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How Kind is Your God?
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If you could summarize God’s feelings for you in a word or two, what would you say? Most of us would quickly say, ‘Love.’
We ‘understand’ that the Word says God loves us. We ‘understand’ that God is love. We sort of ‘get it’ on one level; we can mentally acknowledge that God loves us. Yet how often do our actions and reactions reflect the real truth of our perceptions about God’s heart towards us?
At the core level, the heart level, are you afraid of God?
At the core level, do you believe that He is basically displeased with you?
At the core level, do you believe that God is angry or disappointed with you?
Because of our faulty views of God, we sometimes find it difficult to connect with Him in a way that allows His love to transform us, embrace us, and enable us to feel safe in His presence.
While we who identify ourselves as Christians may state empathically that we know God loves us, our actions and reactions may say something quite different. Consider the following:
- If you try to quiet your heart and mind before God, do you feel uncomfortable? Condemned? Unloved?
- Do you struggle to receive God’s blessings, feeling that you really don’t deserve them?
- When you look deeply at the parts of your heart which are not yet like Christ, do you think God must really be disgusted with your struggles, failures, and imperfections?
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Welcome to My Blog
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The Sacred Gifts of 2011
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Listening to the gentle rain falling outside, I sit quietly reflecting. It is early morning. Everyone else in my home is still asleep. With my Yorkie, Gabriel, curled up beside me in my chair, I sip my coffee and think about the New Year and the one that just ended.
New Year’s Day invites me to consider how well I’ve lived this past year. Did I meet some important goals? As I look back on my last year’s resolutions, I ask God if I’ve lived as well as I could in relation to those goals.
This day invites me to make new promises to myself and to reflect on what I hope the New Year will bring.
Prayerfully I release 2010, knowing that with its successes and its failures, it is gone. I thank my heavenly Father for the successes, the goals met, the progress made, and the victories won. I spend time grieving the failures, the goals unmet, the battles lost, and the ground lost.
In our humanity, we will have failures, incompleteness, bad days and even years we’d rather forget, yet God invites us to offer the completeness of our lives to him.
When we sit at Jesus’ feet in honesty with all our triumphs and all our failures, He receives us.
I think of how Jesus said that we must come to him as a little child. Most little children have not learned to live behind a façade. They are just who they really are.
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Don’t Touch My Biscuit!
Posted by: | Comments‘Rrrrr! My Yorkie, Gabriel, growled at me as he cut his eyes upward towards me, and I should say that the site of a seven pound dog acting as if he is the boss is quite humorous. In his mouth he held his treasure, a leftover canned biscuit, and he warned me to stay away. Gabby’s regimen of guarding this “treasure” been a long standing point of amusement in our household.
It began several years ago when one of us gave him a canned biscuit which was left over from breakfast. For reasons unexplainable, my oldest son, Andrew, actually likes those really cheap canned biscuits. Their flavor can best be described as something akin to cardboard, yet apparently when they are filled with bacon or deer tenderloin, they are the bomb to my three boys. And one day, someone pitched a leftover biscuit to Gabby and the saga began.
Now my house is home to an uncounted number of these hidden treasures. On a recent cleaning spree, I found four under my bed, three hidden behind the sofa cushions, and two in my closet.
Let it be known that Gabby has never actually eaten one of these biscuits, but he hides them and protects them fiercely if you get too close. If Gabriel sees one of us get too near one of his hiding places, he suddenly becomes “another dog”. He will retrieve his biscuit and walk around the house for an hour, biscuit held tightly in his teeth, occasionally growling, looking for a new place to hide his treasure. And frankly, we love to watch him act so goofy. Certain members of my family are not beyond purposefully uncovering a biscuit just to watch Gabby set off on his tirade. We laugh at him because it’s so ridiculous to think we’d want his crusty old biscuits.
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The Deeper Yes
Posted by: | CommentsOne of my very favorite pieces of StoryPeople art by Brian Andreas is a print called A Real Hero which muses, “Anyone can slay a dragon, he told me, but try waking up every morning and loving the world all over again. That’s what takes a real hero.”
Every time I read that verse of prose, my heart is reminded of the deeper yes.
There are many ways that we as Christians attempt to live for God. We may sincerely say yes to denying selfish desires. We may say yes to making our best effort to live holy. We may say yes to keeping whatever religious rules we have embraced, but yet there is a deeper yes.
Living from the deeper yes means living from a place of a relationship of love. More and more, I see the Scripture through the lens of relationship. In the beginning, God walked and talked with Adam and Eve. There were no walls. They lived in intimacy, both with each other and with God.
You know the story. Sin entered. Christ came to redeem us from the curse, and now we are on a journey to discover how to live once again in the power of relationship.
When we experience the overwhelming love of God, our hearts can give the deeper yes, the yes that comes from being overtaken by God’s love. Such an experience allows us to let go of our fears and give love back to God because we are so amazed by His love for us.
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