impossible to ignore them.

Slowly the class grew small as others left for other places and ambitions, but still the were the elusive circle that would not let each other go.

Fiercely they stood by one another in the thick and the thin.

One day they stood in a line of blue with diplomas in hand. Ready to be launched into life, but not ready to bid goodbye the company of each other

Goodbye they said and off they fled to all corners of the country.

The circle only grew wider, but it was not broken.

At random times they were together just for the love of being together.

Then one day those friends were standing in a circle with a casket being in the center. The circle that could not break had been broken. Death stopping life, before they were ready to say goodbye

One is gone, but the circle is not broken for one has only gone onto heaven before the rest

The circle is not broken its only widened. Hope of Christ is what has tightened this circle for all eternity.

Nothing will turn this circle into something broken for its bound by a shared love of Christ

Written for the class of 2010 who broke me in as young naive freshmen. Oh my they were the big brothers and sisters that made me feel so at home during my first year of college. 
 Just a few short weeks ago they said see you later to their classmate, Dustin, who died in the Prescott fire.


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Perfect Grace

I will never understand grace perfectly. 

I admitted this to myself. I had fought so hard the battle of performing for everyone I knew. I fought so hard to 

 perform for God.

I thought to myself I must understand grace better. I need to stop performing. I need to understand grace perfectly.

Suddenly my striving to understand grace became a performance issue just like everything else in my life.

I felt so guilty. Of course I wasn’t supposed to act like this. God didn’t want me to work for approval from him. He does not want me to work for approval from others.

God does not want us to think any less of his love and goodness because we do not understand grace.

Some days I try so hard and shun God’s love. God’s love I decide is reserved for the days when I have it all together.   

When I’m the good Christian girl…I’ll find you a chapter and verse for that little theory sometime, probably in the book of “Beth”.

Those days where “everything is all together” become fewer and fewer. Sliding down deeper into a cave where the daylight grows dim  and the darkness of works wraps around you. I pull the escape door of God’s love and grace shut with my own doing.

 Grace and love are after all for those who have at least done one thing to be worthy of such things is the lie that haunts me.

Sins creep in and its easier to do them without thinking. They pile up and add to the tremendous guilt of not being able to do anything right.

I’ve tried to hide in my cave of gloom, but God know the place of desperation  and reaches in with his love and grace.

Filthy and wretched sinner overtaken by the love of a perfect  God.

Understand grace one little bit at a time. Your not going to arrive over night. All God ever desires is for us to trust in His grace for every single little moment of our lives. Even those moments where I haven’t done one single thing to be worthy of God’s grace

Not done one thing to be worthy of grace. Interesting paradox eh? God’s grace does not require perfection to understand it.

Otherwise I, the unfaithful prodigal sinner, would not be here writing these words.

Because of His glorious grace I live each day. Each day I do things wrong I should do right, but in the end the its God's grace who takes the shambles and makes them glisten .  

Today God's grace is going to be ever abundant. How can I not want to serve this God who is so good to me?

A life well lived.

Usually I avoid the news and all of its many horrendous stories of hopelessness, but not this week. Not since Monday morning when I woke up to find my Facebook news feed flooded with news of a friend's death. Not since the news took such a personal spin for me.

Most of the world heard the news of the deadly Prescott wildfire and to them it was just more awfulness. They read the tiny bites of information the reporters give of the firefighters and grieve at such a loss, but all they will ever know of those firefighters is what then news tell them. A few short lines to summarize lives of men that were loved deeply by their family and friends.

All I will ever know about 18 of those firefighters is the portraits the news painted of them, but one of those fire fighters I will remember so much more of .

The one I went to college with.

 I the underling and he the upperclassmen. Still it was a small school and so we knew each other.

The news said he had a "dry sense of humor" and it was the truth. How many times did something happen that only Dustin would have dreamt up. Life at college is filled with jokes and randomness, yet some how Dustin added a dimension to college life that only he could produce.

Not sure I will forget the night Dustin was in exceptionally rare form and was mixing us up some brownies. I can't even remember what all was so funny. Maybe it was the "well I can't find a spoon so I'll just mix up this stuff with my hands" line, but it was just a simply hilarious "cooking show". Can't remember how the brownies tasted either, but obviously I don't remember them tasting terrible.

Dustin was a funny guy, but for every bit of humor there was just as much seriousness about His walk with God. Preaching the required sermons for homiletics in chapel and then filling the pulpit at the little country church which was not required, but he did it anyway.

I'm writing all this in the past tense which seems so horribly wrong. Just one sort week ago Dustin's older brother sat at our kitchen table and told us about the lives of all of his siblings.

Was it the last time he spoke of Dustin in the present tense?

Sudden and abruptly and without warning life changed that Sunday evening. So unexpectedly 19 lives were cut short.

"So teach us to number our days,
That we may present to You a heart of wisdom." Psalm 90:12

Dustin didn't know when he went to bed last Saturday night it would be his last night on this earth and that the next night would find him in the presence of his Savior. Dustin didn't need to know the number of days, so he could get his life right with God.

He knew who he served and he served that God every day.

The first time I met Dustin. He and his classmates were sitting around the wooden colored table in the dinning hall. They were consuming Subway sandwiches, because for obvious reasons leftovers from the week are not always desirable.

I was visiting the school to see if I wanted to go there.

The conversation was of random stuff. Gross EMT stories and stories of college craziness.

 Then those people, Dustin included, were talking about how to be a light for Christ to their coworkers. Seriousness enveloped the chatter and as I saw authentic faith. I knew I wanted to go school with people like this.

Dustin didn't just do a "good thing "like going to Bible school. He lived his faith

One horrible moment last Sunday night took Dustin's life. In the same awful moment complete joy was felt as Dustin completed his life on this earth and went to eternal glory

 

^"20 according to my earnest expectation and hope, that I will not be put to shame in anything, but that with all boldness, Christ will even now, as always, be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death.

²¹ For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. " Phil 1:20-21

 Dustin is not in heaven tonight because he was a "good person". Dustin just like the rest of us struggled with a sin nature, but tonight because of the glorious grace of our Lord I can say without a doubt that Dustin is in heaven.

Dustin wanted his God to be known and by God's grace God is being glorfied in Dustin's life

Thankful to mourn with a hope. Thankful to remember a life well lived in Christ. Thankful to remember more then random memories, but to see God glorified even in sorrow.