Tag Archives: love

let me tell you

 

I remember the loss of my honor. In a desperate attempt to capture love, I surrendered something I could never get back. It didn’t take long to figure out that love had nothing to do with it. But I was just a teen-aged girl who had never been told that true love waits. It doesn’t use empty words to cajole and convince. It doesn’t prey on insecurities. It doesn’t seek its’ own pleasure at your expense. It waits. It honors.

In the years that followed, I discovered love that became angry when mixed with alcohol, love that left bruises both inside and out. I found love that held a magnifying glass over my every flaw and failure.

No one told me that in all my searching for love, I had found all that it is not.

And now I know but maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re still out there turning over every rock looking for the thing that will fill the empty space. Let me be the one who tells you. You are not pursuing love.

Love is pursuing you.

 

Because Jesus is love and fills the empty space all up and doesn’t promise what He never intends to give and He will never take away your honor.

Love sacrificed Himself for you so let me be the one who tells you that you will never be the sacrifice for His own pleasure. 

No matter what you feel, or what they’ve told you, the Love that is pursuing you is not mad at you. You don’t have to look away and that  isn’t eggshells under your feet, it’s holy ground because He is near, not angry.

And I know that you know all your failing and all your sins and let me be the one who tells you — you don’t need to get better and get it right. You need Him. Because Love covers it all in His own blood and chooses not to remember what you can’t seem to forget. 

isaiah 43

So let me be the one who tells you. Your soul wants love because your soul wants Jesus. And when you stop chasing after what love is not, you will find the Love that is pursuing you.

He will not dishonor you

He is not self-seeking

He is not easily angered

He keeps no record of wrong

 

“For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” Luke 19:10
“…I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore, I have continued to extend faithful love to you.” Jeremiah 31:3
“And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him.” 1John 4:16

 

 

every cut is the deepest

1Corinthians 13:4

 

“to be patient in bearing the offenses and injuries of others; to be mild and slow in avenging; to be long-suffering, slow to anger, slow to punish.” (Strongs)

musical notesI wanna know what love is
I want you to show me*

Lyrics to a song from my younger years. Lyrics that describe my younger years and by younger I mean all my years.

And while I was searching in all the wrong places and all the wrong people, it was here all along. Ancient words that tell me that true love is not of this world. It is other than. More than. Better than.

“God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him.” (1John 4:16)

I wish I had known. Maybe if I had known that God is the very thing I spent so much of my time and dignity trying to find, I wouldn’t have spent so much. If I had known, things would have been different.

But now I know and it is different. So very. But not enough. It is not enough, because I have been acting  like Jesus, or at least trying —

to be patient in bearing the offenses and injuries of others; to be mild and slow in avenging; to be long-suffering, slow to anger, slow to punish.

And acting like Jesus exhausts me because it’s me. Because my strength, patience, and kindness are all feeble and not enough to be what love is. Acting like Jesus requires a lot of me.

Being like Jesus requires heart surgery.

And you know, every cut is always the deepest. God makes no superficial cuts. Deep is what it takes to remove a heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh. Deep is where He finds the bitterness, not the bearing, of offenses and injuries, the desire to get even and the flashes of anger we think we’re hiding as we passively punish those around us with our silence or thinly veiled words. The word of God is sharp and when it cuts it exposes the truth. I am not love.

Love was wounded for my transgressions. Love made a way for me to draw near to God, not just to bask in His presence, but to be transformed in it.

“For those He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son…” Romans 8:29

My destiny was never to act like Jesus, but to be like Jesus.

Lord, Your cut is deep, but keep cutting. I will continue to act like Jesus, mostly. Because acting like Him is better than not acting like Him. But I will lay here, under Your word…

until what has performed for You has become conformed to You.

 

*Foreigner – I Want to Know What Love Is. For all those my age, good luck getting it out of your head today. And you’re welcome.

pieces

One song played in my house all weekend. It’s called “Pieces”, sang by Steffany Gretzinger at IHOP’s One Thing 2015. These words got down deep in my soul…

“Your love’s not fractured, it’s not a troubled mind

It isn’t anxious, it’s not the restless kind

Your love’s not passive, it’s never disengaged

It’s always present, it hangs on every word we say”…

For two days this song thumped it’s beat on my heart until my heart began to respond. At first, it was just background music while I did other things, but before long…I couldn’t do other things and I couldn’t stop thinking about Him.

About this Love that I had gone back to earning. As if.Continue reading “pieces”

the way love moves

Southern Ocean

Love is an ocean of a word. Big and wide and deep and too much to look at all at once and you can’t see its’ boundaries from standing in one place. Oceans and love are both hard to describe from the shoreline.

I will not plummet its’ depths in one lifetime, but I can stand in the waves and watch the way it moved on the earth that time when Love came down.

 

He replied, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?”
Then He got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm. “ (Matthew 8:24-26)

 It was a furious storm, but even though fear was great and faith was small, the storm was calmed.  Love does not demand more faith than fear before He steps into my storm. I like that Love moves that way. I need Him to move like that for me because fear and faith take turns being king of the hill in my heart.

{I need to know that Love is more furious than the storm}

“While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with Him and His disciples, for there were many who followed Him.” (Mark 2:15)

 Love didn’t tiptoe through dark places. He didn’t go out of His way to go around the worst part of town. Jesus ate dinner on the other side of the tracks. He walked through every place like He had the authority to be there because He did. He went across the lake to confront a legion of demons and had dinner with the sinner people the same way He went to the synagogue to preach. In Church or out, Love moved the same way and refused to avoid the worst of us.

sinners gathered

{When the sinners and the outcasts are gathered, there’s a good chance Love is their dinner guest. Try not to be offended. That’s just the way Love moves.}

 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one.  Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41-42)
 

To her credit, she wanted to serve Jesus and maybe she wanted everything to be “just so”. He had come and there were preparations to be made and work to be done. No time for listening. Martha’s home had become her stage and she was distracted by her need to perform well.

Mary chose and no matter how much the performer complained, what Mary had chosen would not be taken from her. The place at His feet was hers because she chose the sound of His voice over her own performance.

{When Love walks in the room, there is a place at His feet that is so much better than the stage of our performance.}

 

crucified hand

“Carrying His own cross, He went out to the place of the Skull (…Golgotha). There they crucified Him…” (John 19:17-18)

 This is how love moved.

 {Love is an ocean big and wide and deep and too much to look at all at once. But I am moved by the waves.}

i have to stop drinking

Mr.rogers-300x295It was an off-handed comment, really. She and I were discussing God things, and “love your neighbor” came up. Without thinking I added “as yourself” and I saw a look pass across her face and I knew, so I said it. Looking into her eyes, I said: “you haven’t loved yourself, have you?”. And we both began to cry. Since then I can’t stop thinking about it, those words Jesus said… “love your neighbor as yourself“.

agapaō

“to welcome, to entertain, to be fond of, to love dearly”

Because what was true for the woman across from me, is true of me. Neither of us has loved ourselves well…I was just better at hiding it.

But we both live in a world that drinks down self-loathing that goes deep into hidden places.

So she and I are not alone but it is my story here on this page and I tell it in the hopes that we can all stop drinking what is killing us. darkness-flees-from-light Because God doesn’t let things hide forever, you know. He is light and those hidden things can run but, well, you know the rest.  And when what is hidden is hit by light it can take our breath away with this realization…

If I loved my neighbor as I love myself, I would find their every flaw and never let them forget them. I would remind them of them every. single. day.

I would not be kind… to their bodies or their emotions. I would call them names. Not truth names, but lie names. Instead of “beloved, chosen and forgiven”, I would call them “unworthy, messed up, and incapable of going one stinking day without stepping in sin.”

I would make them work harder and harder to try to get it right, and every day I would judge them for getting it wrong.

I would berate them for not being better. I would compare them to others, and they would always come up short. And sometimes I would wish they were someone else.

But now that light has shot into deep places, what was hidden in the  dark squirms in discomfort. I can no longer be comfortable telling someone else they are worth loving if I cannot say it to me. 

line-in-the-sand11

And right there God draws His bottom line in my sand of self-hatred and unworthy thinking. And if I am to step across the line, I must be willing to speak truth to me before I can speak it to you.

I am worth loving because God loves me and He does no unworthy thing.

He is good to me. He is kind to me. He is oh so merciful to me, and gives grace in abundance. He does not finger point but lovingly corrects me. He delights in me, sings over me and surrounds me with Himself. I was forgiven, I am forgiven, I will be forgiven because the blood of Christ leaves a stain sin cannot wipe away. I am called to imitate my gloriously good Father, and live a life of love and that means loving and not hating me. It means calling myself names that are true and not lies, treating me kindly both body and  soul, giving me grace when I fail, taking His correction and refusing my condemnation. It means looking past all that I am not and seeing ahead to all that He has destined me to be. self hate

It means I have to stop drinking what is killing me.      

beautiful encounter

“Will you give me a drink?”

A tired, thirsty Savior came to a well to encounter a tired, thirsty outcast of a woman.

I find it to be beautiful.

Hands_through_waterMy eyes take in the beauty of Jesus breaking through the barriers to come for her, and my heart is overwhelmed by the sacred conversation between a woman and God.

I am captivated by His words that reveal what He is most after here at the well.

“If you knew the generosity of God and who I am, you would be asking me for a drink, and I would give you fresh, living water.” 

If you knew who I am.

This is what He’s after. This was no chance meeting on a hot day. This was Jesus, coming to a thirsty woman to offer her the only thing that would quench her thirst. Himself. Not just a sip. Not just a drink of Him on a hard day. His offer is a never-ending drink of God. A drink that would get into her so abundantly it would flow out of her.

Then He revealed what He knew of her. And it is right here that I find a deep beauty in this encounter. He wasn’t just uncovering her sin.

He knew her.

“Back in the village she told the people, “Come see a man who knew all about the things I did, who knows me inside and out.”

Then I hear what His disciples dared not speak out loud.

“Just then His disciples came back. They were shocked. They couldn’t believe He was talking with that kind of a woman. No one said what they were all thinking, but their faces showed it.”

do-not-cross-lineSo like us. Thinking His love should not cross our boundary lines drawn by hatred and religious bigotry.

They had their reasons for thinking that surely His love would not extend to someone they despised.

And we have ours.

I am struck by the beauty of a love that disregards the opinions of men.

A love that refuses to obey our rules.

The woman leaves and this beautiful story comes to a close. Almost.

“I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.”

They saw a Samaritan woman, and would not have looked her way, let alone spoken with her.

He saw a woman who was thirsty.  He saw a harvest.

John 4:1-38 – from The Message

she did what she could

I cannot leave the gospel. My fingers flip pages and my eyes scan words and stories and always I am drawn back. I am searching for the heart of the One I love and He keeps bringing me back to the beginning. This is my journey. My story. Good news hammering against the rocks.

“Leave her alone,” said Jesus, and the hammer came down, making my breath catch.

“While He was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on His head.

Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly.

“Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me.  She did what she could.“ (Mark 14:3-8)

She did what she could. And against the harshness of men, He rose up protective.

This is for you. For me. For all the ones who do what they can. For the ones who hear the harshness of

not enough

too much

you should have

you shouldn’t have

The ones who long to bring what they have and just pour it out over Him because we can do nothing else.

For those of us who will never feed five thousand, but spend the last five minutes of our weary day feeding on Him.

For those who will never lead thousands into the Kingdom, but will live face to the ground praying for the one.

For all the ones who will never do great and mighty things, but who choose to put one foot in front of the other to follow Him in a harsh world.

Broken hearts broken open, poured out

Broken prayers flowing like perfume

Fleeting, weary moments given to Him

Songs we refuse to let fear silence

He will protect it all. He will honor every bit of it.

This is the Heart I found today.