Tag Archives: Christ

Lessons – by Bekkie

Posted on by Standard 28

 

The best lesson my mother ever taught me was how to learn a lesson. When I would tell her a story, any story, good or bad, she’d say, “So, what did you learn?” And I would

 

First page of the Gospel of Mark, by Sargis Pi...

First page of the Gospel of Mark, by Sargis Pitsak, a Medieval Armenian scribe and miniaturist (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

try to figure out what I’d learned. This has been the most helpful lesson in my life. Even very bad situations offer some new piece of information. It’s comforting, to know some good came, even from the bad.

 

Watching my dad’s downward spiral has taught me many things. Addictive drugs are not to be played with. Our words affect other people, sometimes for a long time. Love does in fact hope all things, endure all things, bear all things.

 

Those lessons, and more every day. But there’s one in particular that I can’t get past. My dad’s a pretty good example of someone who is lost. He has something in him that is never satisfied. He sought, for years, to fill it with the world’s version of good things: a family, nice house, good job. When we moved away, he turned to other things, less acceptable things. Forbidden even. It’s almost as if he needed something stronger, more potent.

 

When you share the gospel with someone, there’s some compassion in your heart. You feel sorry for where they are in their lives, in their heart. You offer them Jesus, and hope they accept. But when I told my dad about Jesus, that he could bring peace, that he was the only solution, I didn’t feel just compassion. I felt almost desperate. I needed him to believe, to understand.

 

That’s when I learned about free will, the high cost of it. God loves my dad, loves everyone, far more than I do. This is what Jesus meant, love your enemies. He is merciful even to the evil and unkind. In the end, though, he won’t force anyone. I can’t force my dad.

 

He laughed me off. The gospel is foolishness to those who are dying, but to those who are being saved it is life everlasting. Please pray for my dad. I don’t want to get to heaven and not see him there. I don’t know if this is presumptuous, but please also pray to learn to love also. I think we could do more good if we felt that way about everyone, and not just the people in our immediate view. I’m praying for it, too. Thanks.

 

– Bekkie

 

Hope – by Bekkie

Posted on by Standard 4

I have always been aware that I was one day going to die. I don’t know where the knowledge came from, only that it was there, ever on the edge of my mind. As a child, this knowledge manifested itself in a serious countenance, tinged with anger. As a teenager, it took the form of a kind of reckless spontaneity. As an adult, I believe God gave me a gift. I truly understand that I am already dead. I am walking around in eternity as we speak. Anything I gain or lose here on earth is incidental.

“Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For you are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” Col 3:2-3

So then the question becomes, how do I spend my time, since I’m dead already? I feel like I’ve mostly been twiddling my thumbs, waiting for the end. The bible says in everything give thanks, for this is the will of our Father for you. So then, learn how to give thanks in adversity and in peace. I can do that. For the most part, I don’t get too worked up anyways. Because, you know, I’m going to die, so it doesn’t really matter. But that doesn’t address the problem of specifics. Should I sign myself up to be shipped out to preach the gospel to the heathens? Should I walk the streets with a milk crate, from which I might shout out warnings of the upcoming end to passersby? Should I get a job at Wal-Mart bringing in shopping carts, and use my income to fund the acquisition of four walls to call home?

I really have no idea.

I don’t hear from God on this. I’ve only recently begun to learn how to hear from him at all. We’ve been battling radio silence from the beginning. I don’t trust stray thoughts to be from him. Now I know I have heard from him twice for sure. Neither time did he address the problem of what to do with my body. Only my heart. When I find out what the body’s meant to do, I’ll be very grateful. As it is, I have no home, no job, little education, and my belonging fit in a trunk, none of which I couldn’t live without. I’m starting to think that my sojourn here is going to be uncomfortable at best.

– Bekkie

Sometimes, The Message Isn’t For Me

Posted on by Standard 51

I have only been blogging for a couple of months, and yet I have watched, normally from the sidelines, as people with varying perceptions have “disagreed” with one another to the point that things have gotten somewhat heated. Some have quickly made amends, and others have parted ways completely. And it seems to me that it is unfortunate that this happens so often, because to me, it is only a matter of looking at things from an earthly standpoint instead of a heavenly one.

I tend to avoid such scrapes as much as I can, only being involved personally with my one throw-down on an atheist that I felt was disrespectful to an amazing degree. But, overall, I enjoy being at peace with my fellow man…or, in these cases, my fellow bloggers.

Yesterday, I had pretty much taken the day off from my computer, and when I logged on in the evening, I came across this post written by Sara, Universal Truths in answer to a post written by Anne, titled Personal Responsibility. I’ll let you catch up on the specifics, but the part that I want to address is perception.

As a young woman, I was under the mistaken impression that everything about a person could be summed up and categorized easily and efficiently, like cataloging some kind of vegetable or fruit. For example, I thought that if a person came from a home with an alcoholic parent, that person would either love or hate addictive substances. No middle ground. If a person grew up with normal, supportive parents, that person would in turn, be a normal, supportive parent. In my mind, I tended to over-simplify everything, including people. To me, the key to understanding a fellow person was in finding the correct formula that they fit in, like an algebra problem.

But, as I grew more mature, both spiritually and emotionally, and I began to deal with my own trauma from childhood, I was forced to admit that no one is truly uncomplicated. There are just too many factors that go into the sum total of a person, and with each layer I would peel off of my own self-consciousness, I would then learn to appreciate the same complexity in other human beings. Now, as I look back over my life, and the road of healing I’ve traveled, I am very slow in assuming that any other person on the planet can truly, truly understand completely why people are the way they are. And with this developing understanding of just how much we are not equipped to judge one another has come a mercy for people as I am beginning to see them from God’s perspective instead of my own. I learned to err always on the side of compassion, empathy, and mercy….all the things that I would have wanted people to give me when I was a lost, confused, angry girl.

The only universal truths I have found are in the Bible, but even in there, we don’t all fall in all of the categories. For instance, we all have varying degrees of spiritual gifts, or we struggle with different kinds of sins, etc. The one universal truth is that Jesus died for all of us, and His sacrifice was enough for anyone. But from there on, we each are approaching this life with our own sets of ideals, understandings, perceptions, mis-perceptions, and other lenses that color how we interact and react to one another.

I don’t think for even one minute that Anne was telling me, or Sara, to just get over our pasts. There is truth in her article about taking responsibility at some point in your life for your decisions. But, I guess what sparked the wariness in me is the somewhat generality of the post…Thrown out there like some random net, and not specific in its parameters.

I am not all bent out of shape about her perceptions, because taken in the context of what I believe she was aiming at, she is correct in her opinion. It is good to remember that the body of Christ is made up of many different kinds of people who vary in their gifts. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are so different, and if one takes a minute to think about the personality types that would excel at each of these different gifts, you’d find, like I did, that they would be really different.

We need the warriors in the body of Christ, but we also need the spiritual paramedics. We need people like me, who dismiss all the varying sins and shortcomings a person struggles with, and seek to see a person the way the Lord sees them, but we also need those evangelists and teachers that bring about conviction of sins, or there would be no addressing and purging of sins in any of our lives, either.

All of our gifts were given to us in order to work together in order to bring people into the Kingdom of God; to encourage each other to stay in the fight; to point the confused or lost in the right direction; to help each other in the ways that we each individually need at that moment. It would be counter-productive to be angry or resentful or dismissive of varying perceptions from our sisters and brothers in Christ just because they don’t fit our limited scope of what we think is important. Instead, by widening our viewpoint, it is rather easy to see how each of our differences, our strong points and our weak ones, work together beautifully in the big picture of the Christian Church.

Anne’s post may have hit home for someone else, even though it might not have been necessary for me, or Sara. And as such, it is important for each of us to weigh the importance of a message for our own lives, and if it is not relevant to our own circumstances at that moment, dismiss it and move on. It doesn’t say anything at all if a message simply isn’t pertinent to an individual at that moment. It might still be important for someone else.

– Bird

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What To Do and What Not To Do When Being Robbed At Gunpoint

Posted on by Standard 30

 

A few years ago, when Caitlyn was still in high school, she got a job at one of the Drug Warehouse stores here in Tulsa.

In my mind, they are still little…
Rebekkah, Caitlyn, and William (Dj) with their Dad, Chef

My eldest child, Rebekkah worked at the same drugstore, in the pharmacy, and Caitie worked in the photo lab. What I learned from one incident there is that all of my kids have an alarming lack of self-protective instincts. Some would call it real faith, or courage, or bravery. Their mother thinks it will cause her head to explode eventually.

One evening, as Chef, my brother Ernie, and I were watching television, I received a call from Caitie. The store she and Rebekkah worked at had just been robbed at gunpoint!

Six young boys had come to steal drugs. Fanning out, the guys took up different positions in the store, and using guns they had forced everyone to lie on their stomachs. Then, one of the boys had gone to the pharmacy located towards the back of the store, demanded the narcotics, flashed his gun,  and jumped over the counter…only to have the pharmacist pick him up and bodily throw him back out again. I still laugh when I think of that. The surprise of having not succeeded in intimidating the middle-aged pharmacist, and instead, being bodily lifted and thrown over the counter like some kind of rag doll, was too much for the young thief’s brain to process, and he panicked, running out of the store while calling for the others to follow, and they jumped into a waiting vehicle, and made their speedy get-away.

This is the store my girls worked at. Ironically, I got this picture from another robbery that happened there recently. Yikes.

They left empty-handed, somewhat humiliated, probably frustrated,  and caught on tape. Rebekkah, who was a pharmacy technician, had just gotten off her shift, and actually passed the group of men as they were walking into the store on her way out to her car. Caitlyn, though, was right there at the front of the store, and when everyone was ordered to lie on their stomach, Caitie decided she was going to lie on her back instead, so she could memorize as much as she could about the gunman. Oh Sweet Mother of God!!  Sure enough, on the news, they played back some of the security footage, and there was my youngest child on the ground staring up at a man holding a gun pointed at her. Staring!!! She wasn’t even trying to hide the fact that she was looking right at him the whole time.

I still cringe when I think about that film footage.

Being a hyper-vigilant, freak-out kind of mother, I instantly felt sick to my stomach while listening to the details she was giving me. Sensing I was probably close to flipping out completely, Caitie assured me that I did not need to come up to the store as the police were there taking a report from all the witnesses, and that no one had gotten hurt.

“Don’t worry, Mom! I’m fine…No one got hurt, and it was over in just a few minutes.The police are here now, and I’ll be home soon. Please don’t worry! Really, it is all okay!!,” she assured me, in an alarmingly calm voice.

I remember how my whole body began to shake, and I instantly began to thank God that she, and Rebekkah, were safe. The whole thing seemed surreal.

Sure enough, Caitie came strolling into the house not too long after the phone call, somewhat high on adrenaline, cheerful, and feeling kind of awesome. I had half been expecting to have to comfort my youngest daughter, but her cavalier attitude took me by surprise; though really, it shouldn’t have. By this time, I’d experienced my kids’ penchant for being brave in situations that I really would rather they’d have been cowardly in. When she told me about her decision to lie on her back instead of her stomach, and then actively memorizing  the gunman’s features, and how the police were impressed with her ability to recall some identifying markers, all I could think was how angry I was getting at Caitlyn! Seriously. Why couldn’t she just have done what the gunman had told her to do and minded her own business? Let the cops do their job. Don’t be a hero. Don’t draw any attention from the bad guys..A million other Mother-Wisdom’s came pouring out, and I knew every last one of them was worthless. My kids simply are not cowards. What I consider careful and prudent, they consider cowardly.

Fear isn’t something any of them seem to have in any great quantity. They seem to just expect things to work out in their favor. And while I know that when it comes to my own bodily safety and security, I am exactly the same way, it is unnerving that my kids have followed in my reckless foot-steps. I seriously can’t wait for them to become parents just so I can laugh when they all freak out about their own kids!!

Despite all the advice and lecturing I’ve given my kids throughout the years, they have consistently disregarded the parts of those diatribes that reference protecting themselves above everything and everyone else.

My kids have pulled over in the middle of the night to help strangers in broken down cars. They’ve given questionable people rides in their cars. They’ve answered the door to strangers, and they’ve been entirely too open about their lives to people who I’m sure could have proven to be stalkers. And when, over the years,  I point-blank asked them why they were trying to make their mom’s head explode, their answers were all somewhat the same. They want to help people because God told them to in the Bible. Do unto others, and all that.

“Remember, you never know when you will be helping an angel”, one of them popped off cheerfully. Yeah, I thought, but 99% of the time, it is probably not an angel…

As a Christian, I am very proud of them. As a mother, I’m thinking the angel-thing isn’t a good enough reason to risk their precious little necks. But I have learned by now, my kids can be lead to water, but nothing is going to make them drink unless they decide to do so themselves. Stubbornness is another family trait we all share.

As I am now embarking on learning to truly and honestly trust the Lord with the important stuff in my life, I am actually putting in His hands more than my husband today. I’m trusting Him with the safety and security of my three somewhat reckless, obviously head-strong, but nevertheless well-intention-ed kids. They are all adults now, each embarking on their own adventures and experiences. I have moved from being a protective parent to more of a concerned adviser in their lives, and there isn’t much more that I can do other than to trust that God’s will be done in each of their lives.

Well, that and cyber-stalk their every move…  :-)

– Bird

 

 

A Marriage Is Over

Posted on by Standard 109

It is always astounding to me how a new perspective in an old situation can change the emotional landscape of one’s existence in that exact moment. Suddenly, though circumstances have not changed at all, you have, and every thing that is happening around you from that moment of clarity on feels different.

As anyone who’s been reading my recent posts probably knows by now, I’ve been engaged in a spiritual battle over my marriage. In a nutshell, my husband Chef is in the throes of a midlife crisis, and I, the ultimate passive aggressive control freak that I am, find myself not only unable to “help” him find his way out of it, but have been clearly instructed by the Lord not to bothering trying. For the back story, you can read any of the plethora of posts under the marriage category or my initial post, I’m A Casualty in my Husband’s War Against Time. For those who just want the cliff notes version, here it is: I’ve not been very obedient to God about staying out of His and Chef’s business. As God is inclined to do, He has used this experience as a refining fire for me, and while He is dealing with His son, Chef, He has also been dealing with His daughter, Bird, as well.

Never in my life have I been able to see my own heart so clearly as I have these last few months, and I have to quote Jeremiah 17:9:

 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?

Through this experience, I’ve had to come face to face with some demons that have haunted me since I was a child, and I find that this recent upheaval in Chef’s and my marriage, which I had once considered a time of discipline from my Father, has instead turned into a time of Healing. And, for me, it all boiled down to trust.

Do I trust God?

Had anyone asked me that question even a few days ago, I would have answered with a resounding “yes”, and been convinced that I was being truthful. Whenever you ask almost any Christian this question, we will almost unanimously answer that we do, and probably not think twice about it. But I’ve had this sneaking suspicion for the last few months that God was pointing out a rather nasty little flaw in me, and that is my inability to trust anyone, even Him.

Subconsciously, I kind of always assumed that God loves all mankind, and even the sparrows, more than He loved me.

Even at this very  moment, as I’m typing these words, my heart is sad and afraid about opening up myself to being vulnerable to pain and disappointment. But at the same time, I have been given a new perspective from the Lord, and I feel the sense of peace one gets when they finally surrender to Him and trust that He will do what is best for us.

Yesterday, I gave up my battle with Chef, and with God, and admitted defeat. I literally, for the first time since it all started, gave up my own panic, fear, anger, and manipulation, and instead embraced the knowledge that maybe God wasn’t kidding with me…He told me not to try to fix this, even a little bit, and turns out, He is never fooled by me….even when I’m fooling myself.

Because Chef was gone for a few days on a trip, I had a lot of time to think about my next move, and the more scenarios that went through my head, the more frustrated I got, because it all boiled down to one fact…you can’t fix something in another person when that person doesn’t want to be fixed. Period.

Now, I’ve been thinking lately that my motives for wanting Chef to address these areas of his life were good ones, but instead of focusing on him and his motives, I instead had to look at my own, and they were rather sad and disheartening. I just wanted to continue to live in the life I’d carefully set up for myself, and I didn’t want Chef’s crisis to mess that up.

I’m sure a psychologist would have a hay-day with the number of reasons I have for not trusting other people, but it my thought that God isn’t interested in my excuses anymore. Yes, there are valid earthly arguments for me being this way, but He is my maker, and also my Great Physician, and after a lot of years allowing this coping mechanism to go un-addressed, the time had finally come for another step of healing to occur. And frankly, it just wasn’t a healing I had ever wanted or asked for. And I’ve resisted this process every step of the way.

If I am being extremely truthful with myself right at this moment, I’d have to say “No”, I haven’t trusted God all these years. Oh, I’ve prayed, and He’s answered. I have sinned, and asked for forgiveness, and I believe wholeheartedly that He has forgiven me. But always, somewhere in the dark corners of my mind, I’ve always thought that I was just a technicality in His system, not really a beloved child. I knew He wasn’t a liar, so I was saved. But to believe that the Creator of Everything in the Universe, actually cared and loved me as an individual was too hard for me to process, so I just didn’t. I’m exceedingly gifted at ignoring what I don’t want to see.

I’ve taught God’s love and mercy to any number of people, and I can say honestly that I meant every word. I have had no problems believing for all the good things from the Lord for other people, but I just didn’t want to trust God with the things that were really important to me, just in case He might not have my best intentions at heart.

Why should I? Up until only a day or so ago, I’ve almost always been the captain of my own destiny. I’ve been somewhat skilled at setting up my own controllable environments, and holding things that threatened my neatly ordered world away from it. And, for the first time since I was a small child, I actually came to trust Chef completely. I was shocked, surprised, and somewhat horrified when I realized this a few years ago, but I also have to admit, I really liked the feeling, too.

But by creating this structure of trust on a foundation of manipulation and control , all I was really doing was setting up the Perfect Storm for myself when the people in it decided to rebel, and it all fell down like the house of cards that it was. And frankly, I’ve been grieving for my lost environment, and struggling to rebuild on that same shaky foundation.

I would have to say that for the last several years of my marriage, I’d replace Jesus on the throne of my life with my husband, and even a baby Christian knows, God isn’t okay with that. I also have to say that there were only a couple of things that Chef would ever be able to do that would have removed him from that high place of honor in my life, and over the past few months, he did exactly two of the three things.

I want to take a moment to say this…his issues probably aren’t the things everyone thinks they are. He isn’t having an affair, which is definitely one of the three things I’d really, really have problems with. I don’t want to paint a nastier picture than it really is. But he’s struggling with normal midlife crisis stuff; issues that, to a person who thought things like this were only in her long distant past, have opened up a dialogue with myself that I think will prove to be the cornerstone of my new foundation, and it won’t be unstable or easily destroyed. And more importantly, it isn’t built around Chef.

As a teenager, a person once gave me this Word from the Lord, and what had struck me so curious about it was the tone that it had. They had told me that I had dropped my vase, and it had shattered and the water had gone everywhere. And instead of going to my Father and receiving another vase with new water, I was on the ground, trying desperately to fix the broken vase, and reclaim the lost water. I remember thinking it was kind of an odd vision, and I have to admit, I disregarded it completely….until right this moment. Boy, does God know me, or what?!

Yesterday, I spiritually gave up trying to accomplish rebuilding my broken vase, and scooping up the lost water. Instead, I received a new vase with clean, fresh water from God, and I have stopped grieving for the lost house of cards. Instead, I have a new hope, and it isn’t hitched to anything Chef does or doesn’t do. I’ve learned that maybe, just maybe, God isn’t my Father because of a technicality; what if He actually really does love me? Maybe it was no mistake He called me by my own name; and even venturing out a little more, I can say that I can trust God with all my important stuff, and He won’t let me down.

Today, when I woke up, I had a real peace and a sense of calm that I’ve not really experienced much in my life. And when the devil arrived, as usual, to shake, rattle, and roll my world, my brand new foundation stayed firmly in place. In fact, it wasn’t much of a battle at all, and the skirmish was easily won and quickly over.

Trust isn’t something I truly understand when it comes to other people, and I doubt this is my last encounter with my feelings about it, but I do have a firm knowledge that this is what God had in mind for me when all of this crap first started months ago. He gave me a lifetime of proof that I could, indeed, trust Him, and now, I find that I needed that proof, and a lot of it, before He would have been able to address this problem in me. It makes me feel like He patiently sacrificed Himself all over again for years, accepting my somewhat suspicious, distrusting service to Him. And He did that patiently and kindly,  just for me. And, when the time was right, He cared enough to tear down my pathetic dwelling I’d built on the sand, and instead helped me lay down a foundation of stone built on solid ground. A place that would be safe against the hurricanes of life.

How can I not trust a God like that?

It is with complete, heartfelt honesty when I say this: I am truly grateful that all of this has happened, because I’d rather have this peace and stability based on the foundations He lays for me, than have to do all the hard work it takes to keep my shanty-like environment, built on the sands of mistrust, from crumbling all by myself.

I feel like that life didn’t pass His inspection, and the dwelling has been condemned and torn down. Now, building has begun on a new life, and it will be better and far more trustworthy than the one I’d built for myself. My old marriage is over; now, I look forward to my new one.

Maybe it is a good day to ask yourself — Do you really trust God?

– Bird

A Pictorial Guide to Bird’s Latest Crisis