Megan Fox in Dodge Viper: worship.

I think out loud. Sometimes I give speeches to myself when I’m shaving my legs. Kinda weird, maybe, but it’s how I think the best. It helps me process – see the flaws in my thinking. Something about saying things out loud shows you the atrocity of your thoughts.

1. I worship. It’s something I do. It’s kind of like breathing – I do it even when I’m not trying to consciously. In fact, the only way I can’t do it is if I try and hold my breath – but eventually, in order to live, I must breath. I must worship.

To worship – to be shaped by the worth or value of something else. 

We all do. We are all shaped by the worth of other “stuff”.

Maybe you’re kind of over-weight, or you think you’re over-weight, or someone tells you you’re over-weight – maybe a magazine tells you, because you don’t look like any of the covers since the 1800’s. It’s the feeling you have about yourself – like something is wrong with you and it needs to be changed in order for you to feel better about yourself.

So you diet – maybe you actually don’t harm yourself by dieting – maybe you just eat healthy in a legitimate way. Maybe you don’t – maybe you hurt yourself to gain a certain level of thinness that never actually can be satisfied, but either way, maybe you diet.

Maybe you work out, dye your hair, get a great make-over, and have really toned calf-muscles. Maybe you wear a push up bra with just a TINY bit of cleavage, (I mean too much is too obvious)… and maybe – all the sudden, people take notice. Girls take notice and say things like “You look awesome.” – “Who cuts your hair?” “Where’d you get those jeans?” “Where do you go to the gym?” “Dude, that guy is checking you out!” 

Maybe they start checking you out, ya know, ask for your number or something. Maybe you hear from a friend that some Ryan Reynolds lookin’ guy said you look hot.

And all the sudden you are feeling fine. You have confidence. You are worth a million bucks and are pretty sure any guy in a 10 ft radius is yours, and you could probably marry them, too, if you wanted, and damn, while you’re at it you date a few of them. All the sudden Megan Fox could be your friend, and you feel so good – you might even introduce her to your friends because the guys would still think you’re hot.

You worship. 

You are shaped by the worth of beauty, control, the ability to find confidence in your elegant saavy of self or others-proclaimed prowess. You worship.

2. Worship dictates.

Dictates. I hate words like that – the meaning is sort of lost on the assumption of the word. What does dictate mean?

Predestination maybe? Self-fulfilling prophecy? (Too Harry Potter for you?). How about, plans – a laid out future – an already determined course?

What? Worship predestines, pre-determines, plans?

Well sure – you’re shaped by the worth of something – by beauty. This means, all of your choices will be in-line with satisfying that which you worship –  or that who’s worth shapes you.

It will determine your course of action, your job, your friends, your life. It will plan accordingly. You will plan accordingly around it. You worship.

I often think about the verses, “For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord – plans to prosper you and not to harm you – plans to give you a hope an a future.” or “The good things God laid out in advance for us to do.”

These verses are both in line with the idea of worship. That which you worship makes plans for you. These verse are thus spoken to those who are shaped by the worth of God, for only that which you worship can plan on your account for you will follow it where ever it leads you.

 I think predestination is far less weird than we think – especially in light of the idea that pretty much one choice of worship puts us on course for a fairly predictable life chart. You do what what you worship demands of you to do. What kind of master do you worship? All by God will drive you like a slave.

It’s made me think a lot about what I worship. By what value am I shaped? What is making plans for me?

Moths and Mice Destroy.

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 

Matthew 6:19-21

It occurs to me more and more recently that so much of the Bible is lost on me because of where I am in America, many generations later with stainless steal appliances and cedar closets. 

I have an expensive purse. It’s slightly embarrassing now to own it, but I have it nonetheless. 

I purchased this purse in 2003 while on Spring Break.

I saved money that I was going to take on a trip to England that essentially was cancelled, drove myself to the Galleria, walked into Louis Vuitton, handed over my benjamins and bought a purse. It’s cute. Its a backpack purse with black leather, nothing to signify its  brand, and it holds a lot of stuff – like snacks and lipgloss and my wallet (along with an assortment of gum wrappers, random pens, and receipts from the dark ages). It has lasted me all through college, and I still use it today.

It meant a lot to me in high school because everyone had an expensive purse, and I desperately wanted to be cool like the pretty-put-together people. I, however, have never been a pretty-put-together purse despite what you may think (cause I’m so aweeeesome now), but in my life, expensive things, particularly well-crafted and beautiful things made me feel more valuable, like some how I had more rights because I drove this car, or had this kind of jeans/purse/make-up/shampoo/hair cut/ or whatever makes you cool materially. I had more confidence in who I was because of what I owned and how I dressed. 

So – I store snacks in my purse. Craisens, crackers, m&ms with peanuts, cheeze-its, and yummies to get me through the day. Yesterday, I left my purse on the couch, and when I picked it up there was like black fuzz stuff underneath it, which seemed odd to me. Earlier that day I had found little mice poops downstairs and called Eric to tell him we need to get some pest control over to our house.

This morning, when I went to zip my purse, I realized, that a mouse – attempted to get to my snacks, had NIBBLED into the leather, leaving what I thought was weird fuzz on the couch. Did you know leather looks like fuzz when a mouse chews it to bits?? Now, you do.

Why does this matter to me today?

Because it’s the first time that verse about storing up my treasure in heaven has meant more to me than a cerebral exercise in thinking about rotting nails or moth-holed sweaters (of which I’ve never had) and how valuable those must be and how that should translate into me losing something valuable… though nothing seems as valuable until you don’t have it intact anymore.

My purse is something I treasured, and a mouse nibbled it. 

It is a beautiful thing to think that storing up treasure in heaven can never rot, or be gotten to by mice, or falter suffer water damage, or break. It can neither be stolen by someone else or neglected enough by me that it breaks.

Heavenly treasure is far more valuable than my purse, and for the first time – I actually see that.

Sin, the Nastiest Weed.

We have a garden bed to the right of our house, if you’re looking at it from the street. It is over-grown with weeds. In particular, there is one weed that looks sort of like a small tree with black berries growing on it. Its stalk is fairly thick and pinkish.

At first glance, I thought it would be easy to take this sucker out. Elise tells me, you have to get the entire root, otherwise it will come back. So, I go over to the weed, in my yoga pants and pink and white sneakers, with a GIANT shovel mind you, and attempt to dig up this weed plant. After realizing that the weed was too giant to just start digging, I took some sheers and cut it down at the base. This left just me, a stump, and the root.

Now, this weed was in the middle of some bearded irises. As I was digging, I  began to realize that the weed had grown its giant root UNDER the bearded iris, almost as if to suggest that if I wanted to get rid of the weed, I’d have to also kill the flower. Meticulously I worked to avoid having to do this, chopping with a spade, and trying to find where the root began. I felt like I was doing surgery.

Finally, the root pulled up, and the poor bearded iris, though a bit mangled, lived.

I’m pretty sure I got it all, but it was a battle, and the root of this weed was twisted around, and nestled right up next to a very pretty plant I did not want to sacrifice.

This is my general feeling about anything – it takes forever.

Perhaps it is the generation from which I come  that desires instant gratification or at least instant, obvious change or perhaps it is because tempermentally I am not a patient person – either way, I feel like things take forever, and I am easily discouraged when I don’t see immediate results.

This means a couple things for me:

1. It gives me the illusion that I am further along than I actually am, and from this comes an even greater impatience with myself to be perfect already!
2. It allows me to put a lot of pressure on other people to get their shit together already – I mean seriously, you were told last week to work on your anger or selfishness or whatever – why aren’t you fixed yet?!

I’ve started gardening. Who knows how long it will last, but my aunt came to visit next week and taught me how to till the soil, flip it over, remove the weeds and break up the red clay. It’s hard work, and she said, “If you do this for twenty minutes a day, you won’t need pilates!” So there you go…

I say all of that, because all of the biblical references and comparisons to plants, trees, bearing fruit… is making so much more sense to me. And the passage in Hebrews 10:14 that says, “For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” helps me understand the duration of being sanctified.

The removal of sin, is like a giant twisting weed, nestled right up against the beauty of who we are – sometimes it is really hard to tell where it  originates or how to remove it without nicking other vital and beautiful parts of ourselves. AND weeding takes a LONG TIME. Twenty minutes a day – forever! You can’t stop weeding, other wise other things will begin to pop up – and the insane thing about weeds is – they suck all of the life out of the plants you actually want to grow.

I have the weed of co-dependence. This weed sucks the life out of my desire to be friends with other people, for fear it will be a co-dependent relationship.

Some people (probably me too) have the weed of anger, and this anger sucks the life out of all potentially joyous activities, because the anger is so large and over shadowing that something is always wrong. It is a theif of nutrients and water to the other plants you hope to cultivate.

This is how sin works.

If you want to understand this more – find a section of your yard, and begin to garden it. You will quickly find that the Lord’s work with us is VERY long term, and everyday…

Sex: Of Love and Desire.

Ok – back to sex. Mostly because it gets me a lot of hits on my blog…

But to be serious – I made a discovery the other day.

We have a major confusion between desire and love.

I mix them up all the time. Orange juice is a good example of this.

I say something like: I LOVEEEEEEEEEE ORANGE JUICE! Very robust in my expression, but what I really mean is – I have a strong, abiding desire for orange juice. Do I have a strong abiding desire for my husband? And if I have that inkling – do I act on it, and go get myself a glass of Orange Juice, even if I have to drive to the grocery store, stand in line and purchase a new jug?

This might seem like semantics, but I think its an important distinction, because I think a lot of women LOVE their husbands, but very often do not DESIRE them – as in, have a strong, abiding want for sexual intimacy. But if you ask, of course they love them! I can count myself in this group sometimes – and it’s a hard place to be. Because, when love is so often convoluted, we’re confused as to what we are missing, what we ought to be seeking to cultivate, what we should be praying and asking God to give us.

And I believe, or at least what I’ve discovered, is that DESIRE is something that requires kindling. It requires prayer and thoughtfulness. See, if I forget the qualities that I like about Orange Juice, then I might at some point stop wanting it. (Not to compare sex to wanting Orange Juice.. but for benign example’s sake…) Desire is a cultivated good – that seeks to remind ourselves amidst everything tumultuous that one can feel, of the good and beautiful things, and that it is a stocked full of Calcium and Vitamin C!

Anyway –  love to hear some thoughts on this. Still treking through year one marriage!

Love,

Lora

I Hate the Word Sin.

I want to change. Do you?

This is a common problem that a lot of people find with Christians.

Why do you major so much on SIN? I mean, it’s gotta cause really bad self-esteem. 

Nietzsche argues that, “The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.”

Fortunately I’ve known enough atheists, their ugliness intact, to surmise that ugliness and badness have nothing to do with resolving to be that way, but it does make you think. What is fundamental to humanity? Is it beauty, truth and goodness? Or ugliness, deception and evil?

First I would say, it is a fallacy to suggest that Christians believe the world to be ugly and bad. Take Genesis for example – it is impossible to refute that God echos benediction over creation – “it was good, and it was good, and it was good – and MAN, man is VERY good.” Inherently, the creation, ie the world, was full of goodness.

It stands to reason that we are no longer in a state of goodness. Rape, murder, sex-trafficking, starvation, abuse, infidelity, all the way down to just general unpleasantness can be seen all over the world, and in your own neighborhood, if you look twice. The world, now, is not at peace. It is corroding under the weight of brokenness – brokenness choices, relationship with man and himself, man and other men and between man and nature, and a disrupted relationship with its creator. Who knows the world better than its maker? Better not to presume you do.

Leo Tolstoy states, “Everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.” Well why? If our main problem is that we see too much ugliness, then is change really necessary? Shouldn’t we just all resolve to believe that the ugliness we see is really just a product of thinking that its there? That perhaps evil is a just a byproduct of believing that evil exists. I mean certainly if we thought that the world was good, no one would murder anybody else and Jr. High wouldn’t be riddled with incessant teasing. Or perhaps the argument is that evil is good. That really, we have it all backwards. 

That, of course, is an option. But it’s warped with self-interested denial. One only needs to spend time with another person for 15 minutes at most to discover either blatant narcissism, passive-aggressiveness, a desire for other people’s stuff, an inability to handle conflict, and an utter lack of forgiveness. And, to suggest that any of these qualities make the world more enjoyable, make marriage plausible, relationships flourish, or that a person would LOVE to have a conversation with someone utter displeased with him or herself or utterly obsessed with him or herself – is folly. I rarely find people who lack the above qualities. And yet, the question remains – hanging in the balance – why so much thought about sin? Doesn’t it cause low self-esteem?

I think it leads back to two questions: What is fundamentally true about humanity and the world? (beauty, truth and goodness; or ugliness, deception and evil) and What is the basis for self-esteem? (The goodness given to you by your own self’s striving, or the goodness given to you by the righteousness of your creator?)

So, WHY TALK so MUCH about Sin?

I think the emphasis on sin is for a few reasons:

1. Based on very minimal analysis, it’s pretty obvious that people are imperfect or, as I hear a lot “Only human” (not sure what that means, but I take it to mean incapable of perfection and thus cannot be held accountable for their mistakes or at least, we shouldn’t be surprised of someone fouls up either small or big time).
2. If you were to label the perpetual state of imperfection, and the incapability of a human to make good choices or the pervasiveness of poor and harmful choices – in Christian circles we call that sin, brokenness, folly, evil etc. Or the state of being fallen. OR the flesh, or nature (not nature like trees and flowers, but nature like what we’re inclined toward).
3. If there were a way to eradicate this sin, put you back into joint with the world order, give you peace beyond imagination, soothe your soul and bring forth purpose – a Christian would say, salvation through Christ does this because sin was eradicated on the Cross. That is to say, through Adam though many were slaves to sin, through Christ many are made free. So, freedom from sin is in Christ – he washes the sinner clean and presents his soul to God.
4. The perfection, fundamental to Christ, that eradicates sin, is Christ’s righteousness, and we stand in that righteousness, and are healed through it.

 

So – to a believer, it matters. Sin stands between a person and other people, between a person and the world, between a person and God. It is the ugliness we feel in an argument where someone is demeaned. It is what causes the exploitation of children, women, men – all over the world. It is why the earth is groaning under the weight of brokenness, and why things are so hard. It is the human nature we so easily excuse that allows us to manipulate, lie, steal, gossip, deliberately hurt others and ourselves and make a mockery of suffering, God, and each other. It is why you can’t find peace no matter how much crap you own, or how beautiful you look, or even after 5 drinks. Because sin calls us out – it is the undeniable reality that we need something outside of ourselves, that we need God.

From Deception to Truth.

I gave my testimony last night.

It’s always a confusing thing because, well, my memories of testimony-giving are of some goateed guy pacing on stage trying to convince all of the teenagers that Jesus is way better than drugs. It has taken me a long time to recapture the essence of testimony-giving.

My cousin Nicole stated one time that our first question, our first desire when encountering another believer should be to ask or request their story of coming to faith. How did you become a follower of Christ? How did you come to understand that He is Lord and Savior? What is the story of Christ’s great rescue?

I came to realize last night that a testimony is really just the story of how a person moves from a place of being deceived and decieving themselves and others to a place of truth, of flourishing in that truth and bringing others into the beauty and everlasting satiation of truth.  And that is to say this – moving from a place of unbelief to belief. Moving into a place where the world is ordered, top down, God… then me… then creation. Not me, then my perception of God and the Bible filtered through my lens.. and creation.

Why is this important?

I went to a Summer Songs concert back in July, and Dr. Charles Marsh read a snipit from Nietzsche – stating, in effect, that as a believer, you stand and exist in a lie.

I chewed on it for a while and thought about how entirely opposite it seemed to me; that perhaps, we spend our days stitching lies to avoid the inevitability of truth – that our mortality is greater than our egos; and in the end, the only that satisfaction can be found is in the humanizing care-taker of Christ – who brings all people into truth, and revives all brokenness – who resurrects the soul, the body and the mind.