Here’s the quote that was engraved in the wall of a 150-year-old church in St Louis.
“I think more of the place where I was baptized than of the cathedral where I was crowned.For the dignity of a child of God, which was bestowed on me at baptism, is greater than that of the rule of the kingdom.The latter I shall lose at death, the other will be my passport to everlasting glory.”
St. Louis IX, King of France
Okay. Don’t creep out. I have a tough question. And your answer might be hard or easy based on how old you are, how psychosomatic or how morbid you are. Ready?
What do you want your obituary to say about you?
I have been to several funerals in the last couple of years. The deceased were in their 20s, 30s, 90s, and the last person was even 103. You can glean a lot of wisdom for the living when you sit in the ceremonies for the dead.
There is almost always a recurring theme. She was a lot of fun. She was a great mom. He was a hard worker. She loved music. And all those things are good and true.
But Chuck and I inevitably asked the same question: Where was God in their lives? We would sit through these long rememberances of people and then at the end of the service, the pastor would ask God to receive this person into His arms.
Yet there was little to no evidence that this person ever received Jesus into his or her arms or life.
Want to clarify your life goals? Write your obituary. It might help you focus on what you and the Lord really want to accomplish while you are in this earthen vessel.
I got this great response to yesterday’s blog. She said, “I think I’m following you, but if you’re not familiar with the kind of warfare-pray-with-authority stuff that you do, it could sound to the average Jane like, ‘See! I told you. So now we’d better just love our enemies and pray.’ That’s NOT what you’re saying…”
She is so right. That is NOT what I am saying. That article is a living, color photo of abuse. Just like the sex trade. Just like the raid and arrest on Papermill Drive. Just like the women I talk to whose dads or brothers or mom’s boyfriends stole their innocence and childhood.
I go through a gamut of emotions initially when I see this myself. Shock, rage, revenge, despair. But then I have to remember that God has known about this problem all along. And He has decided that it is time I know about it. It’s time that you know about it. So what do we do?
We tend to do a couple of things: Get overwhelmed and do nothing. Or, get scared and do nothing. Or, start to engage, get pushed back and then quit. This is where the despair kicks in.
But when I look at the model of Jesus, and His instruction to us, He never lost sight of the enemy, the battle and who would win. He modeled for us “praying in the Spirit” and agreeing with God’s perspective. He is a God of Justice. The God of Vengeance. He doesn’t just get even, He overcomes the evil of the world. He makes wrong things right, either in our lives or in the life to come.
My bottom line is this, pray with the power-filled name of Jesus and pray against the evil of the day.
Lord, You see and know more than I do, the lost, hurt, abused women and children of our day. Please show them that they are not forgotten. Please bring Your supernatural help to them. Rescue them Lord, send people to them to rescue them from the evil they are facing. Give them hope. And Lord, I pray that You would raise up warriors who would intercede. I speak the name of Jesus into this world. Your name is poured forth like ointment. To Your name be the glory. Amen.
P. S. from Jana
For another way to intercede, read Psalm 140. It’s is a comfort, but also a great thing to pray aloud.
P. P. S. from Laura
Be sure to keep an eye out for our new look! The updated Women Getting Real website is coming soon…
Many of you have asked about Beth’s return trip to Zimbabwe. When is she leaving? Does she need help? So I asked her give us some views from her heart and specific needs. Just as you prayed and invested before, please do so again as we witness God’s continued heart for His people. Blessings, Jana
“I started out in Zimbabwe trying to figure out what I was supposed to be getting out of the three weeks. What I realized by the time we left was that it wasn’t about what would happen during those three weeks; it was about what would continue after. The biggest thing God revealed to me there is that I still don’t see or know myself as He sees and knows me. I’ve had a lot of growth in these areas especially in the last three years, but there is more.
In Zimbabwe I was looking at the huge dam that holds back the water, which is what made the gorgeous lake where we had spent the previous few days on a houseboat. As I stood watching the water pour out I clearly heard the Lord speaking to me.
The water in the lake, while beautiful and containing lots of life, is just sitting there, unchanging aside from occasional fluctuations in level. But when it is released from the dam it pours out with astounding power creating a moving river and becoming a life of its own. I don’t know about you but I hate swimming in lakes because when water is still it gets murky and gross, growing all kinds of vegetation with who knows what hiding in it. I will take a moving river over a stagnant lake any day. This is what the Lord is calling me to in going back to Zimbabwe. I’ve been poured into and experienced a lot of healing and freedom in the last three years sitting under Jana’s teaching, but there is a lot in me being held back. Now God is inviting me out of my familiar environment where I’ve learned how and where to hide. He’s taking me to a new place where He wants to begin releasing the water and revealing the true life that He has created in me which includes strengths and abilities I’m not aware of yet. It is an adventure I am excited to take with Him.
While I really don’t have a clue what He has in store for me there, the plan for now is that I will leave August 19 to stay for six months with Alistair and Shelley Croudace who own Lasting Impressions youth camp near Kadoma. I will be working at the camp as well as helping Shelley home school their three kids and teaching some in her women’s group.
I still have to trust the Lord to come through in a lot of areas. Here are some things you could be praying for with me.
Lord, we thank You for doing far more than we can ask or imagine. We thank You that we are seeing with our own eyes, “there’s a bigger picture (we) can’t see.” We say yes and amen to these prayer requests and thank You for Your grace and provision. May You continue to bring glory to Your name through Beth and Your work in Zimbabwe. In the power of Jesus’ name, Amen.
Have you ever been somewhere where you can see a long way? Picture in your mind the view from a mountain top. You can see a lot of landscape. Rivers, roads, tree lines, meadows. There are a lot of details and specific markers that help you identify where you are and where you have been.
If you are like me, when you look from the mountain view of your life, you can rattle off many markers that may have shaped your life. School, abuse, addiction, car wreck, divorce, bankruptcy, abortion, buying a house, getting new jobs, losing jobs, getting married, having children, death of loved ones, moving to new cities. These markers act as points on a map tracing our journey. But. There is more.
Here is one of those Holy Buts. If you look at your life and you only see those woundings or events, only see the hurt and scars, you might need to look again.
Many of us have long memories of past hurts and use them as stumbling blocks and excuses to stop us from moving forward. With great precision, we can articulate how this person did this and now we…. Or we say, “I chose this and now I can’t….”
When we do this, we need to look again because we fail to see God’s presence in the exact same life. Do we have a long memory of God’s faithfulness and help? With the same precision, can we articulate, this happened…but God…? He is, in a word picture, the mountain that we move over and around and through. He is our rock.
God was there. God is there. God will be there.
Was working, is working, will be working for our good.
In the book, The Shack, they pose a question to Mack about why he looks to the future and makes up things that will happen, but he never sees God in the future with him. Our regret about the past, our fear of the day, our anxiety about the future might be radically altered if we zoom out and see God is here.
It is, after all, His world. And we are His people.
Take a moment to pray this prayer out loud over yourself and your loved ones. Take a long view at God. Learn how to recount His presence in your life. It may help you see better.
O LORD, You have searched me
and You know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
You perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
You are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
You know it completely, O LORD.
You hem me in—behind and before;
You have laid Your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Where can I flee from Your presence?
Psalm 139 1-7
I was praying in the early morning during that half awake, half asleep time. Praying for people and issues, questions and concerns, needs and desires. I ended my time with, “Lord I really need to hear from You. I need to know what You have to say about all these things.”
I rolled over in the bed and heard this line from a song:
“There’s a bigger picture you can’t see
You don’t have to change the world
Just trust in me…”
I was fully awake, instantly.
Here I was mulling and turning over my plans. Could I — should I —how will I? And God was talking about His plan followed by one instruction: Just trust in Me.
I thought I was. I would have told you I was. But hearing that one phrase in light of all my murmurings made me question myself. Am I really trusting Him? Are you?
When I got out of bed, I went and found the song that had “magically” popped into my head. Then I listened to this song over and over for several days. It retells the old, old story of people just like me and you. People to whom God said, “Me and you are gonna do big things.” And the people responded just like us — with excuses and but-but-but. Here is my favorite part of the song. Each person laid out their objections of why God’s plan won’t work and questioned Him on how He was going to use them with all their limitations.
“It’s not your problem, God replied. And the rest is history.”
If you go back through the Bible, go back through history, you see His mighty hand doing things that don’t make sense to us. Achieving and completing great works that don’t add up to us. That part is not your problem. His ask of them was the same as His ask of us, “Just trust in Me.” That is your problem. Work on the ‘trust in Me’ part.
You can’t trust your plan until it is His plan. You can’t trust Him until you see, understand and relent the notion that somehow you can do it. Jesus said, “Apart from Me, you can do nothing.” Funny how we spend so much time trying to disprove that comment.
Go listen to “I AM” by Ginny Owens. You will love the beauty of His big picture. Our trust in Him does change the world.
“There’s a bigger picture you can’t see
You don’t have to change the world
Just trust in me…
I am your Creator
I am working out My plan
Through you, I will show them
I AM.”
I had this great God encounter the other day. Charis and I were at the pool and she wanted money for the snack bar. So I handed her a handful of change and she looked at the amount mounded in her hand and declared, “This is plenty.” When I asked her to count it, she didn’t see the point because there were so many coins in her hands. “But some of those are pennies,” I said.
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” she said with a wave of her free hand. (You know your kids were raised in the South when f-i-n-e is a three syllable word. It’s beautiful to hear.)
Anyway, we separated the coins into like piles and I helped her add up the quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. Once she heard the magic number of $1.25, which is the exact cost of a frozen Swiss Miss Chocolate Bar, she scraped all the change into her hand and was off. Contented and provided for.
Five minutes later, I am talking to Beth who is preparing to go BACK to Zimbabwe for six months this time to serve at the youth camp. We were working on her financial needs, listing out the room fee, phone, airfare, etc. Her magic amount was a bit more than $1.25.
That’s when the God encounter happened.
“Beth, think about it. When Charis came to me asking for money, she was never one time concerned about whether I had enough money. Her only concern was a yes or no answer from me. And once my answer was yes, it was on me to make it happen,” I said.
“Don’t miss this. She didn’t even care about the pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. To her, it was more about Mom’s got it taken care of. Sure for you, it’s not pennies and quarters but it’s $100s, $200s, $1000s. But to God it is the same. It’s all pocket change to Him. ”
He said yes. It’s on Him to provide the change. And that is what it is. Pocket change from our Dad. A day at the snack bar with His kids.
Ask Big. You have a Big, Big, Dad.
In Just Courage, Gary Haugen asked, “Do you want to be safe or brave?” And then ever so subtly, he asked, “What do you think God wants for you? Safety or bravery?”
These are disturbing questions if you examine them. Let me combine some of Haugen’s thoughts with some ideas of my own that have surfaced. Safety is about control. Safety is about doing life “just so” so that we can predict and determine the outcomes of our lives, our jobs, our families. The desire for safety for the Christian is like the boiling pot for the proverbial frog. It will be the spiritual death of us because it calculates and manipulates all the Life out of us.
We resign ourselves to these small endeavors that are easily managed by our own efforts and rarely tap into the need for an Almighty God. We call this spiritual success because we have planned and prepared, avoided and outmaneuvered any real threat to our well being. We are, deep sigh, safe. We pacify our hunger for more by applauding ourselves with being “responsible.”
Yet all through scripture the only place of safety is in God Himself. Do you think Jesus was calling the disciples to safety or bravery? He said simply, “Follow Me.” Was that responsible? Did they hit the safety wall while following Jesus? You bet. But they also got to experience life beyond the grocery store and ATM. The feeding of the 5,000. The taxes in a fish’s mouth. You don’t need faith and miracles if you have everything under control.
So then is bravery a reckless abandon, without care or thought of future? Not at all. Bravery is following God where God is working and knowing that apart from God, you cannot possibly make it happen. Bravery is laying aside the comforts of life for the compassion of God. Bravery is dependence on God born of a desperate heart. It is the deep understanding that the attempted work is so much beyond the individual, that only God could pull it off. Yet the insanity is, being in His presence doing what only He could accomplish is beyond any man-made satisfaction. Talk about exhilarating.
You know the disciples were scared, but you also know they were blown away by what they saw and experienced of God. Sure it was hard, but our desire for “easy” is an American curse.
To make matters worse, Haugen asked, “How are you raising your children? To be safe or brave?” Safe in the cocoon of don’t-get-too-close-to-the-dirty-world because it might rub off? Or brave so that they are equipped and desirous of charging the gates of hell in the name of Jesus?
Assess your life. Ask hard questions and let God answer them. Do you want your lattes? Or do you want to see His Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven?
“I run in the path of Your commands for You have set my heart free.” Psalm 119:32
Does anyone even remember this line from the musical, The Music Man? All my life I have heard this when bigger-than-life problems hit closer to home than we imagined. That’s what happened when I read last Saturday’s newspaper headline about sex trafficking.
Sex trafficking? You mean women who choose prostitution as a job? No. Sex slavery. These are predators who steal or buy children then force them to have sex with grown men up to 12-20 times a day. I’m talking 5-12 year old children. These are predators who ship women across country borders with the promise of a better job. But in reality they steal these women’s passports, take them to places where they don’t know the language, and then beat or rape them into submission. They are sex slaves. Forced to do whatever their oppressors demand.
Now put all this horror right here in little ole Knoxville. Or Atlanta. Or Los Angeles. Or Thailand. When it is your daughter, or son, does it matter what city you live in?
I have been reading like a fiend and meeting people who are making a huge difference in this battle. Let me recommend you read: Just Courage, by Gary Haugen. He asks haunting questions when calling us out of the shadows of Christian apathy and comfort.
Do you want to be safe or brave?
We love, and are made in the image of, the God of justice. We rarely talk about Him like this, but He talks about it all the time.
He has shown you, O man, what is good;
And what does the LORD require of you
But to do justly,
To love mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God?” Micah 6:8
1 million.
That’s how many children are trafficked for sex each year. That doesn’t include the helpless, defenseless women.
I want to just start the conversation. I want to ring the alarm. I want to ask you to ask God to show you what justice means in His opinion. Ask, watch and listen for His answers. Then ask Him what He has put in you to help bring justice to the world. If you are alive and you are free, then you have a mission.
Evil triumphs when good men and women do nothing.
You know, I love men. In fact, I am married to one. Still. And they never cease to make me laugh — especially my man when we are in a snit. So we had been having a few tense days. (You know the ones I mean…) In attempts to kind of break the ice instead of each other, we decided to go get coffee. No problem, it’s public, it’s safe.
Well several minutes into our “Awkward-trying-to-connect” conversation an attractive woman walked by and her perfume left this small cloud as she passed. I said off-handedly, “I think I know that woman and I definitely still smell her.”
Chuck says innocently, “I like it.”
Stop the film. Now this is from a man who has stopped most scented products in our house because of his sensitivities to smells. We move at church and movies because of perfume wafts that irritate his sinuses. I have abandoned my favorite cologne because he can’t endure it.
And he says of the green fog, as only a man can say it, “I like it.”
I just look at him. Blankly. Trying to decide if this is when I kill him or do I wait until we are in the car. He must have sensed the possible danger because he added ever so carefully,
“It reminds me… of something…you used to wear.”
We busted out laughing. I gave him a High Five and told him that was one of the best saves I had heard in a long time. I told him that he should write a book called “Good Answer Manual” and put that as entry # 462, under the CYA chapter.
I tell all my young brides the same thing. With men there are only two choices: Eat them with a spoon or hack them with an axe.