Embracing the chaos…

We are currently passing around a very violent stomach bug in our house. All five children have now gotten it, some far worse than others. Jeff and I are awaiting our turns, preferably not at the same time.

This is the only sickness that freaks me out, because once someone in our household gets it, everyone does.  There’s a certain element of gross when everyone is throwing up. It involves washing things that I had no intention of washing combined with what do I do with this mess?

Several years ago, Jeff and I had a very bad bout with it. We were throwing up simultaneously which can be difficult with only one bathroom,. We also had  small children, 3 children under the age of 3.  Children under the age of 3 can do nothing for themselves. This was a problem since every time I would move, I threw up. Jeff and I just moaned and groaned and lay on the couch and loveseat with our trash cans beside us. Trying to change a messy diaper while having a stomach bug is really bad, but not quite as bad as trying to clean up someone else’s vomit while you have the stomach virus. Fortunately, at the time, we lived in the same town as my parents, and they took care of our boys while we were in such a desperate situation. The unfortunate part was that we gifted mom and dad with our stomach bug.

Another incident occurred when we lived in Alabama and were visiting my parents in South Carolina (where my sister and her family live as well). She came down to hang out with us for the day and brought my nephew who had thrown up the night before. She said it was shots that he had gotten or something he had eaten (believe me, it’s never something they ate) A couple days later, we headed back to Alabama which is a 5 hour drive. About halfway through our drive, 2 of our children started throwing up. One managed to catch his vomit in a bag (he’s our vomit expert, since he used to get car sick and routinely throw up all over his car seat; this son can practically throw up on demand), but the other one started screaming and flailing around and throwing up everywhere, all over himself and the van. (I tend to laugh at inappropriate times, and this was once again one of those times…it was the screaming combined with the vomiting and the ludicrousness of having kids throwing up at the same time, and still having a few hours to drive that did if for me) The smell, well, it was bad. As soon as we got home,  my other son began throwing up, but for him, this was a moment of pride. He said, “Now we all have it. We’re the throw up boys from Alabama.” I then began throwing up shortly thereafter. I don’t handle pain well, and this was one of those lay in the bathroom floor, I just wanna die moments.

I really thought we were going to be excluded from the stomach bug this year; however, I’m sad to say we are not. I’m just waiting my turn, knowing that it will be bad. From what I’ve heard and seen of this one, it will be one of those lay on the bathroom floor kind of things, which will be really gross considering we need to remodel our bathrooms, and the floors are pretty disgusting as only houses built in the 1960’s can be. I’m awaiting my fate with a certain trepidation but also a certain knowledge. I still think ignorance is bliss.

A person might think I really enjoyed this stuff, and maybe I do, after the fact. I seem to remember these stories in vivid detail, much like I remember giving birth to a child, but giving birth to a child though painful has a redeeming factor, the baby. Throwing up from a stomach virus does not.  

“The problem …is not how to break the chains–God has already done that–but the willingness to enslave ourselves to Jesus, who sets us free.”

Enslave myself to Jesus who sets me free.  What does surrender actually look like? What happens when I know Jesus is telling me to do something, something for my own good, and I refuse to do it? It seems like He tells me to do weird stuff some times. I think He tells me to do things that He would have done, like helping people He didn’t know.  He tells me to help people I don’t know alot, and sometimes I say, oh God, please not today. It just feels so uncomfortable,  so “holier than thou-ish.” I had this whole attitude last week when He told me to help this lady with her groceries. It’s such a small thing, but I refused to do it.  I even sat in my van and watched her, telling Him how badly my head hurt.  I don’t believe God punishes or grows distant…”If we are unfaithful, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny who He is.”  My selfish stubborn pride is punishment itself.

A couple months ago, I was sitting in the chiropractor’s office, and the Spirit was clearly telling me to get up and help this girl who had a baby on her hip and was pushing a stroller through the door. I was talking on my phone at the time, so I just refused His prompting…well, it turned out to be someone I’m related to…ouch…I actually confessed to this relative right then and there how I had refused the Spirit’s prompting. Maybe helping others isn’t the Spirit’s promptings; maybe these are just small acts of kindness that connect human beings…or not connect, in my case.

It seems like I can come up with 100 different excuses to not help someone…but it’s really selfishness and a lack of love…not wanting to put myself out there for someone else. I’ve most certainly got bigger issues of selfishness than not holding doors or not helping little old ladies or ignoring my children because I’m busy doing some thing…but at the source of it all is actually my being unwilling to enslave myself to Jesus, by not surrendering, by not yielding, by not holding my palms face up and receiving what He’s offering…Himself…His life lived through me.

When I’m in the middle of a pit, a pit that I made for myself, I find that I don’t have the wherewithal to rescue myself. I can’t just crawl out of it; it’s not that easy; sometimes when I’ve slipped in so deep, I simply do not have the strength to do anything, and sometimes I’m still discussing with myself whether or not I even want to get out of my pit.  Maybe there was a choice in the beginning before I started slipping and falling head first; maybe then I could have looked to Jesus, but again He’s still the One making  the rescue. It’s just a matter of how far down He has to reach.

Sin has a certain allure to it; the enemy honestly makes me feel like I’m missing out on something I should have; that God is somehow cheating me out of something that’s good for me. My sin is a lack of satisfaction with where I am, who I’m with, and ultimately with Christ Himself. I think that’s probably what Eve felt in the Garden…that she was missing out and pretty much had to have what she was after.  

I’ve seen God do some amazing rescues…I’m grateful. I’m in the process of being rescued again, and I’m more grateful than ever…His love overwhelms me. A favorite songwriter of mine says, “He sees the depths of my heart, and He loves me the same.”  In the past couple years, my journey has been wrapped up in enjoying Christ’s love; I’m really learning how to trust Him and let go, but then there are these sin issues that I have, and I even KNOW that I don’t want to go there, but it’s that whole “missing out” factor for me. It’s the mirage; it’s the pretty package; it’s the thing I have to have.

“Oh, heart of mine/Why must you stray/From one so fair/ You run away/ And one more time you have to pay/The heaviness of needless shame. So come home running/His arms are open wide/His name is Jesus/And He understands/He is the answer/You are looking for/So come home running/Just as you are.”

He who has been forgiven little loves little…

“Turn your gaze to heaven and raise a joyous noise, The sound of salvation comes, the sound of rescued ones.” I know what that sounds like; I’m one of the rescued ones… 

I just got back from a revival service…I literally haven’t been to one of those for almost 10 years…here are some thoughts about my experience from the other side…

Tonight, I heard that God knows all that I think and everything that I do, and that He is going to judge me for everything that I’ve ever done. I know this kind of talk is to bring sinners to repentance, but for me, when I was younger, all this managed to do was make me afraid of God and the all the things He could punish me for if I wasn’t “doing right.” This fear of God led me to performance-based Christianity instead of to Christ Himself.  I usually walked away from these kinds of services more self-focused than I was before I went into them. They became about me and what I needed to do better in order to please God. I remember one speaker who was in a wheelchair telling his story about how he rebelled against God and then he fell off a cliff.  I had this constant fear that I was going to be in a car accident and that God was either going to cripple me in some way by scarring my face beyond recognition or by taking my legs. I thought about this every time I got in a car.  I don’t think tragic stories have to come across that way…God obviously uses what we think are tragedies to draw us to Himself in unbelievable ways and not as a form of punishment.

Tonight, the speaker used Psalm 139. This is one of my favorite psalms. It speaks to me of Abba’s love for me…how He formed me…how He created my paths for me before the foundations of the world…how He knows me inside and out…how He knows my thoughts before I even say them…this psalm tells me of my Abba who lovingly created me, not a God who wants to use my thoughts against me so that I’ll turn to Him…I was disappointed to see the psalm used as a tool to try to turn unbelievers to Christ out of fear and not out of love.

In my past experience, alot of evangelistic preaching has been hell, fire and brimstone. How hard can it possibly be to get people to walk the aisles? I mean, really, what sane person would want to spend eternity burning in a lake of fire? But, the speaker tonight didn’t focus on hell so much, but rather the relationship with God through Christ, and he was much more grace-oriented than most I’ve heard.  I can appreciate that.

I guess I just keep coming back to the statement that the love of Christ compels…compels sinners to believe and compels saints to fix their eyes on Jesus.  Really, this life is all about relationship with Christ…”that I may know Him”…we miss everything if we miss Christ.

This morning I woke up to once again have issues with some of my sinful thought patterns, and then Jesus revealed to me that He died for this sin over 2,000 years ago.  At that moment, Jesus freed me from my thoughts; He once again rescued me and a sense of gratitude and love overtook me.  He not only died for this one sin; He died for ALL my sin: past, present, future. Then I realized that I wanted to fast today, not out of some sense of guilt or pride but rather to go through, in a small way, one of the many things Jesus suffered on the cross…being hungry.

This fasting thing is a stretch for me. I don’t usually deny myself much, but today I really wanted to focus on what Christ had done for me on the cross. I am not fasting to fast; I’m fasting so that every time my stomach cries out for me to eat, I think about Christ and the things He suffered because of His love for me, for all mankind. This has been uncomfortable today; I realized I’m not used to being uncomfortable. Whenever, I’m hungry, I eat.  Philippians 3:10 came to mind,  “That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His suffering, being made conformable unto His death; “ I want to experience Him, even the fellowship of His suffering.  I have to be honest this has been a really long day for me. I now have great anticipation for what Easter and Christ’s resurrection means. 

I gave up my fast a little over an hour ago. When I realized I had started using my willpower to be able to “make it” and had stopped focusing on Christ but rather the food in my fridge, then it became about me.   When Jesus asked His disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Could you not watch and pray?” it reminds me that my flesh is very weak, and I would have fallen asleep too. I admit weakness; I admit failure. But I am not my failures; I am not my weaknesses; I’m my Abba’s child.

I really hate things being wasted…maybe that, in part, is why I’m such a packrat. In August, we brought 2 large moving trucks to Nashville for 2 reasons: I have a hard time parting with alot of things, and I didn’t want to have to replace what I was throwing away. That would be wasteful in terms of time and money. So needless to say, I have alot of junk in my house that I keep moving from one place to another. I cleaned out a closet today, but nothing got thrown out; I just moved everything to do a different spot…hmm…not very productive after all.  I always think that I might be able to use “this thing” someday, so I hang on to whatever it is, and it gets buried in the back of a closet.  For instance, today I found plastic cups that I didn’t even know I had…which I then moved to a different location…maybe next time I’ll be able to find them when I need them or even remember I have them…probably not…

Whenever I see a pile in front of someone’s house, I am immediately drawn to it.   In fact, when I was 6 months pregnant with my 3rd son, I salvaged a well-used Lil Tikes workshop from someone’s junk pile.  Hauling it into the back of my van as water from the workshop dumped all over me and the inside of my van was nice, but I was determined to rescue my treasure and show it off to Jeff.  He’s never quite as excited as I am about my finds because he knows he’s going to be loading them in and off moving trucks for the rest of his life.

A couple days ago, my daughter Julia dumped a 16 oz. cup of water into an animal cracker container that was almost full. I’m not talking about a little box of animal crackers; I’m talking about the Sam’s Club size, almost 5 pounds of animal crackers now swimming in water. My first thought after I stopped yelling was “maybe I can leave the top off, and they’ll dry out”…seriously.  But my relationships should be more important to me than my being concerned about the people around me wasting anything ever.  My judgmental attitude toward people who I think are wasteful has actually been harmful to me.  Just looking at Jesus’ life, He was definitely into relationships over anything else.  He did have the disciples gather the leftover food into baskets on two occasions…but that probably wasn’t the point…

I know my issues are bigger than waste though;  it boils down to greed for me. It all comes back to me wanting more. I don’t want my neighbors’ stuff; I want my neighbors’ junk or half-eaten food…how odd.  My frugality is just another form of greediness, because if I handle money well, I can get more stuff.  I recently came across a passage in the Message in Proverbs 23 that says “Don’t accept a meal from a tightwad; don’t expect anything special. He’ll be as stingy with you as he is with himself; he’ll say, ‘Eat! Drink!’ but won’t mean a word of it. His miserly serving will turn your stomach when you realize the meal’s a sham.” Being overly concerned about waste is just not something that I imagine alot of people struggle with…but for me it’s turned into a self-righteous kind of greed…

We just went to a new church on Sunday. My children however do not like being left for the first time at a new place. Perhaps it’s because their parents don’t handle change well either. So all my kids, well 4 out of 5, were having their various meltdowns while we were trying to drop them off at their classes. Jesse (11) was the only one who was able to handle going to a new class. He told us later that he thought we were going to like the church, so he might as well go to his class, rather than delay it.

I personally hate trying new things. When I was 11, we moved from NC to SC ,and I had to go to a new Sunday school class for the first time. I remember wearing a long white fancy princess dress to Sunday school, and the girls in my new church just stood gawking at me…that was the last time I ever wore that dress.  But we didn’t make our children wear weird clothes…they can totally choose what they want to wear…Jeff and I don’t care in the least…in fact, Jesse’s Alabama hat is permanently glued backwards on his head.  Jonah (10) and Jake (9) would not even go look at their classroom, much less go into them. They ended up going with us to the service. Julia (who turned 5 that day) was having all kinds of fits. We tried one classroom and then another and gave her the choice about which one she could choose…that seemed to help. We left her and practically ran down the hall so we wouldn’t be seen if she tried to escape.  But Jeremiah (3)…well, that was the kicker. Jeremiah’s door can be seen all the way down the hall, which is a problem when parents are trying to escape from screaming, crying children who can still see them for another 2 minutes while they complete their trek down the hall and out the door. Jeremiah’s classroom door had a gate across it, so I had to lift Jeremiah over the gate with his legs kicking and put him into his class. But as I was halfway down the hall I heard his screeching voice scream out, “You butthole, Moooommmm!” Yes, that’s right. I just continued to walk on without looking back and acknowledging that I was the mother to whom these words were being addressed.  Now, my older boys, when they were little, they didn’t know words like shut up or butthole or various other crude words that kids eventually know exist.  So, needless to say, we are addressing these things… 

When we went to pick up our children from their classrooms, they were really quite fine, as we knew they would be. In fact, they actually enjoyed it.  

I was watching this preacher on TV last night, which I never do. This guy was saying that if I follow any of the commands I’m still subjecting myself to the law. Ok, I have to be honest, I had already thrown out all of them, except two, the one about loving God with all my heart, soul, mind, strength and loving my neighbor as myself.  I really thought those were the ones I was supposed to follow because Jesus said it Himself; however, Jesus said this before He died on the cross and fulfilled the whole law.  This pastor was saying that we’re still under the law if we even think we can do these things, because these are things we cannot possibly accomplish…love God with all my heart, soul, mind, strength, not to mention my neighbor…I really think there’s something to what this guy was saying, although I have to admit it makes me a little uncomfortable, but I think that’s my former legalist self trying to emerge.  This pastor said it’s all about Jesus’ love for me…which reminds me of children coming to Jesus…Jesus loves me this I know/For the Bible tells me so/ Little ones to Him belong/They are weak but He is strong/ Yes, Jesus loves me/Yes, Jesus loves me…..Jesus loves me; I belong to Him; I’m weak, and He’s strong.

So now I’m coming to grips with an even greater freedom than I already thought I had…I’m not obligated to love God and my neighbor? So I just sit back and receive God’s love, no strings attached? Seems way too easy…I’m sure I can come up with something…but why would I want to? This revelation to me last night makes me want to love my Abba even more. It makes me unbelievably grateful that I think I might start jumping up and down.  It makes me want to reach out to my neighbor in love…isn’t that what love does?  We love Him, because He first loved us…

I talked to my friend Anna yesterday, and she has been reading some of my blogs. She called me a hippie, a God-hippie to be exact. I really kind of like that. It seems like the more I fall in love with Jesus, the more raw I become; maybe I’m starting to come into my true self, the one that’s not quite so people-pleasing and sensitive to the wrong kind of things. I’ve had someone else ask me if I was a grace junky; I like that too, but I think God-hippy is more to the point. I don’t want to love God’s grace instead of God Himself.  It’s kind of like being in love with the Word of God instead of the Living Word…that’s what I always take away from people who pressure other people to read the Bible, like that is the only place we can find God. It becomes another form of the law. Don’t get me wrong, I love to read the Bible and do read it; however, Jesus is not just found in those pages…He’s here, He’s all around, He’s in me…So if God-hippie in any way describes a girl who is madly in love with Jesus and doesn’t care what other people think about that, then that works for me…peace…

“Moooom, Juya’s buns are on the table,” Jeremiah (age 3) whining about Julia (age 4 1/2) sitting on the kitchen table.

“Mom, when I get tall like Jonah, can I clean the bathroom?” My response to Julia, “Suurrre.”

“Mom, when I get older, I do NOT want to kiss anybody.” -Julia says as she rolls her eyes

“Juya, you’re so pretty. I gonna marry you.” -Jeremiah said to Julia when he saw her in a new shirt

“Mom, when you stop being a Grandma and PapPap, then you’ll be dead.” -Julia