Purity

Purity has been a major theme for me lately. Because these last days, weeks, months, years, whatever are so important, I can not help but think that we need to hold each of our thoughts accountable for their actions already done and check them before they become actions. If the Lord comes right now, would our lives reflect His holiness? Would the church measure up to Godly motives and ambitions? Would I measure up to His standards of purity? Would my family? I have been thinking a lot about these things lately. It is a fascinating thing to delve into your mind and really work to capture each of your thoughts and judge your own level of purity and discover what your motives are. It may take a bit of work and honesty, but I think these are actually good things. It is time to clean house.

When Seasons Change

When seasons in our life change suddenly, we have choices concerning what to do with that information. We can mull over the past or hope it goes back to that soon, living in the rear view mirror so to speak. We can wonder where it is taking us and spend time worrying about what is ahead. Or we can live one day at a time until some semblance of stability returns. Remembering that God is in charge of this universe, I can choose to trust that He is taking us on a journey for a reason and just do our best to live life or not. My peaceful season has passed and its innocence and naivete. And on the journey we go into distantly familiar waters of leadership and care taking and wondering if people will honor requests or sneak around more carefully and dip into the cookie jar when I know it is not beneficial to do so. How do you keep someone from grabbing up what should be left alone in a moment of perceived hunger? How do you tell someone you respect and love that some things should just be left alone? How do I explain how much I fear losing a man who has cared for me so long? How do you make your importance their importance? How do you explain that integrity of Spirit has more to do with the unseen than the seen, the heart than the physical? How do you get someone to find wrong what is wrong but has been reasoned away as no big deal? Does he have the reasoning skills to understand what he thinks is is no big deal hurts his family and himself? Does dementia take away that ability to get it? I guess this blog is more questions than answers, but one thing I am certain of is that God knows what He is doing. We are asked to go down a path for a reason. You may want something, such as honor, value and love and get selfishness and pride back. You may want to be treasured and get disinterest back. You may in this life want appreciation and get betrayal back. All of these things are possible UNLESS you are asking the right Person. Everyone in this life will let you down at some point except God. The perfect Holy One will love you every time, appreciate you, not let you down, value you, treasure you. See, maybe I’ve needed this reminder that even if people don’t appreciate what I do enough to honor me above themselves, God gave His Son’s life up to buy me back from the enemy. That is how valuable I am to Him. No matter how ugly or betrayed I ever feel by anyone, God has never called me anything but His beautiful adopted child that He does everything for. No matter how many mistakes I make, God will honor me as His amazing handiwork. That is pretty incredible.

Say Truth in Love

Raised by a Christ following Marine, things were pretty black and white around my house growing up. Lies were severely frowned upon and truth was told sometimes rather bluntly or brutally. I know beyond all shadow of reason that my Dad loves me and has all my life and that he would do anything at all for me, even if it killed him. However, sometimes his words didn’t come across as what I would call loving. Yes, they were all true. If you did a fact check, you would find all his statements correct. I have thought about this a lot lately because I love truth. I believe it sets you free. And if our enemy speaks lies for a living, I want to speak the opposite, which is truth. God is truth and Christ said He was the way, the truth and the life. However if I am not careful, my truth can come out as unloving or uncompassionate or cold like words that wring out in my head still from my Dad, the truth sayer. And having explored this, I have come up with some examples to show the difference between saying truth and saying truth in love.
Truth: That shirt is ugly.  Truth in love: That is a very interesting choice for a shirt.
Truth: The only thing I like about this dinner you made is the broccoli. Truth in love: Oh, you are so good at cooking broccoli.
Truth: It’s good you can play the sax because you sure can’t sing. Truth in love: I could listen to you just play the sax for hours.
Truth: Green is a horrible color on you. Truth in love: Blue is definitely your best color.
See the difference? Telling the truth in love does not compromise the truth or present it with a lie. It gives the positive spin on the truth. You willingly make a point to encourage and uplift rather than berate and bring down. Love is patient and kind, which means love is purposefully compassionate. Truth without love is really a contradiction and one is misunderstood because God is truth and God is love. How can He be both if they oppose each other in their true form? It is impossible. So, if we are clear on truth and love in their pure forms, we see that presentation is the key to a happy marriage of these complimentary topics. We must tell each other truth in love. Neither can be compromised in their integrity or you get a jumbled mess and people’s feelings get hurt. Truth in love is a matter of being intentionally both.

What I Do Wrong

There are things I do right, some very well. There are other things I do wrong. Maybe you can relate to one of these. I am an angry driver when anyone thinks while they are driving that the earth revolves around them and they can drive accordingly. I tend to wish I was right more than I actually am right. I tend to act on those incorrect suppositions sometimes. I tend to not punish my second child for wrongs as much as I did my first because they aren’t quite as big a deal as I thought they once were. I tend to act and then think, much to the chagrin of my conscious when I find I stuck my foot in it again. I tend to live life first and clean up after it second. I rev up the engines of my mind before all the information hits it and backfires. I say too much at inappropriate times. All these things I freely admit to struggling with and the Lord is gaining solid ground on all these areas. We all have weaknesses. We all have evils that resurface. However, you are fooling yourself if you think these are coincidental and you come against your areas of weakness as any coincidence. Where you have fallen, you will at some point be tempted again. Why? Because our fight is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers and powers of this present darkness. You are under attack and the enemy tries everything until you give in to one of his certain types of attacks. Then he is lazy and just keeps pushing you toward that same temptation again and again. He just relentlessly tries until you give in again and then he goes after that thing stronger. His goal is for your sin to become a stronghold to distract you and keep you from a right relationship with the only Savior, Jesus Christ. I used to have worse sins, stronghold that were much stronger than my current subset but I am free of them now. Why? Because I am some holy and strong saintly person? No. Because I had help. I finally told someone I trusted about my “secret” sin (none of which is new to anyone on earth) and they helped me be accountable and prayed with me. Jesus Christ freed me and until then, I hadn’t understood how trapped and duped and idiotic I had been. Sometimes we need help, accountability. Other times we need strong prayer and repentance and just saying no. That depends on the habit of the sin and how embedded it is into your life. God can pull you out and there is freedom on the other side of it, life as He intended, and of course the amazing reward of heaven after it all. Hope is in Christ! And He is coming soon!