Recently, my husband and I made a day trip to the beach. It had been too long, and a lot of loss had occurred in our lives since our last visit. I can tell you that getting my feet on the sand and back in the water was long overdue! The beach has always been a place of solace and comfort for me. It is where I feel most connected to myself, to nature, and to the One who created it all. I feel God’s Spirit all around, and He speaks to my heart in ways that bring new perspectives and realizations. It is where He soothes my broken heart or wraps His arms around me in my grief or trouble. I can stand there for hours just listening to the sound of the waves as they tumble onto the beach around me. We all have places like this, places that touch our hearts and still our souls long enough for the noise of this world to fade into the background so that we can hear or see what we NEED to hear or see.
This life can be so complicated and layered. There is so much going on around us all the time. It is a frenetic pace and, if we aren’t careful, everything within us takes on that pace and the chaos that comes with it. We get so used to the noise of living that we forget how to actually live. The endless distractions or things clamoring for our attention manage to absorb our time and energy. It becomes the “norm,” and we don’t even recognize it anymore. We have endless and continual information rushing at us like an unstoppable tidal wave of distractions, tearing up everything in its path. As people of faith, we can get so caught up in trying to keep up with the pace and then we wonder why we struggle to feel connected to our Father. I can’t help but think of how He tells us, “Be still and know that I am God” (Isaiah 46:10). If I want to truly know Him and be confident in who He is and how He moves, then I must become still.
Being still is not an easy thing to do these days. Not only do we struggle for time in our schedules to do so but becoming still actually stirs movement in other ways. As a child of God, it is almost impossible to sit quietly for very long before we start to reflect, and when we reflect, our spirits turn to the One who created us, redeemed us, and lives within us. We hear the still, small voice within and sometimes it reveals things we need to change. Other times, it reveals truths we couldn’t see or hear in the cacophony of our daily lives. Noise can drown out so much, and as our world continues to become faster and faster, it is so incredibly important to slow down so that we can truly hear, see, and feel those profound things that He desires for us to understand.
Standing on the sand recently, with the waves lapping around my feet, I found myself back in that old familiar place. I found the stillness in every fiber of my being and the world began to make sense again. I’m not saying that situations in my life suddenly changed, or griefs I’ve had were suddenly gone, but rather that my perspective lifted higher, and I could breathe again. I love to stand and see what is revealed as the waves recede back into the sea. Beautiful shells or rocks appear, and they shimmer in the sunlight as it dances across their surface. Incredible sea creatures, different and colorful, stretch out into the warmth around them and provide a glimpse into the intricacies of God’s creation and the depth of his unending creativity. I don’t think twice about the fact the waves are constantly rolling back into the sea because there is beauty in what lies upon the sand as a result, things I may have never seen otherwise. These moments center me, and it wasn’t until after we returned home that something struck a chord in my heart so strongly that it reverberated through my mind.
There are times in life, certainly in mine, where I feel God’s presence all around me. Sometimes it comes through time spent in nature, with family, or in the embrace of a friend; sometimes it comes while standing with other believers, praising Him in song or sitting together as His family, spending time together with Him. But there are also times when it seems like maybe He’s not as near or that I have somehow lost my ability to hear Him, yet He has promised that He never leaves nor forsakes us. He is still with us as an endless sea of love that does not disappear, but rather ebbs and flows around us. There is a beautiful rhythm in the way He moves in our lives, sometimes seemingly nearer than others, but if we spend our entire life being so focused on watching the waves recede, we will never turn our vision to what is revealed when they do so. We will miss some of the very things our Father is trying to show us. He doesn’t recede to abandon; He recedes to reveal!
I am constantly amazed at how He speaks to us as His children. He finds ways to meet each one of us where we are, in whatever place we find ourselves at any given point in time. He knows exactly the language to speak that will open my heart, my ears, and my eyes so that I can find peace and understanding – not in having the answers, but in knowing that HE does. Those “languages” could be in images or scenes that come to mind, an impression of His voice within, the laughter and love of family or friends, or countless other things through which He speaks to us but make no mistake about this: If you are His child, He is speaking to you and your heart. The best way to hear Him is to be still and listen.
Whether you find yourself in times of sunshine or rain, abundance or want, joy or grief, remember you are never alone. Your Father, the One who loves you most and sacrificed Himself to make a way so that He could be with you again forever, is with you always. He knows exactly where you are and how to reach you…and He will never let you go.
Blessings!
I realize we are quickly approaching Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but this year I’ve been unable to stop thinking about Palm Sunday. Believe me, I love the reminder of the resurrection and what Jesus did so that I can be saved, but I’ve not paid a whole lot of attention to Palm Sunday until this year. Maybe it’s because I’m in a strange season of life, trying to determine where or what God is tugging me toward, or maybe it’s because I just needed to see something to shift my perspective a little bit.
There may be a good reason why he did things differently, but all I see is my unmet expectations. In my original conversation, all he said was that he was going to take care of the yard. He did not reveal other details of what he planned to do, and I created additional expectations based on the way I would do things. My expectation that the yard work would be done rests on believing what he told me. My expectation of HOW it would be done rests in everything else I assumed from his statement. Our expectations are colored by our past experiences, and they deeply affect our emotions. When we expect something bad to happen and it doesn’t, we get excited and happy. When we expect something good to happen and it doesn’t, we become upset, sad, depressed or even angry. We’ve all experienced the reality of that roller coaster when we interpreted something differently, and suddenly our world is turned upside-down because something unexpected took place.
How many times in our lives have we lived out our own personal “Holy Week?” I have been in difficult situations where I was depending on the many promises of God. I believe He knows and cares about what I’m going through, has the power to deliver me, and is working things out for my good. I have shouted “Hosanna” in my expectations and perceptions of what He has said, but then He starts working things out differently than what I expected. He starts doing or allowing things that I just don’t understand. If we aren’t careful, we watch what’s happening and start to think that maybe He isn’t who we thought He was. We look around and start getting angry that He isn’t doing more “smiting” of our enemies or my circumstances and is instead leaving you or me alone to fight for ourselves. It doesn’t take long for us to think on these things before we end up angry because it seems He doesn’t care enough to take care of us. In our own way, we go from shouting “Hosanna,” to shouting, “Crucify!” We start letting our doubts, or even anger, that arises from unmet expectations to drive our perspective, and we can end up choosing to set free the worst of ourselves rather than to trust God knows what He is doing.
Unmet expectations can cause us to doubt what we know to be true. When we hold so tightly to our version of what our deliverance should look like, or how it should come, we end up spending our lives looking for the next best solution. We waste our energy trying to resolve it ourselves and end up sacrificing our peace and joy in the process. Sometimes our deliverance comes through waiting. Sometimes it comes through struggles. And sometimes we are yelling “Crucify” at the very One who is delivering us – all because He isn’t doing it as we expected.
For years, California has been in a historic drought. This week we have been hit with torrential rains which have caused all kinds of issues, including flash floods in many areas. Weather events can bring all kinds of challenges and even destruction, but that’s not the point of this particular post. Instead, I want to talk about an idea I call “spiritual irrigation.”
Irrigation allows us to be more in control of our destiny. We can plant crops where they wouldn’t normally thrive because we have found ways to transport water from one location to another in ways it wouldn’t occur naturally. Irrigation certainly requires less reliance on God to provide the rain we need – or think we need. We have gotten so used to doing things our way that we forget the source of our blessings. We start thinking we are truly in control of something as basic as water itself. Oh sure, we pray for God to bless us with rain but if we get too much, we start to complain. After all, we’ve been watering our crops and now that it’s raining, there’s too much water! We wring our hands and wonder what we are going to do. We’ve all seen buildings (or cities) built in areas where there is little doubt they will be flooded or even washed away if there is a lot of rain. We actually criticize people in these areas and say, “well what did they expect? They built in the middle of a flood zone.” But why? Because the rains don’t always come and after a while, no one actually believes they will.
I am tired of being a “spiritual irrigator,” and my definition of a drought is probably much different than God’s. I want to live with a faith that follows God’s leading and trusts Him to provide the rain. When we shed our need for control and put on that cloak of trust, we get to experience the most amazing moments. We get to dance in the rain because we know from where it came. We start seeing God’s providence instead of looking at Him as if His ways are interrupting our great plans. From our perspective, it is better to plan and execute rather than follow and trust. But from God’s perspective, it is far better to simply trust Him for everything we need and then dance in the rain when it falls.
Gossip. We’ve all been victims of it, and we’ve all been perpetrators of it. We hate when we hear someone has been talking poorly about us and it might even anger us when what is said is untrue. There’s a great lesson in the old game of “telephone” where one person whispers something to the person next to them, and then it is passed along through the line or circle of people and then spoken out loud at the end. Rarely is it even close to what was originally said, which often brings great laughter. Sometimes the morphing of the statement happens simply from people misunderstanding a word here or there, and sometimes it happens because someone deliberately changes a word or two just for the “fun of it.” Either way, it is a great reminder that whenever we hear something second, third (or even further) hand, we need to be very careful in how we react to it.
Lately it seems this subject has come up more and more, whether it is at work, church, family or other relationships. I think we go through seasons where it just flares in all areas, and we watch the destruction that it can cause when people “share information” with or about others. (In case you didn’t know, “sharing information” is just a nice way of saying “gossiping.” LOL) Anyway, It struck me this week how important it is for us to go back to that one first and foremost commandment that we love God above all else and the second that we love others as ourselves. I have shared often about the characteristics and nature of love as it is described to us in the Bible, and one of the traits that came up for me recently is where it says it “believes all things.” That means it believes the best in people regardless of what is said. It means you choose to believe the best about those you love, and when gossip hits your ears about something they may or may not have actually said about you, then you choose to believe it was a misunderstanding. If I love you and esteem you better than myself, I won’t fall prey to spreading gossip about you or taking gossip I hear about you to heart.
As I mentioned earlier, if I love you in the manner God has instructed me to love, and someone else tells me that you said something mean, nasty or untrue about me, I will choose to not believe it. Until God reveals otherwise, I will believe that something has been misunderstood or misinterpreted along the way. And if I don’t do that, then I’m not really exhibiting love at all. I know there are some who will disagree with me when I say this, but we don’t have a right to be angry, set the record straight or even clear our names. We don’t need to try and root out the source of the gossip so we can confront it. We need to simply leave it up to God, and the truth is we don’t like that one bit! It goes against our nature. The way we stop tongues from wagging is to simply not be one of them. And when something is said, we should respond with something like “I’m not comfortable hearing or discussing this unless that person is here to defend themselves.” That holds true whether we want to agree with the gossip or not. It’s easy to believe the bad about a person (or their intent/motives) when their personality rubs us the wrong way. Even as Christians, we tend to always believe the worst in each other. We may start out believing the best, but then something happens that we disagree with, we just stew about it. It’s just so much easier to believe the negative. And, truth be told, a lot of times we actually take pleasure in it. That should never be the case! We need to remember that we need to guard and control our ears as much as we need to guard and control our tongues!
This life of faith – “kingdom living” – is a higher calling, and if we are not going to rise up to that level, then we need to stop calling ourselves Christians. I’m not saying we will always be successful, because we will fail. We will fail miserably because our emotions will get in the way. We will fall prey to the enemy’s advances in our lives through our tongue and through our ears. It is time for it to stop. It is time to stand up and truly love in the way we are commanded. Because when we don’t, we are out of fellowship with God. It is not a feeling; it is a choice. It isn’t important what someone else says about you or what you may have heard about someone else. What is important is that when we engage in gossip or any other unloving behavior toward each other, God no longer hears our prayers because we now have unconfessed sin in our own lives (Psalm 66:18; Isaiah 59:2). The only way we can break through the deafening barrier of our own sin is by confessing it to God and asking for His forgiveness, which he has promised to grant every single time (1 John 1:9).
So as for me, it is my renewed commitment to be constantly striving to love as God expects me to love and forgive as He expects me to forgive. For me, it is a renewed commitment to believe the best in my brothers and sisters (and even non‑believers), whether at home, church, work or anywhere else. We need to do it with our spouses, children, family, friends, coworkers , etc., and yes, even with our enemies. There is no such thing as “partial obedience” when God instructs us to do something. It is pretty simple: either we obey or we do not. Let’s get back to weeding our own gardens instead of trying to weed each other’s. Let’s take the log out of our own eyes before trying to remove the splinter from someone else’s. And let’s quit finding creative ways to rationalize our behavior when it does not coincide with what we SAY we believe or KNOW is true. I call you to join me. I call us to action. Because through love, we are truly unstoppable.
The Cadence of My Soul 