Unbalanced

There are more than a few things about me that leave my friends shaking their heads in amusement. Peculiar little rituals or rules that just don't seem to make any sense.

For example, I can't eat anything off of any wooden utensil. It makes me shiver just to think of it. I was a sad little school girl for many years on cafeteria-ice-cream-day. You know how those little cups of vanilla delight come...with a little wooden "spoon" taped neatly on the top? Couldn't do it. Couldn't eat off that thing no matter how much my mouth watered.

I also can't eat meat that is wrapped in paper. Now this was not a big deal until I moved to Wisconsin. I hadn't even SEEN meat wrapped in paper until then. My husband gives in to me, thank goodness, but he often tells me that we are getting worse meat at a worse price because of my little oddity. But at least I can see my meat as it sits in the freezer. No surprises there.

Another one of my peculiarities came to light as I sat at a large table during my Bible study. Two tables had been pushed together to form a large square. I sat at the lower right hand corner, Rebecca sat close to the lower left hand corner, Minda sat at the top left corner, and.....no one sat across from her. The upper right hand corner was empty.

I tried to ignore it. I did! But soon my foot began to tap; then my fingers started to twitch. Soon I'd had all I could stand, and hoping that I wasn't going to offend Heather, who was sitting next to me, I raced to the empty corner of the table, sitting down and offering a quick explanation that I just couldn't have the table be unbalanced.

I like symmetry. I love balance. I like to know that all my corners are filled and neatly in line. My mother in law underestimates the depth of this need when she tells me that off-center is the "in" thing. She doesn't realize that by placing my television on the left hand side of the wall, she is all but asking me to never enter my living room again. I just can't handle it.

As we were joking about my neurosis during my Bible study on Tuesday, my friend Linda Kuechle suggested that I blog about being unbalanced, and how being unbalanced in our relationship with God can leave us just as shaken and uncertain as I felt with that table.

I had never thought of it in that way, but she was totally right. When I spend more time watching television, or talking on the phone, or using the computer, than I do with God; I am unbalanced. I may not physically topple over, but my spiritual walk will not be straight.

Most of the time when we want to balance something, we need to make each side even. Everything has to weigh the same. That's not the case with us. God calls us to place Him as our first priority, our spouses second, our children third, and our other commitments can fall in place from there. That is how we will be balanced. We need to place most of our weight with God, because He gives us the strength to do all the other things.

I am seeing the fruit of truly doing this for the first time. I've always talked about doing it, always known that it is the way it SHOULD be done, but now I am actively seeking to balance myself by putting God first. And I can tell you that it's true...everything else gets a little bit easier.

There are going to be times in our life where we are going to feel unbalanced, there's no getting around that fact. But with most of our weight placed with God, we'll never tip over.

Between the Sunset and the City Lights

Flying at 6:00 in the morning has an amazing benefit that I certainly wasn't anticipating as I boarded the plane half awake on Friday morning. It was dark when we reached the airport, and since Steve and I had crashed at a hotel at 1:30 a.m. and woken up at 3:00, all we really cared about was the fact that the steady hum of the plane was about to become our lullaby.

As we sat down in our assigned seats, I was pleased to see that I was next to a window. The few times I have flown have either been in the afternoon or late at night, and I remembered enjoying the sight of endless landscapes and twinkling lights beneath me. "Maybe I'll just look for a little while before going to sleep," I thought, settling into my seat.

Minutes later we were in the air, and I was closing my eyes. I don't know how long I slept, but I remember the feeling of being pulled awake. I believe I thought something to the effect of, "Are you serious?!?" before cracking open my eyes to see what He wanted from me.

I've seen some beautiful things in this world: double rainbows, ice encased trees, and majestic oceans that stretch beyond the horizon. I've seen things that have made me catch my breath, and others that have brought me to tears.

But I've never come as close to seeing God personified in our earth as I did on that airplane that morning.

When I opened my eyes, I was in the middle of the sunrise.

The colors were vibrant, stretching across the sky unhindered. The clouds just below me rose and fell within themselves, a thick blanket of lavender. As the tears filled my eyes, I thought, "Good morning, Father."

I couldn't tear my eyes away. I felt like I was being given a gift, this opportunity to glimpse the magnitude of God. The overwhelming thought within me was, "God is SO big!"

"They who dwell in the ends of the earth stand in awe of Your signs;
You make the dawn and the sunset shout for joy." (Psalm 65:8)

As I sat marveling at the true greatness of our Creator, the clouds parted for a moment, revealing a city far below us. Lights twinkled from hundreds of houses and buildings; a symphony of lives represented through their glow.

It struck me, this contrast between the enormity of the sunset and the miniature reflections of light.

As I sat contemplating our relative size in comparison to God, I realized something.

God is so big. We are so small. But God's love for each of us is NOT small! I saw hundreds of lights in that one part of that one city. Hundreds of lights that represented thousands of people, and God knows each...and...every...one. He knows them intimately. And He LOVES them.

I am one person in one house in one city in one state in one country in just one continent of this world. And HE loves Me. Our great big God who created the most amazing sunrise I have ever seen, loves me. And He loves the people in the house next door, and the one next to that. We can't even imagine the number of lights we'd see if we could glimpse the entire world from above; yet He cares for each and every person as much (and more!) as we love our children.

In fact, He loves each one of us so much that He did what none of us can imagine doing. He sacrificed His one and only son. For me. For you. For your children, and your parents, and your neighbor. For billions of people you will never even see. Because His love is as big as He is. And He loves you.

John 3:16, "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal Life." (NASB)

Suddenly the distance between the sunset and the city lights seems so much shorter.

Being a Permanent Marker in a Dry Erase World

When our plane landed at 12:30 this morning, I felt a wave of emotions. Steve and I had flown to my hometown in New York for the weekend to surprise my dad for his 65th birthday. The weekend was blissful, partly due to the fact that my in-laws were incredibly gracious and kept all seven of our children so that we could travel alone.

(So basically, my husband now knows that he doesn't have to rent a hut on the ocean in Bora Bora to make me feel like I've been on a vacation, he just needs to take me somewhere where I can hear myself think.)

Though I didn't get a chance to sit and write out my daily journeys with God, He was busy making sure that I didn't forget to fulfill my side of our agreement. In the still and quiet times I felt like He was constantly pointing things out to me, thoughts that I had splashed across before without really diving in.

And so it was that I found myself holding a black permanent marker and realizing that it was what I was striving to be.

Generally I shy away from this type of writing tool. They're so....permanent. I mean, you take a Sharpie marker and start writing, and there's no going back. You better hope you don't misspell a word, or change your thought mid-sentence. And if you realize after you're done that all the lines slant slightly downward? Well, it's just too bad. Because scratching it out leaves more of a mess than leaving it out there for critique.

On the contrary, I love dry erase markers. You make a mistake and with a quick swipe of the finger it's gone. Not a trace. You can fix your error and replace it with something that won't get laughed at before anyone is the wiser. I feel comfortable with them because they give me anonymous chances.

Until a few weeks ago, I was a dry erase marker when it came to my public relationship with God. Oh, I told everyone I met that I was a Christian. I would tell them that I accepted Christ as my Savior when I was 21 years old. But the nitty gritty details of my faith? The Scripture verses that popped in my head when having difficult conversations with friends who questioned the existence of God? I'd more often than not start to write them with my words with the comfort of knowing that I could wipe them away easily if I started making someone uncomfortable. Dry erase conversations; dry erase faith.

I've met Permanent Marker Christians before. I have always respected them. They represent Christ's love to anyone who they meet. And it isn't always portrayed with testimony, or Scripture, or verbal witnessing, but it's a no-questions-about-it attitude that radiates Christ's love. It's the kind of faith where it doesn't matter if your lines are crooked once in a while, or if you miss a punctuation mark. You are no longer worried about looking perfect, no longer ashamed of who you are in Him.

This is the kind of faith God asks from us. Romans 1:16 says, "For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes." (NASB)

In this new generation where tolerance reigns, the world asks all people to be dry erase markers. We are to feel out the responses of our peers before making bold statements so that we do not offend others with our opinions. As long as we don't make waves, as long as we don't push our beliefs on others, our thoughts will be tolerated also.

As a dry erase marker, it wasn't about my opinion of others; it was my selfish worry about others' opinions of me. If friends came to me seeking my advice about a sin in their life, it was easier for me to say what they wanted to hear instead of the truth from Scripture because I was scared of how they would react.

Being a permanent marker is about allowing people to see who you are with no apologies.

All my life I worked to blend in. Now I can't wait to stand out.

In Sickness and In Health

I am such a baby when it comes to illness. I mean, I have given birth to four children, two of them with no pain medication whatsoever, and yet the common cold leaves me limp and lifeless in bed.

The beginning of the school year might as well be tagged as, "The children go to school and Mom gets sick." They bring home all the school children germs that my body has had three months to forget about, and inevitably I am the first to fall.

So here I am in my stuffy headed foggy world, and God is making sure that I know that there aren't going to be free-to-take-time-off sick days in my 12 month commitment to Him. Because man did I get blasted today when I decided to use my germ-y status to say No when He wanted me to say Yes.

So, here I am, keeping it real. Because I surely don't think I would tell this story to the world otherwise. But I don't want to paint a "I accepted God's challenge and now my life is rosy" picture, when the reality is that I accepted God's challenge, my life has gotten so much better, but man it's hard sometimes.

Today was insane. I didn't get to go to my Bible study this morning because I wasn't feeling well. My baby is battling the same cold I am, and those of you who have had children know how much fun a 17 month old who feels awful is. My phone rang constantly, and even though I did finally lay down and pass out for a couple hours, that time was interrupted by about 541,258 things that apparently needed my attention right then and there or the world was going to explode. So I was frazzled already when 2:41 hit - that magic time where my oldest children start streaming home from school and life goes into hyper-drive.

So just imagine constant chaos from 2:41 until 4:18. At 4:18, Kahlan came home. I quickly got off the phone with my friend because I could see the tears brimming in her eyes. As I was trying to help her work through a big disappointment she'd had that day, three of my children asked me nonsense questions, my mother in law knocked on my front door, and the phone rang.

And God said, "Be still."

And instead of saying, "Yes, God," I think I did something unladylike...like growling.

Instead of listening to Him, instead of walking away, or taking a deep breath, or just praying that He would carry me through the next three minutes, I walked out my front door.

Barefoot.

Oh, and did I mention the fact that right before I left I said to my mother in law, "You take care of the kids, I'm done being a mom"?

Yeah. Not pretty.

So I walked down the street with no shoes on, wincing as each little rock dug into my skin. And each time I flinched I thought, "That was for saying No."

So if you happen to live next to a park and happened to be doing your dishes while standing in front of your kitchen window, that strange lady who was sitting in the grass picking leaves apart was me. No, I am not trying to stalk other people's children. I was just being disobedient to my Father.

I wasn't in the park for very long. I can at least say that I felt God's presence very strongly as I sat studying the grass in front of me, and I knew that He wanted me to go home. So I sucked up my pride, said Yes, and walked home.

And it all worked out. Steve was home when I got here, he didn't think I was insane, my mother in law told me that she knew that the combination of sickness and stress was what had made me implode (versus thinking I was crazy, or a bad mother, as I imagined), and I was able to finish helping Kahlan without scarring her for life.

I listened, and He helped me. It certainly would have been much better had I listened the first time, but it wasn't as bad as it would have been if I'd said No the second time. That was another good lesson in the long line of lessons He has been teaching me in the past eleven days or so.

I kind of hoped that the woman washing dishes would have come out to see what kind of crazy woman sits alone in the grass at a park. I was looking forward to telling her that I was crazy...about God.

But maybe that will be a "Yes" moment for another day...