Archive for God's Heart
5 Ways to Keep Ministry from Sucking the Life Out of You
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My husband and I have been in ministry for 27 years now. We have lived through great mountain top highs and successful seasons, and we have lived through some low valleys and seasons of failure. There have been moments when we both have had to ask ourselves if we would choose the path of ministry again if we had it all to do over. My heart always finds the answer to that question is yes, although I humbly acknowledge that I don’t always feel that way. There are days and weeks and months when living in the ministry fishbowl and living a life dedicated to the service of others costs more than I wish to pay. But yet, deep from my innermost being the call of God still speaks and I know there is no other path that I would choose.
This morning, I pause to think of the many of you who live a life of ministry. I breathe a prayer for you even now as I write, and I offer these five ways that I have found to be anchors for true ministry. I am not offering this list as an all-inclusive; just a list of things that were on my heart today.
1. 1. Check your balance.
By His Grace
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I woke up this morning with a song in my heart and a dance in my feet. I love it when a day begins – and ends – that way. I slept great last night. I finished two grad classes yesterday and am sliding in to finish with just one more class which begins today. My husband fixed my computer, which I am quite sure had been possessed by some evil spirit. The sun is shining; the birds are singing with me on this springtime morning. My diet is working and the scales are going down, down, down. My husband and I are experiencing a new honeymoon of sorts after 32 years. My kids are doing well. I am expecting my first grandchild. I have friends who love me. My church is filled with amazing people. I have an appointment with my hair stylist who will effectively hide all my gray today and make my hair look like the sun kissed it. Someone is looking at my house for the second time in a week and I pray they make an offer so we can downsize.
Does life get any better than this? It is so easy to thank God during the good days, but what can we do when the days are not so good?
Are You Tired?
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Isaiah 53:4 contains a beautifully mysterious phrase. Jesus carried our sorrows.
What an amazing thought! The very idea of “sorrows” invokes feelings of things that are weighty and burdensome. To know that there is One who will carry those things which are too heavy for me is a thought which comforts and encourages my soul.
Life is made of cycles and seasons, and you don’t have to live long to figure out that some of those are filled with sorrows and pain. When my life is filled with sorrows, I cry out for relief, longing to escape the place where my heart is torn apart. And Jesus answers. Sometimes his answer contain immediate rescue, but many times His answer carries this idea, “I will carry the sorrows for you.”
He always wants to carry our burdens, but we usually try to handle life in our own ways, carrying things in what we believe to be our own strength. The problem with that is, well, we don’t really have any strength! It is an illusion. Nothing reveals our lack of strength any more than sorrow and pain. When life becomes unbearable, then we are either driven to the feet of Jesus to ask for help or we are moved to reject him because we misunderstand his heart.
The Truth about Shame
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Yesterday I blogged about a situation I had experienced where a mother wrongly used the Word of God with her son. In my estimation, her communication with her son was not honest and forthright. One of the most troubling things about the mother/son exchange that I witnessed was the way this mother tried to use shame to control and correct her son, all the while using the Word of God as her instrument of correction. (You’ll have to go back to yesterday’s post for more information.)
So the entire experience caused me to think about shame.
What is shame?
Why do we feel shame?
When should we feel shame?
When is shame unjustified?
How do we get rid of shame?
Dictionary.com defines shame as the painful feeling arising from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper, ridiculous, etc., done by oneself or another. And another definition which applies to the scenario I saw yesterday is: to drive, force, etc., through shame. For most of us, shame is another word for embarrassment yet it can be much deeper than embarrassment.
I can think back to a time when my fourth grade teacher made me read a sentence over and over again into a tape recorder in front of my entire class until I could say a word correctly. Seems my Southern brogue was already in place and was corrupting my speech. I felt so ashamed as I tried repeatedly to say the word correctly.
It’s All in How You Use It
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Have you ever “used” the Word of God for your own selfish purposes? Ever used it to prove your point, not caring whether or not you hurt someone else as long as you were proven right?
Although I am normally a very “nice” person, yesterday I almost crossed out of my good little boundary box to tell off a woman in the orthodontist’s office.
She was sitting just across from me with her son, who appeared to be about 14. I noticed she had a Gideon Bible in her hands. Then I heard her say, “That’s not right!” as she scanned a text using her finger to guide her reading. She was obviously in the first couple of chapters of Genesis. Her son looked at her incredulously and said, “In the Bible? You’re saying something in THE BIBLE is not right???”
“Oh, here it is,” she said, as if almost validating that she knew the book so well that if there was an error, it was definitely the printer’s fault and not hers.
Well, you will have to trust me for this story. I was there. Attitude was exuding from this lady, and I don’t mean a good one.
So I am already kinda ticked at her. Then she did it. I watched and listened in horror as she began to take God’s Word and beat up her son, not literally, but emotionally. It was emotional, spiritual abuse as far as I was concerned.
