Confessions: # 1 I Am Worn Out

I've wondered sometimes if I am the only one who loses faith. I'm not ashamed to admit that I struggle and sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't just be easier to give up and walk away. Go my own way and get what's mine in the world. Even as I write, I want to do just that. I'm tired. Exhausted really. I remember when my faith was new and nice and shiny. Nowadays, I look at my faith and I see that it's wearing thin in the middle. It's becoming threadbare, and the edges are starting to fray. It's no longer in pristine shape after years of being trampled on and drug through the mudd. It is bloodied and bruised and limping and barely alive. I'm worn out and washed up. I remember when things like simple childlike faith, grace, and simply trusting that God was enough for me was easy, but now that all seems like a forlorn memory. It's been drilled into my head that one of the marks of a 'good' Christian is doing a quite time. But even something as easy as reading my Bible is a chore as of late. Do I love Jesus any less? No. But I'm tired of the ritual.

Earlier today, I posted this to Twitter: #Truth: Today, grace hurts.
I've felt that way all day. I screw up and I feel terrible about it. So, I pray and confess, and yet even though I know I'm forgiven and even though I know that God's grace covers me, it pains me to accept that which I don't deserve.

I'm trying to hold on. I really am. I blare Christian music in my iPod all day, trying to find encouragement, and I try my best to stay in constant prayer, but it seems like the more I pray and the louder I turn my music up to drown out my doubts that I'm worthy, the more bitter and cynical I become.

I don't want to turn out cynical. I don't want to turn out bitter. And I don't want to lose faith. But it's hard not too. Like I said already, I'm tired. And today, both grace and the cross are hard to bare. But, I'll keep limping my way on. I'm not giving up though. I am broken and bitter and apathetic, but I'm not giving up hope.

"Tell them to look up. Tell them to remember the stars.The stars are always there but we miss them in the dirt and clouds. We miss them in the storms. Tell them to remember hope. We have hope." -Renee Yohe

Bear With You

Jamie Tworkowski, the founder of To Write Love On Her Arms (http://www.twloha.com/) posted in one of his blog post recently these words. He said:

"Be loved. Be known. Love people and know people. Be so brave as to raise a hand for help when you need it. Make friends and make sure they know they matter. Be loyal to them and fight for them. Remind them what’s true and invite them to do the same when you forget. If you do some losing or you walk with someone else in their defeat, live with dignity and grace. It is a middle finger to the darkness"

I've been dealing lately with community. With my openness with others. With loving others and being loved by others. I was recently, thanks to my friend John Blackford, introduced to the musical stylings of Christian rappers Lecrae, Trip Lee, Sho Baraka and Tedashii. As I listened to Lecrae's album "Rehab" I kept hearing words like community, and I became convicted of my lack of living in community with fellow Christians. I've been under deep conviction lately of my reclusive, introverted nature. If I claim to love Jesus, I cannot seclude myself and hide behind the flimsy excuse that "I'm just not a people person". That being said, I've been listening to Trip Lee's album "Between Two Worlds" for the last two weeks. It's a raw and honest introspective album that has made me look hard at myself and how I live. Well, although I love every song on the album, all day today I've been playing his song "Bear with You (Featuring Tedashaii)" and I have to tell you...it has hit hard. I've had a frustrating time this semester, especially dealing with my family and even some of my friends. But as I have listened to that song today, I have been moved beyond mere conviction to a sort of Holy Discontent, and I am determined to look past myself and all of my excuses to try my best, with God's help, to bear with those in my community at Williams and back home. Paul writes to the Colossians in 3:12-17:

So, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. Beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body; and be thankful. Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.

Like Jamie said in his blog and like Paul writes to the Colossians, we must bear with one another. To do so is a middle finger to the darkness. Trip says in "Bear with You"  "It gets hard tryna to bear with my kind, But I gotta keep the gospel in mind Since He rose with my life, it ain't mine I'ma bear with ya, I'ma bear with ya"

 I pray that I will be able to bear with you, and you with me through all of my imperfection and weakness.

"I'ma bear with ya!"

Limping, but far more alive...

"God's grace does not mean that God benignly accepts humans in all their fallenness, forgives them, and then leaves them in that fallenness.  God is in the business not of whitewashing sins but of transforming sinners."-David Garland


The cross of grace, I have found is a heavy burden to bear and more oft than not we bear the cross of sin with joy. But where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. We are fooled into believing that the cross of grace is easy and carefree, but I can testify to the enormous weight of God grace, because in my life, where my sin was great,  God's grace was higher and longer and deeper and wider than my sin and I struggled under the weight of God's enormous kindness because where my sin was great, his grace was greater. I encountered God and wrestled with him, and he took away my cross of sin, replacing it with a cross that I was never meant to bear. The cross of grace. It was too good. It was a cross that ransomed me from the throws of death and hell. It was a cross that bore witness to God's forgiveness and unfailing love. Here's my encouragement to you: Wrestle with his grace. Trust me, it's okay to struggle with it. It is only natural to fight against it because grace is so unnatural to us. Even if you come away from your life changing experience with his grace and you are beaten and battered and limping, you will be stronger because where our sin is great, God's grace is greater. It is not a pretty fight and we are bound to come out bloodied and battered and limping but we are far more alive afterward than we were before we began.  

Psalm 137

Psalm 137
  By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
       when we remembered Zion.
  There on the poplars
       we hung our harps,
  for there our captors asked us for songs,
       our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
       they said, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"
  How can we sing the songs of the LORD
       while in a foreign land?
  If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
       may my right hand forget its skill .
  May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
       if I do not remember you,
       if I do not consider Jerusalem
       my highest joy.
  Remember, O LORD, what the Edomites did
       on the day Jerusalem fell.
       "Tear it down," they cried,
       "tear it down to its foundations!"
 O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
       happy is he who repays you
       for what you have done to us-
  he who seizes your infants
       and dashes them against the rocks.

God's Love Toward Us

"And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God"-Ephesians 3:17b-19

It has been a long while that have I wrestled against grace. Trying to make it to God on my own, I abandoned the concept of grace altogether and tried to make my way to heaven on my own and I tried to somehow surpass the glorious gift given to me. That did just about as much good as trying to sail a ship with no rudder and a giant gaping hole in the bulkhead. Slowly however, God has taught me to trust him and he has begun to patch the holes in my ship and I have started to, in a very minuscule way, begin to understand the grace God has given to me through his Son Jesus Christ. 

I am in the process of preparing for a weekend retreat where I have the opportunity to speak on the theme of God's glorious love toward us. I consider myself blessed to get the opportunity to preach God's word and to, over six sessions, teach out of Ephesians 3:17b-19 and other portions of scripture which portray God's love toward us. 

As I have studied this theme of God's love toward us, I have learned a considerable amount. I think however, the biggest thing I have realized however is that I am in no way capable of grasping just how deep and high and long and wide the love of Christ is for me, and that is a humbling feeling. 

For all of my striving, for all of my working, for all of my poor and feeble attempts to reach God on my own, I was failing to recognize that Jesus loved me unconditionally and without reason. That grace was mine, and that I can rest in the knowledge that he loves me more than I can fathom. 

With this, I will conclude. I was listening to a sermon recently at Camp Living Stones(http://www.camplivingstones.com/)and Jon Smeltzer, the camp pastor said something that really stuck with me and it is something that I am still working through. He said "Men and women of God are not characterized by their love for God, but by their understanding of God's love for them." I am amazed and humbled at the vastness of the depth of Christ's love for me and the grace he has given me, but each day I am striving and pushing farther up and farther in, so that I can come to a more complete understanding of God's love for me.