Living Life Differently

I find myself wondering lately when did we buy into the idea that overextending ourselves and filling our calendars past the bursting point was acceptable?  When did we decide that if we could spend just 5 minutes in the morning letting our Father fill us that we could make it through the day?  When did we start to believe that it's normal and okay to live like our lives are a fast food restaurant doling out the minutes of our lives to all of the various work, church, charitable and family commitments that clamor for their share of fractions of seconds of our lives?

I've noticed an overwhelming amount of my friends that seem desperate for a few more hours in their day. a few more minutes to their week or even just one more second to the month, just to get everything that life is demanding from them.  I'm starting to form a theory about this pattern that I recognize creeps up even into my life after nearly a year of consciously choosing to work on changing those patterns in myself.  I fully believe that all of those "good" causes are ways the Enemy chooses to distract us from being the best possible version of ourselves we can be.  

I mean face it....  Work is something we do to sustain our families so it's not exactly something we can just decide not to do one day, but it takes a huge amount of courage to ask if the job that demands so much of our time is really the job we need at this moment of our lives.  And church and charity...  Who is going to dare say that maybe you should turn down that request to provide a meal to a family in the need or say no to the latest suggestion that maybe you should volunteer in yet another ministry that is beginning to form?  And I think it goes without saying that we can't exactly leave our children and spouses to survive on their own and expect those relationships to survive unscathed....  So how are we suppose to manage all of the things that demand our attention and drain our lives of the vital resource of time?

For myself I'm finding that it requires that I break the cycle.  It means that the word "No" has become vital to my vocabulary.  Now it doesn't always come out of my mouth that way, but learning to recognize and verbalize that something doesn't work for me right now is key to my survival in this current phase of my life.  Giving myself permission to "just say no" has been invaluable.  It's changed how much and how often I feel overwhelmed and over-extended.  

By their fruits you will know them.

Matthew 7:16a

I think about this verse and wonder what people see in my life as compared to the life of Christ?  Do I value the same things that he did?  Do I show it by the choices I make?

Out of this line of thought have come some life changes for me.  Through my search for what I value, God has brought some amazing women into my life through books, blogs, conferences and a church who's motto I've adapted and adopted as my life motto.  Let me introduce you briefly to these inspiring women and the lesson each taught me.

First into my life in the middle of some hard life changes came Bonnie Gray, a blogger (Faith Barista) and author, who introduced me to the concept of Spiritual Whitespace.  This idea of stopping my life and letting God share His truth about me was life-changing.  It meant that rather than living in the middle of anxiety and panic attacks I could begin to live in the truth that I was God's Beloved.  It didn't matter that I wasn't good enough for certain jobs or roles in other people's eyes, God had a plan and saw me as something to be cherished.

Next God built on that idea of Whitespace by introducing into my world yet another author and blogger, Ruth Soukup and her book and blog, Living Well, Spending Less.  The idea that stuff can be distracting isn't really a new concept, but Ruth shared her own story in such a way that one of the changes I've implemented into my life this year is working toward living life more intentionally and living with only the things we need.  It's a work in progress, but I find the more I say no to stuff the easier it is to say no to the things that attempt to demand my time and energy.

Following the idea of Living Well, I was introduced to Jennifer Dukes Lee, at a women's conference.  As I began to say no to those things that vied for my time and attention I've noticed that the fear of what other's think always hides in the recesses of my mind.  Who would be offended if I posted this very real thing in a blog post?  What will they think when I say no to this event?  And the list goes on.  Through Jennifer, I was given the perspective of I don't need others approval.  I've been Pre-Approved by God!  He loves me just as I am.  I'm a work in progress and that's ok.  

Three women with very different messages over the past year have helped give me some traction in how to adapt the motto from a church that has come to hold a special place in my heart over the past year and a half.  This church has the motto of Doing Church Differently, while staying true to the message of Jesus Christ.  I love it!  It permeates everything they do as a church from their services to their businesses to their community involvement.  I find myself taking the spirit of that motto into my personal life.  I want to live my life differently, while sharing the message of Jesus Christ in every choice I make.  

Living life differently for me has begun to mean, purging the stuff that hangs out in my house demanding time, attention and energy to organize and clean it.  It means carving time out for Whitespace in the middle of a world that says doing more looks productive.  It means learning to live without the approval for others.  I know their are so many more things that will continue to go into living life differently, but this seems to be the foundation of a good start..... 

The Grace of Repentance

I recently had someone ask me if I believed in repentance.  It's funny because it feels like it should be such an easy answer, but for me it's not.  For me the word repentance brings back nightmares I had as a child.  Waking up at night to a silent house, straining to hear the slightest noise that would tell me I wasn't the only one left in the house.  At 10 years old my fear wasn't that an ax murderer had broken in and killed everyone, it was that God had decided to take everyone who had proved they were sincere about their "repentance" to Heaven and I was the only one in our family who was left because I knew my heart.  I knew as much as I might try I wasn't perfect and that I messed up a lot!

We would sing Jesus Loves the Little Children and I never believed it because I didn't feel worth loving much.  I looked at myself even as a child and just saw all of the things I couldn't get right.  I lived in fear of God rather than basking in the love and grace of God.  I saw God as someone who wanted to punish me not bless me.  Over the years I came to see blessings as things God gave you for performing as expected.  Not the result of the overabundance of his love for me.

Over the weekend I came up against a piece of my past that I thought I had moved through.  The heart wrenching fear that God didn't love me after all and that nothing I could do or say was good enough.  The incident had me sitting in a chair begging God to show me the truth and counter the lie that inside I knew was wrong, but the message from my past of an unforgiving God was so strong that it triggered my panic attacks.

Earlier in the year I purchased a necklace that reads pre-approved and has the definition inside a pendant.  I purchased it because somehow I knew I needed the physical reminder that God has pre-approved me.  Others opinions of me do not matter and they do not define my relationship with Him.  In this particular moment that message became the exact thing that God could use to speak the truth of who I am and who He is making me into.  It reminded me that I'm his Beloved, he values me and loves me more than I can imagine.

Over the course of the next 24 hours it felt like God just began showering me with reminders of his love, grace and truth.  He reminded me that David who failed so much was someone he called a man after God's own heart.  David, who killed a man after sleeping with his wife.  David, who didn't pay attention and tried to move God's ark in a way much different from God's directions.  David who had multiple wives.  This was a man who lived a really messy life, but the Psalms are filled with his searching for God.  I was reminded that the simple definition to repentance is not a list of rules I have to keep up with.  It's not penance when I've screwed something up.  It's realizing I'm walking in a different direction from God and correcting course.  It's changing my ways, not beating myself up over the fact I can't be perfect.

Grace is not something I can earn, but for repentance to be genuine it has to be something I can accept and live in.  Love. Grace.  Repentance.  You can't separate them.  Without love and grace, repentance is only judgement and humiliation.  Without repentance, love and grace are only tools to excuse anything we might want to do.  Separate they can be abused, but embraced together they become a thing of beauty and life change.  Together they give us David's story that inspires us to strive to be called like he was "a man after God's own heart".

So do I believe in repentance?  Absolutely!  I've lived it.  I experience it every day when I screw up.  I experience it every time that I let the lies from the past overwhelm what God is doing in my present.  But I also believe that it must be embraced with love and grace to have any effect in our lives.  Repentance becomes the means to repair relationship with God, not the means for our brokenness to be held over our heads.