I had an out of body moment this morning in the children’s ministry room, watching an activity the kids were doing. We were playing a game where the kids had to figure out from a list of statements what was the truth, and what was false. (The day’s theme was discerning truth from error–something I don’t do all that well sometimes). There was a kid in the middle of a circle, and the rest of the kids in each team held a long piece of string. If the narrator of the game said something true, the kids stood still; if she said something false, the kids walked around the kid in the middle until he or she was fully tangled up, representing how easily we can get tangled up in error.

I thought about this on the train on my way home, and the words of Hebrews 12:1 came to mind: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entagles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Pioneer and Perfecter of faith. For the joy set before Him He endured he cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God”. (Emphasis mine). Normally the words encourage me to keep going, keep growing closer to God, but today, as they hung around in my heart, started piercing me.

I realized that it’s not just spiritual error that can entangle me. Bitterness, envy, anger, pride, fear, ingratitude, wallowing in the past instead of forgiving myself for it and unwillingness to repent and surrender are the strings that I keep tying back around myself instead of being free. As I consider the passage that I mentioned, I know that this “throwing off” process isn’t one that happens overnight: as one more knot is untangled, I am that much more free.

Further, it’s not one that happens by myself–I need the community of believers (a “band of sisters”, if you will) around me to help me see knots that I don’t even know are there, and to tell me when my efforts to untangle myself are only ending me up in a bigger knot than before. It isn’t easy for me to admit where I’ve been wrong, where I’ve failed, but I know that’s one of the biggest ways I get free: as I admit my mistakes, they lose their power over me.

The question I ask of you, readers, is, what’s got you “tangled up”? Consider the question (I don’t need an answer), and prayerfully give those issues to God. Read Psalm 25, and confess as the Spirit convicts you of the sins that are entangling you. I pray you find rest, that you see the gentle hands of Christ reaching out to you, to take away the things that entagle you, so that you can be truly free.

This time last week, I was sitting in a comfy chair in South Barrington, anxiously awaiting whatever God would say to me. Now a week and several journal entries (and a couple blog entries) later, I am still in awe of His marvelous work through the conference to reinvigorate my life with Him.

I have already decided that I’m going next year, come Hell or high water. The only reason, I told a friend, that I wouldn’t go, is if I were laid up in traction somewhere. Otherwise, I’m aware that Summit is something I need to do for myself to keep my life with God in the world going. It is a challenge and an inspiration on a scale that I don’t see every day, which is what I need to go through every day. The jet-fuel injection that I got has yet to really be felt, as I’m still sorting through my notes and thoughts on it, but one thing I do know: I am more grateful now than ever that I went.

I keep coming back to Gary Haugen’s phrase “the more demanding climb” as an incredibly accurate depiction of the kind of Christian life that we are called to. It reminds me of Jesus’ saying that the gate is small and the road is narrow that leads to life, and just how much I want to be one of the ones who finds it. I believe that I’m on the right path, but sometimes my lack of clarity is frightening–I don’t know if I’m walking the wrong way or not!

Part of the problem, I realize, is that I’m not spending nearly as much time with God as I need to in order to understand where He’s leading me. It’s too easy to say that I’m undisciplined, but I’ve been really lazy. That’s the truth. I’m realizing that I can’t just rely on the yearly challenge of Summit for the “more demanding climb”, but need to daily seek God’s direction for where to go next, especially in the times when it seems like I’m climbing up sheer rock with nothing else around me to give me any clue where I’m going. Without that daily time, for all I know, I could be climbing backwards!

My hope for the days ahead is that I can become more deliberate about spending time with God. I think the key here is to keep short accounts: if I miss a day, just pick right back up the next day and not hold it over my head. If I do, that will help beat discouragement, I hope. And who knows but what God could lead me to a far different place at this time next year as I come off my second Summit! I trust that no matter what, He will be faithful to complete the work He has started in me, and that’s the bottom line.

I find myself thinking about the prayer I prayed on my way home from the bus stop last night, and the verse that has been rattling around in my head ever since: Jeremiah 1:4-10. When I remembered that passage last night, I wept in joy.

I knew in that moment that there was a moment somewhere in eternity past where God loved me enough to breathe me into being for such a time as this. He knew everything about me, knew every good thing (and every stupid thing) I’d ever do, and yet He gave me life. It was an awe-inspiring thought: that this huge, macro-God, whose wisdom goes so far beyond anything I could ever hope to fathom, saw down to the micro-life that was mine. Not only that, but He put a calling on it that is as unique as my DNA: it will never be replicated in exactly the same way in anyone else.

This isn’t to say that I have the slightest clue what the heck to do with my life, because I still don’t. But it does say that no matter where God calls me, I will go, knowing that He knows the path ahead of me far better than I could. It means that I will trust what He has given me, because He has already given me all the tools I need to fulfill the calling He has placed on me. It means that I will journey intimately with Him–even and especially–when I can’t feel Him and don’t understand Him. It means that I am wholly His, and this is a decision I have to make daily. I pray that next year’s Summit finds me closer to God than ever, and even further on the marvelous adventure of following Him.

I sit here at 10 pm on Friday night, absolutely stunned by the last couple days, at Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit. I learned so much about God and the work He is calling me to do, the “more demanding climb” of following hard after Him (thanks to Gary Haugen, one of the conference’s speakers, for that phrase).

I know this much to be true: that this weekend marked a line in the sand for me, a time when I finally committed myself to the excellence with which God is calling me to love, and to live. I’d been sitting on the fence for quite some time, not surrendering some key issues in my life (namely, my career and vocation, and the move to the city of Chicago–life in the ‘burbs is sucking the life out of me) to Him. I realized, particularly through Craig Groeschel’s session and Bill Hybels’ closing session that if I surrender these things to Him, He won’t take away my dreams (as I thought and was afraid He would), but rather will give them wings of strength that they couldn’t have possibly had on their own.

I realized that when I give a dream to God, even if hard times come, He will make it come true in ways more beautiful than I could ever imagine. I might not ssee the impact of what God is calling me to do in this life, but I know more surely than I know a lot of things that the impact isn’t up to me. It’s my job simply to follow Him, to do the work He is calling me to do, and do it to the best of the abilities He has given me. I will write more on this later; prayer and sleep are calling me now!

I checked my Facebook page a little while ago, and a friend of mine had posted this video. Just seeing the images reminded me of the horrendous suffering that Jesus went through to make grace available to us–the savage beauty of His pain and brokenness to make us whole. Needless to say, I cried.

But the tears weren’t just in amazement at the lengths to which God went to redeem us. My tears, I confess, were about just how callously I look at the cross, for my forgetfulness of its shame and suffering. And then, as I watched the video, it hit me: it is this callousness that has allowed me to grow cold in my walk with Him, to believe that I can just do whatever I want, and there are no consequences for my actions. I don’t have to spend time with Him; He’s just going to be there for me regardless.

Everything else in me says that this is a load of bull(blank). After all, Paul tackles this question: “What shall we say then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Paul’s question here is a fantastic one, and one that hits me below the belt: if this grace is true, why am I going back to living in the very thing that I am now supposed to be dead to?

It’s almost like a kid after he’s had a bath, jumping back into the mud in the backyard. Mom/dad will get ticked of course, but the kid doesn’t care. He lives in the moment, getting as dirty as he darn well pleases, knowing that even if there’s a consequence, mom/dad will still clean him up. It never occurs to him that mom/dad might leave him to figure out how to clean himself up.

Fortunately, God isn’t that kid’s parental unit. God doesn’t leave us to figure out how to clean ourselves up. Just watch that video to understand the length He went to in order to give us the means to come clean, whether we’ve messed up 10 times or 10,000 times. It’s not about how much or how badly we’ve messed up, it’s about how much we need Him.

I’ve come to realize that I need Him more now than I did when I first surrendered, since the battle I’m fighting against sin is frightening sometimes, sometimes to the point when I find it easier just to give in and commit the sin than it is to surrender that moment to Christ and let Him have His way in me. This is frustrating to me, and it shows a huge shortsightedness about the destructive nature of sin, and forgetfulness of what Paul says next: “Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were therefore buried with Him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life (Romans 6:2-3; emphasis mine).

That’s the hope of grace for those of us who are Christ-followers: we have the possibility, no, the reality of living a new life because of grace. No matter how much we keep messing up, no matter how badly. God is not impatient with us, nor will He one day say “I’ve had enough of you acting like My grace doesn’t matter. Get yourself out of this one”. The beauty of it is that “as far as the east is from the west, so far He removes our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12). As soon as we confess our sin, whether it’s an attitude of ingratitude, judgment, whatever, it’s gone! We don’t have to look at it, since God has cast it far away from Him.

That’s the beauty of the cross: that we can keep coming back, dirty-faced, scraped-kneed, split-knuckled from trying to fight Him, and He will always take us back. This was something that came to me like a refreshing breeze on a hot summer day as I watched the YouTube video that started all of this. And so I can only pray that I never take His grace for granted, knowing the price He paid to make it available to us.

I heard about this last night, and I laughed so hard the milk I was drinking at dinner came out my nose. It was a real WTF moment.

Apparently, some Republican individuals are claiming that Barack Obama is “too skinny” to be President. Like I said, WTF?!? (In the interest of fair warning, Keith Olbermann is pretty far left-wing, but he’s hilarious. This is material better suited to any of the late night comedians, but he does a good job of making fun of its utter ridiculousness).

After all, what are we taught as children: “Thou shalt not be ridiculous”. This is beyond the pale of acceptability. (I guess when you can’t play the race card without it being soundly condemned from so many quarters, you have very few options left). As was correctly pointed out in the video clip, it’s an extreme example of the whole “he’s not one of us” card that some individuals in the Republican party seem determined to play against Obama whenever they get the chance.

And if that’s not “playing the race card”, I don’t know what is. It’s so obvious that you can smell it from a mile away, and it stinks. Funny how BS always does. At issue here is the politics of fear, of setting up an “other” who is automatically “bad” because he is an “other”. It’s this kind of fear-mongering that needs to be exposed for what it is: a desperate attempt to maintain the status quo against the real possibility of change and growth. The folks who set up these kinds of “us-vs-them” battles tend to be threatened by change and growth, so instead of embracing it, they seek to destroy it, since it would upset their comfortable little worlds. But maybe they need to have their apple carts upset a little, since it would make them realize that their tactics are childish, ridiculous, and uncalled for.

I’ll be writing more about this in the coming days, particularly after I’ve had more time to digest it. It’s safe to say at this point that this was an energy drink for my soul, waking me up out of its complacency, and out of its sense of entitlement. The story this tells is one that deeply convicted me (you’ll have to read the link; I don’t want to give away many of the details).

The question I’m now wrestling with is, Why do I, as a Christian, knowing what I know, allow this world’s opinions and values to influence me as heavily as I do? Is it really true that beneath my sarcasm about designer clothes and big houses, that I’m really just envious of the trappings of prosperity and all that jealousy is merely wrapped in sanctimonious crap? Invariably, that’s part of it. Beneath the carefully-matched makeup on my face, I’m green with envy over others who seem to have “made it”.

But that can’t be all of it. I’m convinced it’s not all of it. The other part of it is an attempt to be grateful for what I have, something that isn’t easy when I’m consumed with envy. The thing that helps me is to see the glass as already broken. This is a Buddhist idea that is a needed correction, since what it teaches is that things are impermanent, particularly material things. The writer of Ecclesiastes said essentially the same thing.

So then, I have a choice: to let the things of this world, in all their impermanence, influence me, or not. The Todd Agnew song (I’ve forgotten the title) about Jesus and what following Him looks like always convicts me, especially his line, “If Ephesians says to imitate Christ, why do you look so much like the world?” Man…. Why do I look so much like the world I claim to hate so much, and why am I so envious?

Maybe the problem, at its core, is that I’m chasing the wrong wild goose. I’m living vicariously through others, yet at the same time judging them for the choices they’re making. WTF gives with that? Yep, I am chasing the wrong wild goose. Despite all the issues wrapped up in this, the final analysis indicates that
this isn’t a hopeless situation. I know that Christ can and will set me free from this vicious cycle of jealousy and denial, if I will trust Him to show me what’s going on, and through it, will lead me closer to Himself, the true Source of satisfaction.

For those who haven’t heard, Randy Pausch (“The Last Lecture”) has passed away. I just heard the news on Good Morning America a few moments ago. It is a sad day for him and his family, as well as for everyone whose lives he has touched–they number in the millions.

Take a moment today, read his story, and then reflect:

What’s keeping me back from living the life I want to live?
What kind of legacy do I want to leave?
What dreams do I want to make come true, not just in my own life, but in the lives of others?

Those are the questions that rise like prayers for me in this sad moment. The world has lost a truly luminous spirit, but his message of hope, inspiration and courage will live on in the hearts and lives of all those he touched. May God bring him safely home, and bring comfort to those who grieve his passing.

Writer’s note: in order to understand this post, I need to take you back exactly three years and about 2 hours in time, to 7 p.m., Wednesday, July 06, 2005. I went to my church with a friend, having absolutely no idea what was about to happen: an encounter with Holiness that would leave me shaken, shaking, ultimately, renewed in God’s love.

I heard a message that night that now stands as a stake in the ground, about God’s rain in our lives, and what happens in times of distance from Him, how dry we (I) become. It was in those moments, and through the worship, that I heard God whispering to me, “Come back, My child. I am your Home, I am your Shelter, your Source of life”. I was swept away through teaching and Sacrament into the very heart of God Himself, and made the decision then to rededicate myself to Him.

Fast forward to three years later, 10 a.m., or so. I’m again sitting at my church, this time, in the quiet courtyard nestled against the side of the building. The only sounds I hear are the occasional chirp of a bird, the whisper of a car as it passes along the main driveway leading on to the campus. My soul, in the stillness, suddenly remembers, and is taken back to that night, and I am in that instant aware of how much has happened since then. The surge of memories brings the flotsam of the sins I’ve committed, the jetsam of things I’ve left undone in the years since that momentous night. But it also brings something else: an awareness of the healing work God has been doing in my life, and how, despite my fighting Him, He is continually drawing me closer to Him.

And so, the cry rose from me, when it came in the form of a chorus last Wednesday as I walked home from work in the rain:

Holy Spirit, send Your rain
On my heart’s dry ground again
Send out Your healing flood
‘Til by Your love I’m overcome

I think back on how, through the last three years, part of God’s healing work in me has been that continual drawing me into awareness of the gifts He has given me, and my purpose in being here. I don’t have all the answers after three years, but by His grace, I know I’m closer to Him than I was (even though I’m not as close as I could be).

Even today, amid all this powerful awareness and gratitude, I struggled with the doubt and despair that never seem far away: the sense that despite all of the things I know and believe, the dogging feeling that no matter what I’ve done or become, it will always be lacking. As I think over it now, I realize that at the root of such a feeling is my soul, attempting, even now, to withhold things from God that are rightfully His, resisting His gracious Sovereignty.

So why, despite all of this, am I writing a post called “Amazed by Grace”? The answer is simple: all through the past three years, God’s grace has been the theme that brings unity and harmony to the discord and chaos of my life. I see His grace in the things that have happened to me, in how, even when I didn’t make the smartest decisions, and even when I resisted following Him, He didn’t ever give up on me–I know I would have given up on me a long time ago. But as I’m finding out (thanks to The Shack), God never will give up on me, that His love is beyond what I could ever comprehend.

And so, I look toward another year of being amazed by grace. I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next 365 days, the next 525,600 minutes. For all I know, one of those minutes could be my last. But I know more surely than anything that if that is the case, and I sleep in this world, I will be more fully alive than ever, more fully amazed by grace than ever, since I will see Him fully.

If that’s not the case, I pray for the strength to live each one of the minutes ahead of me in gratitude and joy. I pray that at the end of this year, I’ll be even more amazed by grace than I was today, and even more in love with the God from Whom grace comes.

Further editor’s note: I somehow screwed up, and this never got posted. Ooops. So now, it’s about two weeks later, but the words I’ve written are still true, if not even more so, after the past week couple of weeks. I’ll write a little more about that this weekend.

Well, the message here is obvious: it’s been way too dang long since I last wrote. I apologize to those of you who have been reading, since I know you’ve enjoyed what I’ve had to say.

The truth is that I put this thing on the back burner, without good reason. I could b.s. any excuse I want, but whatever I would say would be completely false. I’ve been through a lot, but that’s no reason for me to not write. So at least once a week, you will hear from me!

I love all of you who read this, and thank you for your thoughts, prayers, support, compliments (and even your insults), and most of all, your love. Here’s to another stage in this journey!