Christianity 101

Don't get the whole "Christianity" thing? I can help.

It’s stressful to be a god.

2 Comments

world-on-shoulders

Now and then I’ll link to a post from the “Conversion Diary” blog.  Usually it’s when Jen writes another post about me.  I don’t know how she keeps doing that.  See if this sounds like anyone you know…

“But as time goes on, and your status grows in your own mind, you start to feel the weight of it all; when you make yourself a god, you assume the responsibilities of a god: being everywhere at once, taking care of everything, having an answer for every possible dilemma. You must plan, plan, plan to make sure that everything goes the right way, and then come up with infinite backup plans in case those plans don’t work out — after all, you alone hold the entire universe in existence.

It’s stressful.”

Click here to read the whole post:

It’s stressful to be a god.

(Note: the picture was snagged from Jen’s post.)

This Book is Rockin’ My World

2 Comments

He Leadeth Me

(Click title if you can’t see the picture or link.)

If ever you start to get whiney about your life, pick this book up.  The sufferings described here are so unbelievable, they’ll make you question everything; yet through it all you’re drawn back to God and His providence.

What books have rocked your world lately?

Jesus, Bring the Rain

4 Comments

14310081702_568f58e0bc_z

Jesus, Bring the Rain…

That’s a scary prayer to pray isn’t it?

Do you see the “rainy” times in your life as a chance to praise God? Neither do I! This video helps us to see the trials in life with eternal eyes…

Lyrics to “Bring the Rain” by Mercy Me

I can count a million times
People asking me how I
Can praise You with all that I’ve gone through
The question just amazes me
Can circumstances possibly
Change who I forever am in You
Maybe since my life was changed
Long before these rainy days
It’s never really ever crossed my mind
To turn my back on you, oh Lord
My only shelter from the storm
But instead I draw closer through this time
So I pray…

Bring me joy, bring me peace
Bring the chance to be free
Bring me anything that brings You glory
And I know there’ll be days
When this life brings me pain
But if that’s what it takes to praise You
Jesus, bring the rain

I am Yours regardless of
The clouds that may loom above
Because You are much greater than my pain
You who made a way for me
By suffering Your destiny
So tell me what’s a little rain
So I pray…

Holy, holy, holy
Is the Lord God Almighty

Photo Credit

Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen?

Leave a Comment

63744965_1019400944_o
That title is almost a cliche, it is asked and mused over so often. But just know this: God doesn’t like rotten things anymore than you; in fact, He hates them even more than we do.
  • Clergy sexual abuse
  • Murder
  • Adultery
  • Selfishness
  • Broken families
  • Illness
  • Child abuse
  • This list could go on, obviously…

I don’t presume to know the mind of God, but my best guess is that it’s not in His WILL for bad things to happen (not that some of them aren’t in His plan, when He knows it will bring a greater good), but I believe it would never be in His will for a child to be abused, for example. However, He set the universe up so that humans DO have FREE WILL. When we make bad choices, it must make Him sick, since He sees all, and knows what will come of it.

But know this, He can and does bring good out of crappy things in our lives. My conversion is a good example – He took something so horrible at the time, and turned it all around. He can do the same thing in your life. Don’t doubt it.

Photo Credit

By Tony Snow, who recently passed away

2 Comments

 

Tony_Snow_cropped (1)

Blessings arrive in unexpected packages – in my case, cancer. Those of us with potentially fatal diseases – and there are millions in America today – find ourselves in the odd position of coping with our mortality while trying to fathom God’s will. Although it would be the height of presumption to declare with confidence “What It All Means,” Scripture provides powerful hints and consolations.

The first is that we shouldn’t spend too much time trying to answer the “why” questions: Why me? Why must people suffer? Why can’t someone else get sick? We can’t answer such things, and the questions themselves often are designed more to express our anguish than to solicit an answer.

I don’t know why I have cancer, and I don’t much care. It is what it is, a plain and indisputable fact. Yet even while staring into a mirror darkly, great and stunning truths begin to take shape. Our maladies define a central feature of our existence: We are fallen. We are imperfect. Our bodies give out.

But despite this, – or because of it, – God offers the possibility of salvation and grace. We don’t know how the narrative of our lives will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet our Creator face-to-face.

Second, we need to get past the anxiety. The mere thought of dying can send adrenaline flooding through your system. A dizzy, unfocused panic seizes you. Your heart thumps; your head swims. You think of nothingness and swoon. You fear partings; you worry about the impact on family and friends. You fidget and get nowhere.

To regain footing, remember that we were born not into death, but into life, and that the journey continues after we have finished our days on this earth. We accept this on faith, but that faith is nourished by a conviction that stirs even within many non believing hearts – an intuition that the gift of life, once given, cannot be taken away. Those who have been stricken enjoy the special privilege of being able to fight with their might, main, and faith to live fully, richly, and exuberantly – no matter how their days may be numbered.

Third, we can open our eyes and hearts. God relishes surprise. We want lives of simple, predictable ease,- smooth, even trails as far as the eye can see, but God likes to go off-road. He provokes us with twists and turns. He places us in predicaments that seem to defy our endurance; and comprehension – and yet don’t. By His love and grace, we persevere. The challenges that make our hearts leap and stomachs churn invariably strengthen our faith and grant measures of wisdom and joy we would not experience otherwise.

‘You Have Been Called’. Picture yourself in a hospital bed. The fog of anesthesia has begun to wear away. A doctor stands at your feet; a loved one holds your hand at the side. “It’s cancer,” the healer announces. The natural reaction is to turn to God and ask him to serve as a cosmic Santa. “Dear God, make it all go away. Make everything simpler.” But another voice whispers: “You have been called.” Your quandary has drawn you closer to God, closer to those you love, closer to the issues that matter – and has dragged into insignificance the banal concerns that occupy our “normal time.”

There’s another kind of response, although usually short-lived an inexplicable shudder of excitement, as if a clarifying moment of calamity has swept away everything trivial and tiny, and placed before us the challenge of important questions.

The moment you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change. You discover that Christianity is not something doughy, passive , pious, and soft. Faith may be the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But it also draws you into a world shorn of fearful caution. The life of belief teems with thrills, boldness, danger, shocks, reversals, triumphs, and epiphanies. Think of Paul, traipsing through the known world and contemplating trips to what must have seemed the antipodes (Spain), shaking the dust from his sandals, worrying not about the morrow, but only about the moment.

There’s nothing wilder than a life of humble virtue, for it is through selflessness and service that God wrings from our bodies and spirits the most we ever could give, the most we ever could offer, and the most we ever could do.

Finally, we can let love change everything. When Jesus was faced with the prospect of crucifixion, he grieved not for himself, but for us. He cried for Jerusalem before entering the holy city. From the Cross, he took on the cumulative burden of human sin and weakness, and begged for forgiveness on our behalf.

We get repeated chances to learn that life is not about us, that we acquire purpose and satisfaction by sharing in God’s love for others. Sickness gets us part way there. It reminds us of our limitations and dependence. But it also gives us a chance to serve the healthy. A minister friend of mine observes that people suffering grave afflictions often acquire the faith of two people, while loved ones accept the burden of two peoples’ worries and fears.

‘Learning How to Live’. Most of us have watched friends as they drifted toward God’s arms, not with resignation, but with peace and hope. In so doing, they have taught us not how to die, but how to live. They have emulated Christ by transmitting the power and authority of love.

I sat by my best friend’s bedside a few years ago as a wasting cancer took him away. He kept at his table a worn Bible and a 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. A shattering grief disabled his family, many of his old friends, and at least one priest. Here was an humble and very good guy, someone who apologized when he winced with pain because he thought it made his guest uncomfortable. He retained his equanimity and good humor literally until his last conscious moment. “I’m going to try to beat [this cancer],”he told me several months before he died. “But if I don’t, I’ll see you on the other side.”

His gift was to remind everyone around him that even though God doesn’t promise us tomorrow, he does promise us eternity, – filled with life and love we cannot comprehend, – and that one can in the throes of sickness point the rest of us toward timeless truths that will help us weather future storms.

Through such trials, God bids us to choose: Do we believe, or do we not? Will we be bold enough to love, daring enough to serve, humble enough to submit, and strong enough to acknowledge our limitations? Can we surrender our concern in things that don’t matter so that we might devote our remaining days to things that do?

When our faith flags, he throws reminders in our way. Think of the prayer warriors in our midst. They change things, and those of us who have been on the receiving end of their petitions and intercessions know it. It is hard to describe, but there are times when suddenly the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and you feel a surge of the Spirit. Somehow you just know: Others have chosen, when talking to the Author of all creation, to lift us up, – to speak of us!

This is love of a very special order. But so is the ability to sit back and appreciate the wonder of every created thing. The mere thought of death somehow makes every blessing vivid; every happiness more luminous and intense. We may not know how our contest with sickness will end, but we have felt the ineluctable touch of God.

What is man that Thou art mindful of him? We don’t know much, but we know this: No matter where we are, no matter what we do, no matter how bleak or frightening our prospects, each and every one of us who believe, each and every day, lies in the same safe and impregnable place, in the hollow of God’s hand.

Tony Snow, former White House Press Secretary for George W. Bush

Photo Credit

My Conversion Story and How Our Marriage was Healed

17 Comments

Have you ever gone through bumps in your marriage?  Do you know how normal you are, even if the bumps are much more like mountains?

You don’t hear about the ones who make it…

Normally we only hear about marriages that didn’t make it, but rarely do you know when someone went through a funk and got through it.  We told VERY few people when we went through our struggles because we didn’t want to be under the microscope when we were with family or friends.  I had just a couple of close friends and one family member who knew as it was happening, and I don’t think Kent told a soul.  Now we’re totally open about it with anyone who will listen because we want to help others who need to know that funks are normal and you won’t always hurt so much.  There is light not so far down the road, maybe just around the next bend.  God can do the impossible, don’t doubt it for a second.  I’ve seen it over and over again and it happened with us.

Here’s what happened in our lives about 14 years ago now…

When our oldest son was 2 years old, Kent and I were so madly in love with him that we focused more energy on him instead of on each other. At the same time, Kent’s job was very stressful and when he’d come home tired, weary, and ornery, instead of giving him some empathy and not taking it personal, which is not easy to do, I would return every jab with venom.  (No one was going to treat me that way!)

Soon this spiraled down into both of us not feeling much love for each other anymore.  To be honest, at times I couldn’t stand him, and his negativity wore on me.

We were in different places though. I felt that it would pass, I thought we could somehow get through it, and just knew I’d never want to separate our family and turn our son’s life upside-down. We were BOTH so close to him, I couldn’t imagine either one of us only getting to be with him part-time, or taking turns on holidays, I didn’t want divorce to be part of our family legacy!

Kent, however, wasn’t so sure. At the time he bought into what society told us, “Kids are resilient, they’ll come out just fine…”  He was thinking about leaving but never actually voiced it… I just knew.  I could feel it, it was palpable, and I was scared to death.  The depth of my pain felt like someone close to me had died, because a deteriorating relationship that you thought was so solid IS like a death.

About this same time, as our lives were spinning out of control and I was quietly crying myself to sleep into my pillow most nights, I happened to talk to my Aunt Karen…

hidden keysI was still afraid to tell anyone, but just hinted to her that things weren’t great between Kent and I.  She had been through a very painful divorce years earlier and this brought her to her knees, crying out to God, so she caught on easily.  She cried with me and prayed with me and told me that Jesus wanted our marriage healed even more than I did. She pointed me to some good books (like this one), and Focus on the Family stories about marriages saved (I hung on every word) — these resources taught me how to be a better wife, to be more selfless, to be the person Kent needed, even when I didn’t feel like it, and how to close my mouth more and pray!  It was truly a sacrifice, because someone who is snapping your head off or acting cold toward you isn’t exactly easy to treat with kindness and empathy, but for our son I kept with it.

The turning point

My heart was slowly turning toward Jesus, the only one who could help me through this, and who would never leave me, no matter what, even if my husband did.  Things certainly didn’t get better overnight between us, and I wasn’t convinced they would improve – the doubts and fear about where our lives would end up could be all-consuming at times.  I’ll never forget the two of us sitting on our living room couch one day, with our two-year-old playing nearby, and tears running down my cheeks.  I calmly said, “If you really want to leave, just go and be done with it.”  Kent said, “But I’m afraid I’ll go and then find out that my problem wasn’t ‘us’ – you’ve been great lately.  I don’t know what’s wrong with me, something is missing.”  I knew just what to say,  “I know what’s missing, Kent.”  He knew what (who) I meant.  He’d seen me reading my bible more, and for the past year or so we had been going to church again, but he didn’t have a deep connection with God yet.

I believe that just getting things out into the open like that, into the light, and me letting go was our turning point.love must be tough

You MUST read “Love Must Be Tough” by Dr. James Dobson.  When someone feels trapped, human nature wants to get away.  Not always, but often, when the door is opened wide and they are free to go, they begin to wonder if that’s really what they want.  They may even begin to fear losing what they have, if you play it right.  It may sound immature to ‘play games’ a little, but if you are wise, you’ll realize that even the best of us are still humans who don’t want what comes too easily to us, or who will go after what we perceive that we “can’t” have.  In a solid, healthy marriage none of this is necessary, but if you want to make it through a bad spot, you’ve got to know this.  First make the sacrifices to be the spouse you know that you need to be, and then think about what I’ve explained here.

After that day something changed in him.  

I kept playing it cool, drawing closer to Jesus, and praying my guts out, but it wasn’t long and Kent was reading his Bible, too.  Soon he got to know another Catholic Christian guy named Dave, who showed him what it looked like to be a real man in love with the Lord.  (You don’t have to be a “weirdo” to be a committed Christian — as Chris Stefanick says, “Yes, some Christians are weird, but they were also weird before they were Christians.”)

One day he came home and told me he quit his job and had no prospects for another. Believe it or not, I was thrilled! The job was way too stressful and he worked too many hours, so I knew this was a great move for our family. Within a week he had a better paying, less stressful job, and with regular hours.

I was thanking God like crazy for how He was moving!

Soon things slowly began to heal between us. We were both reading our bibles, so God was working on each of our hearts and our lives.  We got more involved in our church, and found friends that we are still very close to today. We went deeper into our faith and had discussions about things that didn’t make sense to us, so we searched out the Truth together. It’s difficult to explain how right and good and deep the connections are in your marriage when you grow together in faith as a couple, and with other Christian friends – it truly is “the abundant life” that Jesus promises when we follow Him.  We are blessed with close families on both sides, a lot of good friends, with Jesus as our very best friend, of course, but here on earth, we really are each other’s best friend.

How different life would be had we given up…

That was 14 years ago! We have 4 kids now, and all of that seems like a lifetime ago. I often think of how different life would be had we done what society said was “OK” and gave up when it was difficult. It was the worst thing I’ve ever gone through, yet now I’m thankful it all happened, because it’s what brought me to really fall in love with Jesus.  What’s neat is how He then used the muck we went through to help others – over the years other couples have come into our lives that we’ve had the chance to help through their own tough times and lead them closer to Him.

We feel so thankful that God brought us back and He can do the same for your marriage.

Here are more links and resources that might help you:

Life Changes – Five Ways They’re All the Same

1 Comment

cross and sun

This was originally written and posted for my Nutrition blog, but I thought it might be a good one to post here too…

I’ve had two major “conversions” in my life (and probably other small ones too): my “food conversion” and my Christian conversion. DON’T LEAVE YET! I won’t go weird on you, but this really is kind of interesting, so stick with me. Even if you haven’t been through either of those types of conversions, chances are you’ve had other times in your life when you’ve noticed a difference in yourself and began having new convictions as far as how you chose to live from that point on. No matter what area of your life you made changes in, I’ll bet you’ve noticed some of the same things that I have. (If you’ve noticed other similarities too, please leave a comment below!) I thought a post on this topic might help, so you know you’re not alone when you deal with the same issues.

Here are five ways I’ve found all life-changes are the same:

  1. After I went through both conversions, I wanted to tell EVERYONE about it! I was so excited about these newfound truths and thought the world should know. I have no doubt in my mind that in both cases I irritated some people like crazy. (And still do at times, I’m sure!) It took time and some growing to realize that everyone isn’t always ready or willing to hear what I wanted to share, just because I wanted to share it. Sometimes, just like I was previously, they aren’t “there” yet and may not care to ever be there, either. (It wasn’t that long ago that I didn’t care about things like trans fats and high fructose corn syrup on ingredient labels either!) Now I try to be a better listener to their stories and hear about where they are at, instead of talking about myself. (Every person has a lot to teach others, no matter where they are in their own journey.)
  2. I learned that whenever you make big changes in your life, you will be attacked for it. Sometimes in huge ways, but at the very least you will probably be accused of going “overboard” like I was, although I never could figure out how in my particular types of conversions someone can go overboard. When it comes to Christianity, how can you try too much to be more like God, who is only good? When it comes to eating healthy, can you do that too much? Especially in America?! Nevertheless, people sometimes feel they have to defend themselves, because maybe they aren’t ready to make the same changes yet. I’ve been accused (often) of “depriving” my poor kids of sweets or junk food. So when this happens, I’ve learned to have thick skin and not let it bother me, because usually they’re only joking around, or sometimes they just don’t understand. I know that what I’m doing is better for our family, not just in the present, but far into the future, and that’s all that matters. The point is, anytime you are different from others, you will be persecuted (some things never change – remind anyone of high school?!), and I happen to think that means I just might be on the right track!
  3. I also learned in both instances that nothing you say is going to make some people want to make positive changes in their life until they are really ready (or when it comes to Christianity, until the Spirit moves in them…) This is a tough one for me because, like anyone else, I really love my family & friends, and just want their body & souls to be healthy! But I remind myself that nobody likes a know-it-all or a bulldozer, so if there is a way I can help or when the timing is right, I pray I’ll be ready and speak when I’m supposed to. Until then it is not my business what choices others make in their lives, and I’m sure they are where they feel they need to be for now. I’m learning to respect that and keep my mouth shut more. (I still need a lot of help with that one at times!)
  4. The time frame that change happens is different for everyone. No matter what type of conversion is going on inside you, for some people it takes place over a very long period of time (years) and for others it is fast (a moment), and I’ve heard many stories in-between. However, no matter how it happens is “OK”, all that matters is that you’re growing over time and becoming more the person you want to be (or even more important, the person God wants you to be.)
  5. Lastly, both times I learned that God really can do the impossible in us! Even though I grew up going to church now and then, there was so much I didn’t understand about even the word, “Christian”, so for me to be able to get past those barriers and many others, and decide to open up to Him more in my own Christian conversion, was miraculous. As far as my food conversion, this is how I know He did the impossible with that: when I can go to the grocery store and bypass my beloved Cocoa Puffs or Pop Tarts because of all the junk in their ingredient labels, you KNOW He has done something impossible in me!