52 Weeks of Questions: Week 4

This question was inspired by one of my Discipleship Essential leaders, Emilee, who made me even more excited about Heaven than I already was.

We'll start by reading Revelation 19:6-8:

6 Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters and like loud peals of thunder, shouting:

“Hallelujah!
For our Lord God Almighty reigns.
7 Let us rejoice and be glad
and give him glory!
For the wedding of the Lamb has come,
and his bride has made herself ready.
8 Fine linen, bright and clean,
was given her to wear.”

The bride has made herself ready.

So, the question - What am I doing to prepare myself for Heaven?

One Word 365

Yeah, so beginning ONE WORD 365 (Version 2012) was slightly less exciting than in 2011. Though I was more than happy to leave CONTROL behind, I admit having small bits of fear thinking about how faithful God was to release (Read: rip frequently, quickly, and deeply) control of my life from my hands and placing it into His. Truth is, I haven’t really left my word from 2011 behind, I’ve just given it a friend… One more area for God to work and make me, well, more like him and less like me.


It has become a tradition among a small group of my friends to retreat for the final days of every year… A sort of spiritual preparation for the battles to come. Somehow, I talked them into participating in the One Word activity for a second straight year. No small feat considering how our words “took us out” in 2011. But the blow by blow reality of last year’s word was just evidence that God had picked the right word for each of us and was faithful enough to see it through in our lives… Even when we wanted to abandon the mess and head for higher ground. The truth is, you don’t walk away from faithfulness, even when it’s painful and hard because what is faithful has a promise that is greater and longer lasting than any other lure.

So, there were three words that came to mind when praying about what my word should be in 2012 – joy, prayer, deeper (That last one was actually a friend’s suggestion that I wanted to prayer block pretty badly)… Anyhow, when it came down to the reveal (Yes, we have a reveal when we share our words together, write them down, and place them inside a book we think no one will ever actually read at our retreat house and come back to them a couple times a year.), the word was JOY.

Joy because sometimes the journey is rough and joy seems hard to find. Joy because it is a fruit of the spirit and we are called to it. And, joy because I can see some of the steep climbs ahead in this year and I want to prepare my heart in advance, if at all possible. (Insert joke about how I haven’t actually given up control here.)

So there it is – joy – the promise of walking away from the world and marching on towards heaven. Here’s to staying the course in 2012.

52 Questions: Week 3

The great thing about questions is that they are never in short supply.


And, by great, I mean slightly frustrating…

So, as I was prepping to write for this week, I had one question in mind. Then, as I sat waiting for a friend to arrive at church yesterday, I overheard a better, more relevant question. Well, overheard isn’t exactly accurate… I was sitting near two men who seemed engaged in a discipleship sort of relationship and may have feigned reading a book while I listened in on what questions guys ask each other in these types of conversations. The one guy was talking about what God was doing in his life and the mentor listened, waited, and then tossed this question back at him:

“Are you pursuing what God is calling you to in your life? Or, do you think you are looking at what you want to change about your past and using God as your reason for changing it?”

Hmmm… I’ve never thought about it this way, but what a great question. I’ve read/heard many people speak about loving God for God and not for His gifts, but I’ve never heard this question before, though it seems like it might have a similar root. Before I had enough time to wonder about it for my own life, my friend had arrived and we were on to something different. So in order to make my eavesdropping spiritual, I thought I’d give this question the attention it deserves and spend some time pondering it this week.

The Trouble With Responding...

Answers have a funny way of lagging behind the question in a way that makes you wonder if they’re even along for the ride. In the 52 weeks of questions, I have a sort of silent expectation that I’ll answer each week’s question within that seven day time frame. I’ve managed to do that so far, but know as both the weeks and questions waver in their difficulty and desirability that might not be possible… It’s also possible that I might rend some cursory and surface answer only to realize a real and personal answer is actually weeks away. God has a funny way of bringing past questions forward to remind us that although we might be “finished” with a topic, He might not be.


So the question for week one was this: Is there something in your life that needs to be brought back to life again?

After rambling for three paragraphs in my journal, I came up with this list:

- Joy needs to be revived.

- Prayer needs a new life.

- Hope for people, including myself.

The first was obvious, since Joy is my word for the year. Prayer seemed to be a possible action step to joy… And hope, well, that one seemed to write itself without any hesitation. That’s when you know it’s time to investigate.

I’ve been sitting in Isaiah for seven months with only periodic glimpses of the fact that Israel is me. God had hope for a people and things that did not have enough or know enough to have hope for themselves. God has hope because he knows all things. We don’t have hope because we think we know all things and what we know has made us feel empty.

Not knowing leaves us hopeless. Bleak circumstances make hope seem infinitely far away.

But we have promises. Promises and a God who has hope for us. So, when I don’t know, I hope. And I don’t hope with a wistful or shallow hope, I hope with a promise like what is written in Isaiah 64:3: “…you did awesome things that we did not expect…”

I have hope in a God who does things I don’t expect. My heart is revived that things will not always meet or fall to my expectations. Amen.

52 Questions: Week 2

On a rainy afternoon at a Wegmans a while back, one of my mentors encouraged me to meditate on the story of the alabaster jar. Sitting there, she read the passage aloud…


Mark 14: 1 - 9

Now the Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread were only two days away, and the chief priests and the teachers of the law were scheming to arrest Jesus secretly and kill him. “But not during the festival,” they said, “or the people may riot.”

While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.

Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly.

“Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me. She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

When she finished reading, she paused and simply said, “Those present thought it was a waste. To Jesus, it was the most precious thing in all the world, but to those present (some of which included the disciples) it was a waste.”

Then she followed with two simple questions:

1. Are you willing to waste yourself of Jesus?

2. What would it look like for you to waste yourself on Him?

So, these are the questions I am posing this week because while I did go home and reflect and meditate on the verses drawing out many valuable conclusions, I somehow managed to steer away from answering these two questions myself. Avoidance, even when unintentional, has a funny way of never lasting, so here’s to intentional digging in this second week.

52 Weeks of Questions

Sometime last year I did a vocational analysis for CS Lewis Institute. At the end, the person conducting the analysis made this point to me: There are things in my head that demand to be written and my mind won’t be satisfied until I let them out.

Interesting.

As we usher in a new year, I can’t help but come back to that point. Over the last couple of days, I have been streaming Passion 2012 (http://live.268generation.com) as much as I possibly can given that I still have to work.

The worship is awesome, the talks are amazing, but the one thing that is sticking right now is the questions. The questions are probing, convicting, unsettling disturbing… They’re the kind of questions we would love to ask someone, but might be too afraid to ask ourselves.

But then, I think that there are just things in our heads and our hearts that demand to be written down… And our heads, our hearts, our God will not be satisfied until we have created a holy disturbance in ourselves trying to answer and respond to these demanding questions. Jesus asked questions often. Not to get an answer, but in order to reveal the heart. It’s why we fear questions, but it’s also why questions make us grow.

Even as I type this, I have internal trepidation. My humanness has mastered both the art of deception and avoidance. It is not our nature to linger in discomfort, merely to absorb its blow and carry on the best we can. Truth be told, if we weren’t conscious or convicted Christians, we might passively live out the gospel pursuing only deceptive comfort and joy. Yes, this is the Holy Spirit which knocks on the door of our placated hearts and shows us it’s time for a question. The Holy Spirit even gives us the confidence and courage to answer it. And while, the gospel promises both comfort and joy, it does not promise them at the sake of forgetting heaven and falling in love with earth.

In the month leading up to Christmas, I decided to advent intentionally. It was a hard month with some unexpected circumstances, but blogging helped me to extract my heaven bound self from its earthly scenario. That said, I’d like my weeks in 2012 to be a little more intentional… And, though I say this cautiously, a little more disturbed. So we begin 52 weeks of questions. My personal hope? To not fear or flee from the hard questions… To take time to answer the probes that God and the saints put before me… To see God prove faithful to his promise of true comfort and true joy as I earnestly open every door in my heart, Christ’s home.
So, in light of being inspired by Passion 2012, here is the question posed by Louie Giglio last night:

Is there something in you that needs to be brought back to life again?





Side note: I’d love to hear any reflections people are having as they wade through these questions. Feel free to ask questions back. I love to learn from listening, so please know that your answers will be both a lesson and a gift to me too.