Inherent Value

We’ve walked through so much heartache and death with our friends and family over the last year, our pain joining with theirs. So much has seemed broken beyond repair, unable to be fixed or salvaged.

I was thinking about this as I was walking this morning and I suddenly saw in my mind’s eye a picture of a white, weathered, dilapidated barn. Its door was open and inside it was bursting with all kinds of things that had been discarded, deemed to be of no use or value, things tossed aside in favor of new, things that were seemingly useless.

Barns like those are treasure troves. They’re the places where things of great value can be unearthed. They may need some refinishing or refurbishing, but when the hard work is done, they’re more valuable than they were when they were first created. They’ve stood the test of time and have survived. There’s great value in that.

God then reminded me that some of the world’s most valued and treasured works of art were created out of that which had been deemed beyond repair, things that had been discarded. Oftentimes, those things had to be taken apart, piece by piece, then joined with other pieces, old or new, to create something entirely different, something of great beauty, something that the world holds in high esteem, something that speaks to the hearts of those who gaze upon it.

Our lives can be barns filled with all of those things that we’ve deemed beyond repair, beyond saving, beyond help. We’ve tossed them aside, planned on dealing with them later, then they just got buried under the next thing we threw on top of it. Pretty soon, they’re forgotten about entirely and their progression toward brokenness only continues until decay and rot corrodes them completely and they crumble into nothingness.

Instead, we can choose to see the inherent value in those things. We can work to fix, restore or renovate that which is broken, putting in the blood, sweat and tears to cause beauty to shine forth from those things once again. Maybe it’s impossible for it to be repaired. Maybe it needs to be taken apart, bit by bit, joined with other pieces, and made into something entirely new. Life requires that of us sometimes.

Beauty can be brought forth from ashes and those are the things that become priceless.

Architect's Plans

“A man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.” Proverbs 16:9

Have you ever been at a point in your life where you feel dissatisfied, restless, and as if you’re surrounded by regrets? Ideas, plans, dreams, hopes, desires…..something seems to have prevented so many things from coming to pass in our life together. Finances, health issues, and being “tied” to a place for various reasons have seemed to be our biggest obstacles. We can’t or won’t dismiss and ignore all of the wonderful things that HAVE happened and been fulfilled, but this sense of restlessness and feeling like we’re just going through each day without coming closer to reaching the dreams we’ve had for a long time is where we’ve been at for a while.

As I’ve been chatting about this with God, I saw a picture of architect’s plans laid out on a table before two individuals. I understood one to be myself or my husband and the other to be our Divine Architect, the Master Builder Himself. We were looking at the plans together, discussing each aspect of them. We would point things out to one another, each making suggestions or explaining our thoughts behind the plans being drawn a  particular way or even agreeing to make adjustments to the plans to better suit the overall end goal. What I loved about the picture I saw was that even though our Architect had so much greater knowledge than we had, He was willing to plan with us and even adjust things according to our ideas and perspective.

This picture made me think about how at the very beginning, God set up this idea of working together on plans as He accepted Adam’s input in naming all of the creatures of the earth (Gen. 2). Later, God and Abraham shared such depth of relationship with one another that God refused to hide from Abraham His plans for Sodom and even allowed Abraham to “tweak” His original plan for the city (Gen. 18). Even before that crucial discussion, building up to that point we see how the relationship between them grew over time with each sharing their hearts and thoughts and ultimately, revealing their plans to one another and working together toward what was being built and established.

I believe that God invites us into a relationship that includes a partnership with Him – one in which we listen to one another, trust each other, and have such depth of relationship that we can plan together, with the Master welcoming the input of the layman. We were created to have relationship with Him and work alongside of Him, bringing heaven to earth in the most natural ways.

I think this sense of restlessness, dissatisfaction and regret  come from our timing not being the same as His, coupled with our inability to see the final plans in their entirety. I remember not long after I got married my parents were building a new home. I was devastated to have “lost” the home I was familiar with and I just couldn’t visualize what my dad was describing to me over the phone. Personally, I need to SEE things. I’m a visual learner. When things are described to me in an auditory manner, I often can’t translate that into a visual picture in my mind. It leaves me frustrated and, in the case of this new home that would never feel like “my” home, it just made me cry. I couldn’t see beyond this sense of feeling lost, adrift, and even abandoned in a way, despite the fact that I had begun a new adult life with my husband. Life was changing and not only did it seem like I had no say in it, I couldn’t see ahead to the plans for the future. I wanted answers NOW. I wanted to know not only the immediate next steps, I wanted to know all of the ones that were to come and how that was all going to turn out in the end.

Right now, Bri and I have ideas of what we want the plans to be for the future. We see some drawings on the table and are working with our Architect, but we want to not only get moving on the designs, we want to be living in the finished project and enjoying it for years to come. As I type this, I’m thinking that part of this is learning to actually enjoy the process, rather than chafe against it. It’s also about letting that relationship between Master and layman continue to grow and enjoying that, as well. I believe God is inviting us to have those conversations with Him that change His mind and alter His plans, but in a way that still accomplishes His ultimate goal through the process of give and take. He gave us free will with a purpose and invites us to surrender it to Him. We can do that knowing that He is a good Father who loves us deeply and only has the best plans in mind. 

Mirror, Mirror....

Over the last few months, I've really been drawn to connect with God's presence, focusing on Him being right here with me and all around me and connecting heart-to-heart with Him. He's been teaching me about His goodness and what it REALLY means for me. Trust me, I'm still learning how to grasp the fullness of both of these concepts!

He's also been bringing me into a more intimate relationship with Him than I've ever known before. I know the various aspects of relationship we can have with Him - Savior, Lord, Master, Creator, Father, Friend, Husband, Lover, King of Kings and so much more, but I've been drawn into a love relationship with Him that's been sweeter and deeper than what I've experienced before, especially in the role of Husband and His unconditional, unwavering love. (I'm so very blessed to have a real life example in the form of Bri being my husband. He loves me like that and it's beautiful beyond words.) This has been the foundation for what I'm about to share.

The other night we attended an event, called Arise, at our church. At one point, the Aaronic blessing found in Numbers 6:24 was broken down for us, using the Hebrew definitions for bless and keep. With that in mind, the blessing was written out as, "Yaweh will kneel before you presenting gifts and will guard you with a hedge of protection, Yaweh will illuminate the wholeness of His being toward you bringing order and He will beautify you, Yahweh will lift up His wholeness of being and look upon you and He will set in place all you need to be whole and complete." We were encouraged to ask God what gift He wanted to give to us, draw it, and then ask Him, "How does this gift connect with who I am?"

Being completely vulnerable and honest, I haven't had the best of body images over the last couple of years as I gained back weight I've lost. It's really been a struggle and I derail myself when I make efforts. I really want to share about this because what God showed me and spoke to me extends WAY beyond body image to ALL of the wrong ways we EACH see ourselves. Body image is just MY baggage and the lies that I have allowed to be in my head.

Here's what God did. He gave me a hand mirror. When I looked in it, there was no reflection. Rather, there was the word, "TRUTH." I asked Him how this connected with who I am and this is what He said. "I offer you a true reflection of yourself - what you cannot see, even beyond what others see. A beauty that far surpasses what you've ever defined it as being because it's the reflection of who you are in me. It's the truth of the Creator to the created. The Love toward the beloved. It's truth."

I'm sharing this because I really believe that this is a message that the Lover of our souls wants to plant deeply in each of our hearts. We all have mirrors in various rooms of our homes or even as reflections shown in many types of glass that we find scattered here and there. We look in them any number of times throughout the day and we hear words about ourselves. Most often those words are lies that we believe about ourselves, our failings, our weaknesses, our mistakes. He wants to replace the lies we entertain about ourselves with His TRUTH. 

I pray that today you would be able to see His truth about you reflected back at you and that you would be able to embrace it with your whole being. Above all, know that His truth is that you are LOVED as you are. May you sense that more deeply today than you ever have before!

XOXOXOXO

Refinished and Refurbished

I love to refinish furniture, more often than not, choosing to paint it in the process these days. This is much to the chagrin of my sweet husband who loves the look of wood grain. While I do too, I’ve been in a season of painting EVERYTHING with my eye on other household treasures that Bri has requested I leave in their natural beauty. Ahhh….the things we sacrifice for marital harmony…

This morning, I’ve been painting a small end table and it got me to thinking. You see, I discovered this discarded piece of furniture at Goodwill where someone had obviously donated it. They had no use for it, saw no beauty in it and got rid of it. On the other hand, all I could do was look at it, seeing past its imperfections, to its beautiful lines and fine details, envisioning it in its restored beauty, rather than in its current condition. Isn’t that how God sees us and how He calls us to envision one another?

How often do we see ourselves and others as imperfect, honing in on all of the things that we deem to be “wrong” or “bad?” Bri will often say to me, “I wish you could see yourself the way I do.” To which I reply, “And I wish YOU could see YOURSELF the way I see YOU…” Yet, as much as I know Bri and I see so much more in each other than we see in ourselves, I know that God sees WAY beyond that. He looks past our imperfections, our sinful, selfish natures, our woundedness, our “ugliness,” and all He sees is what we are through the Master Craftsman’s refurbishing touch.

Do you know that the definition of “refurbish” is “to bring something back to a cleaner, brighter, or more functional state”? That makes me think of Isaiah 1:18, which says, "'Come now, let's settle this,' says the Lord. 'Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, I will make them as white as wool.'" Although stained with imperfections, pain, anger, unforgiveness, hurt and more, He washes us clean through the power of His love and forgiveness, refurbishing our spirits and souls, bringing out the natural beauty within that we were originally crafted as having.

That’s exactly what happens when furniture is refinished. It’s brought back to a cleaner, brighter, more functional state and the things that were seen as ugly or imperfect are made new under the hands of a craftsman (or at least an amateur DIYer). Admittedly, the process of refinishing a piece of furniture takes time, hard work and multiple steps. It’s never done quickly. As much as I would like to hurry the process because I like the end product and want to get to that as fast as I can, it won’t turn out nearly as well if I rush through it. Most of us like the idea of shortcuts and skipping steps, but ultimately, it costs us in the end. 

If we skip steps, like sanding or priming, when refinishing furniture, we may find ourselves back at square one, starting the process all over again, taking the time to do what we should have done in the first place so that what we create will have lasting beauty. Sometimes, too, we get to the point where we don’t want to go that one final step, put on that third coat of paint that’s really NEEDED….it would be so nice to just be done…Yet, if you stop there, you’ll likely always look at it with regret, wishing you’d just put in the extra effort to make it all that it truly could be.

God’s refurbishing in our lives is a process - one with multiple steps that takes time and sometimes requires stripping bare so that the natural, “wood grain beauty” can be coaxed back out in the process. We all get tattered by life and it becomes so easy to see ourselves or others as lacking beauty, value, and worth. That’s not the time to relegate to the discard pile. It’s the time to invest in bringing newness back to that which is tired, worn out and even a bit beaten up. We need to take the time to go through the process and allow others the same grace and opportunity. We are each treasures called to a “cleaner, brighter, more functional state.” There is such beauty in each of us and I can imagine our Father looking on us with excitement and anticipation, exclaiming, “Look at those lines! The curves are so beautiful! What fine details! The beauty I behold captivates me!” 

Building Delays

Have you ever worked on a project either large or small and due to circumstances out of your control, you’ve been delayed during the process? Maybe you’ve ordered specialty tile or cabinets or you simply can’t find the paint color that seems just right. Maybe the contractor you’ve hired to help you got pulled away from your job due to things that were out of his control. It’s frustrating,right?

Well, we’ve been in a season of one delay after another for the last two months. Brian’s dad passed away on February 4^th and we were gone for a week in Connecticut. We came home, worked on catching back up on “normal” things in life (including this blog) and our friends’ ten year old son passed away two weeks after we said goodbye to Bri’s dad. We’ve had some additional challenges as a family and it’s been a time of standstill, scrambling, waiting, confusion, seeking to know what our next steps should be and disappointment. It’s felt as if our GC (General Contractor – i.e. God) has just walked off the job and left us to try to figure things out on our own.

Personally, I NEED to finish things that I’ve started. I like the sense of completion and accomplishment when I’ve wrapped up a project that I’m working on. Being honest, I find a sense of worth in those completed projects. I feel good about myself. All is right with my world. It’s in control. (Read MY control.) When things are left in process, it makes me feel really unsettled, aggravated and as if everything is out of control, especially when I don’t know what the next steps should be or I’m waiting on others to take steps that are necessary in order for me move forward. We put in call after call to our GC and He doesn’t seem to pick up His phone or respond to the MANY messages we leave, although we KNOW He hears them. It leaves us feeling lost, frightened, angry, frustrated and wondering when we can get moving forward again. Yet even then, we have an unshakeable trust in Him, knowing that He has a plan, His timing is always perfect and that He finishes what He starts (Phil. 1:6).

Those times of delay are often the times when we learn the most. I read a definition in my Bible this morning for the words “shall live.” It means, “to live, to stay alive, be preserved; to flourish, to enjoy life; to live in happiness; to breathe, be alive, be animated, recover health, live continuously. The fundamental idea is to, ‘live and breathe,’ breathing being the evidence of life in the Hebrew concept.” These last two months have had an absence of flourishing, enjoyment, happiness, animation and constant living and breathing in the moment. I was reminded this week to look for and anticipate the moments that would take my breath away, the moments of living fully in the moment we’re currently in, of being fully present, not distracted by the things that are or are not going on, being fully alive through it all, not shut down and missing out on the breathtaking moments all around me. 

A friend had a recent conversation with Bri about living in the “pauses” of life. That’s sat with me daily ever since. For someone with my personality, pauses are HARD. I want to be DOING, ACCOMPLISHING, COMPLETING….M-O-V-I-N-G FORWARD. I’m learning to embrace the pause. LIVE in the pause. Trust HIM in the pause. It’s hard. I’m not going to lie about that. BUT….it’s beautiful too. I can’t claim to understand the many mysteries of God and I won’t even try. What I do know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that He loves us. He cares for us. He treasures us. He protects and defends us. EVEN WHEN IT DOESN’T FEEL LIKE IT.

This scripture sat with me this morning as I spent time with Him. It’s from Habakkuk 3:17-19. They’re favorite verses of mine that I hadn’t read in a long time. I love God’s timing.

“Though the fig tree may not blossom,

Nor fruit be on the vines;

Though the labor of the olive may fail,

And the fields yield no food;

Though the flock may be cut off from the fold,

And there be no herd in the stalls –

Yet I will rejoice in the Lord,

I will joy in the God of my salvation.

The Lord God is my strength;

He will make my feet like deer’s feet,

And He will make me walk on my high hills.”

We will not stop dreaming and planning. We will not stop putting our faith in the One who sees far more than we ever will. He has a “bird’s eye perspective” over the building process and we trust in Him and what we cannot see. That silence that has seemed so resounding? He hasn’t been silent at all. He’s simply been speaking in unexpected ways that we weren’t immediately attributing to Him. He’s been answering our voicemails through others, as GC’s often do. We’re living in the delay and allowing the adjusted plans to unfold on a daily basis. It’s hard, but it’s good.

(Definition of “shall live” taken from the “Word Wealth” for Habakkuk 2:4, the Spirit Filled Life Bible, NKJV, published by Nelson.)

Switches

Switches. Every house has them - light switches on walls, switches on every appliance, even switches in our showers and tubs, and every house has a breaker box full of switches that trump every other switch in the house. 

Do you know how a switch works? Simply put in 5^th grade science lesson fashion, a switch completes a circuit. When the switch is “off,” then the circuit is open, preventing the flow of power from getting where it’s intended to go. When the switch is “on,” the circuit is made complete, allowing power to flow freely.

God’s been speaking to me a lot recently about the concept of switches in our lives. There are certain things that happen throughout our days that quickly flip a switch within us and oftentimes, it’s not pretty when the lights come on! Others have switches with delays – they complete the circuit and turn on the power eventually, but not immediately. Switches are intended to work instantaneously. There shouldn’t be a delay. If there’s a delay, then the switch is faulty and it needs to be fixed or even replaced. Other times, we flip a switch with a specific purpose planned and nothing happens at all. Whether the breaker is flipped or the electricity is out or there’s faulty wiring somewhere within, something is preventing the power from flowing where it should go and many times, WE’RE left feeling powerless when this happens.

One of the things that God has particularly been working on in me is the idea that I’ve permitted others to have control over certain switches in my heart, my mind, my emotions. I’ve given them power to wound or anger me – power they were never intended to have. Sometimes it It’s seemed that I’ve just stood there, as if in a dream, watching as someone flipped a switch, triggering things within me that left me in a horrible emotional state. Then….I woke up…. I realized that when I allowed someone else to flip a switch that triggered negative emotions within me, that I was allowing their power to surge through me, overloading my circuits and causing me to blow a breaker.  

It was as if the lights went on, illuminating my understanding. I realized that I was the only one with the right and authority to flip switches in my OWN house. Anyone else who was trying to do that was trespassing. I decided that I had the right and the authority to either let those individuals in or to keep them out of my house and even out of my yard.

Not only that, I took responsibility for my own actions.  I understood that while I might not be able to determine the actions of others, I could control my own actions and reactions and I needed to make conscious decisions that would determine where I was going to allow the power to flow in my life. In each situation, I need to determine which switches were to be on and which were to be turned off.

Some of us have faulty wiring. Things have happened in our lives that have caused short circuits, blown fuses and power failures. That old wiring isn’t working anymore. This kind of renovation goes deep and it comes with a cost. It’s found behind the walls and can be impossible to replace without doing some tearing down first. We need to be willing to allow the Master Electrician to come in, rip out what’s faulty and replace it with wiring that’s perfect. We need to be willing to pay the price of the pain that may come during the renovation and be willing to deal with things looking torn apart for a while. Then, we need to learn from Him how to operate the new switches and wiring and ultimately take the authority to flip the switches in our house or leave them off.

While learning truths like this often isn’t fun because they come as a result of challenging times, we can be grateful for them because of the renovation that occurs when we allow the process to happen. For me, I’ve needed to learn that I control the switches. I govern my actions and reactions. Those are the areas of MY responsibility. These are the places where I have power that’s found in the form of self-control and conscious decision-making. When others try to come and flip those switches, even those who I can’t change being a part of my life, I have the right to not allow them to flip my switches.  This sometimes means keeping certain people at a distance so they can’t reach those switches or, when it’s possible, keeping those individuals out of my yard entirely if that’s a decision that needs to be made for mental and emotional health.

Ultimately, God is our power source. He’s the One whose power courses through our circuits. He gives us authority to choose when to flip switches or not. We need to know Him as our Power Source and know the switches within us, using those to their greatest capacity, allowing His power to flow fully, illuminating the world with His light as it pours out of the windows of our houses. We get to be the conduits and He gives us the choice of how we’re going to walk in it. 

A Good Foundation

“…and it (the house) did not fall, for it was founded on the rock…” (Matthew 7:24-27)

It’s pretty easy to understand that when a house is built on a questionable foundation, it likely doesn’t have much of a chance for remaining standing for generations. Sometimes it’s the ground that the house is built on that’s faulty, as mentioned in Matthew 7; other times, it’s the poured foundation that’s at fault.

Recently, I watched one of my favorite home renovation shows and the house that was having work done on it had a foundation that was literally crumbling. Even though the land it was built on was solid, the foundation itself was faulty. Before the contractor could go any further, she had to have the house raised and the foundation re-poured. If she had done all of the renovations and restored the home to its former beauty, but neglected the foundation, all of the work she had done would have been for naught and she never would have been issued a certificate of occupancy, let alone been able to sell it.  

There are SO MANY directions this post could go in and there will likely be additional posts on this topic, but we decided that the best place to start would be with the foundation that we chose for our marriage. Admittedly, we share a marriage with its fair share of frustrations, but we really do have an amazing, beautifully imperfect marriage in which we’re truly madly in love with each other and still passionate in our feelings toward each other. My heart still races when I hear Bri’s voice. He wraps his arms around me and I just want to be enveloped even more. I call him “love” and he calls me “beautiful.” The sound of his voice still makes me smile and we’re miserable (and cranky) the first day apart following a vacation together because there’s just no one we’d rather be with than one another.

This didn’t just happen. We chose to make it and keep it this way. Before we got married, we determined that we would live our lives together following three “rules.”

1. Jesus Christ is Lord of our lives and of our marriage. Everything for us has flowed out of this principle. This is the solid Rock upon which we’ve built.
2. Divorce is not an option. Period.
3. When we’re angry about something, we’ve committed to deal with the issue at hand, rather than slandering one another’s character.

THIS is what’s seen us through the hard times and trust me, the hard times have come….and come. Let me explain these three little rules just a little more.

First, both Brian and I entered into relationships with Christ at pivotal times in our lives. Bri was 14 and I was 12. We each understood the sacrifice that God had made on our behalf in sending His Son to take punishment that should have been ours, in exchange for a redemptive love that restored to us a right relationship with our Heavenly Father. We surrendered our lives to Jesus’ Lordship and did our best to follow and honor Him. Honestly? Bri did a better job at that than I did, but that’s a story for another time. 

When I met Bri, I would readily confess that I was a Christian, but I definitely wasn’t living the life of one…until God used Bri to turn my heart fully back to Him and caused me to choose Him above the things I had put in His place. Want to know what I first fell in love with about Bri? The way he would teach me about Jesus….we would talk for HOURS. He would drive me home, we’d steam up the windows PRAYING, then he would walk me to the door, hug me goodnight and tell me he’d talk to me the next day. That was considerably different than the “normal” drop offs I’d had after dates! As we fell in love (Bri says he knew the night we met that he’d just met his wife) and knew in our hearts that God had called us to be married, we knew that having Christ as the center of our lives individually and as a couple was a non-negotiable for us to make it as a married couple. Everything in our life together has been built on this decision.

Second, we determined that no matter what, for us, divorce simply wasn’t an option. This isn’t to say that we’re in any way condemning those who have gotten divorced. We know that we live in a sin-filled, fallen world and there are consequences for our actions that can take any number of forms and sometimes, it’s the innocent who pay the greatest price. (Check out Uriah’s fate in II Samuel 11.) There are times or circumstances when we believe people shouldn’t remain married and our hearts have broken with friends and family who have been through it themselves.

On my side of the family, there’s been a history of divorce. On Brian’s side, there hasn’t been. The fact is that people are torn apart during divorce and we decided for us that we’d push through no matter what we faced. I’ll be honest. We hit a REALLY rough period in our marriage and there came a time when I looked at our pastor’s wife and said, “I have a lot of compassion and understanding for those who opt to divorce because it can seem a whole lot easier to do that than to go through what we’re going through right now.” I remember crying out to God and saying, "Lord, I KNOW I love this man, but...could you please help me feel it again?" All I can say is that when you get to the other side, it’s beautiful. What we have now is so much better than anything we’d had prior to that – even in the best of times. We’ve been refined by fire and we’re better for it, individually and together. Every day we fall more deeply in love with each other. We may not always feel it happening, but we look back and realize that it did. We not only love each other, we have a deep respect and admiration for one another.

Last, but not least, when we argue (because we do) we deal with the issue that’s causing the argument, rather than seek to assassinate the other’s character. I can truthfully say that we’ve never called one another a name, let alone a choice word. I’ve never thought of my husband as a jerk or worse and he’s never thought that of me. Do we do things that drive each other crazy? Yep. But we deal with the issue that’s making us frustrated, rather than allow anger or hurt to cause us to speak things that tear the other apart.

So, these three rules are the foundation upon which we’ve built. It’s saved our marriage and caused it to be what it is today. We’ve made one another better people. I’m who I am because of the ways in which God has worked in my life through my husband and vise versa. We know that this foundation is one that will last for generations and be a legacy that we can confidently pass on to our children.

So, what’s YOUR foundation look like? Where have you built it? What condition is it in? Do you need to lift up your house and fix the foundation before you do any other renovating? If needed, take the time to fix your foundation – at least double check it – before you go any further…