Dishes, Names, and Burning Bushes

As I was standing in front of a mountain of dishes tonight, the kitchen lit by a dim florescent bulb, I realized that I had been letting my blog become sadly neglected.  I think that my dog did too, based on the dejected way that she was looking up at me from her bed next to the sink, but then again, that could be because she has a love for maple syrup and eggs.  She has the best I'm-starving-pitiful looks.  And I usually fall for them.

But back to the subject, as I stood there listening to Cat Steven's Greatest Hits and sinking my hands into the dirty dishwater, I wondered what I should write for my next blog post.  At one time (actually, not too long ago), I had it all figured out—I actually came up with ideas of what to write about, and then I sat down and wrote them, but that hasn't been happening lately.  So while I brainstormed, I came across a totally unrelated thought: people seem to get my name wrong when I call them on the phone or introduce myself for the first time.  Grace doesn’t seem that hard to pronounce to me, but I've been called everything from Stacy to Trace—I must have bad pronunciation.  Then I wondered if I could use that in a blog post, you know, stem off of the "getting my name wrong" thing and do something cool with it.  I started thinking of passages in the Bible that might somewhat sort of correspond with that topic.  Can you come up with any?  Most likely not... but I remembered a passage that definitely had to do with names: Moses being called by God.
In Exodus 3-4, God (in the form of a burning bush) and Moses have a very serious conversation.  God's obviously chosen Moses to do His work here on earth, to take the people of Israel out of the land of the Egyptians and to the Promised Land, but Moses isn't so sure.  After a number of questions and excuses—Moses goes from wondering out loud if the people will even believe him to how horrible of a speaker he was—Moses finally asks the One Question that he had been dying to ask.  I can imagine how his knees were knocking as he asked it:

"But Moses said, 'Pardon your servant, Lord.  Please send someone else.'" (Exodus 4:13)

God was angry.  In fact, the passage states that his "anger burned against Moses."  Now I don't know about you, but I don't want the anger of the Lord of everything burning against me.  Moses was probably scared to death and didn't know what to do next.  He was upset, because the Lord had found the "wrong person" for the job.  Not that the Lord ever makes mistakes, Moses most likely reasoned that He just confused the name "Moses" with someone else's, someone braver, better, a public speaker and rabble-rouser.  But no. 
God had chosen Moses for a Big Purpose—to show that the smallest, most incompetent among us can become great and accomplish his dreams.  Although I don't know if Moses' dream at that time was leading thousands of people out of a city and into the desert with a king and his army trailing behind.  But one day, God knew that Moses would come to love the people that he lived for.  And the Lord wasn't about to let Moses miss that opportunity to love them.

Even though that's completely off-topic from people getting my name wrong, I think it's an important lesson to learn—God gives us seemingly impossible, unfathomable, crazy, unacceptable, strange tasks because He wants the best for us.  So the next time you meet up with a burning bush... but seriously.  When He calls, listen.  Don't assume that He's mixed up His names.

Life: in the Abnormal

Is caring about the needy abnormal?

No, seriously.  Is caring for the people who need us abnormal, in this modern, fast-paced world that we've all been pushed into—though, admittedly, at our own will.  Has being concerned for other people been put so low on our list that we prefer not to be bothered by them?  When I bring up this subject, I get the "usual"—homeless people are simply looking for free handouts, for money to buy their drugs, or that slaves aren't the norm for our society, that there simply can't be enough of them to make any real difference.  But let me assure you, there are enough needy people—homeless, widows, orphans, impoverished, that it makes a difference, to do even one act of kindness.  When you really open your eyes to the world's needs, you don't merely see people walking their dog down the street, or a group of teenagers hanging out in the mall.  You see needy people, destitute people, mourning people, hurting people... people who need the message of hope and love and true life that you own.  So caring for the needy in our society seems to be pretty strange, but caring for the un-needy?  Even stranger! 

So what do we do about our lack of caring, our lack of true, untainted love?  We drive carelessly past a homeless man on the street, and within minutes forget about him altogether—if we really saw him at all.  We get magazines about "giving a gift that can change a life," and instead of checking out the website and spending a few of our preciously wasted minutes looking at how to buy a cow for a family in Africa, the magazine ends up in the trash can.  Yes, we changed a life.  We added to the huge feeling of hopelessness that some kid who's dying of hunger is facing.  It's not exactly the type of change we want to make, is it?

And yet, this is the "season of giving."  If not now, why not never?  Look around you right now.  More than likely, you are surrounded by many material things, good things, comfortable things.  Things that may have cost you a lot of money, but you really don't need them to survive.  And yet, with all this... this stuff, we can't save the life of an impoverished child.  We can't support a ministry that's trying to bring kids out of slavery.  We can't even give a couple dollars and five minutes to get a burger for the guy standing on the corner, holding a cardboard sign.  So I ask again:

Is caring about the needy abnormal?

Of Chaos and Peace

Now and then I come to a point when I'm so busy that I don't get time to write for my blog, let alone the half dozen books I'm working on, my journal, and the many people I write letters to.  I love to write.  It's that simple.  But this is the first time this week that I've had a chance to sit down and write up a post that really reflects what I've been thinking lately. 

We started school this week, tackling the Geometry, Writing, and Spanish books like they're the worst challenge we'll ever face.  As I sit here, with a cup of green tea in front of me and the impending notion that I really need to work on my Spanish course, I'm beginning to find an old truth, and make it into a new one. 

The truth is this simple: everything will be done in its proper time.  Life will go on whether I do my Spanish lesson today or get in two tomorrow instead.  And sometimes other things are more important than a Spanish lesson or math homework.  This truth has been widely spread since the book of Ecclesiastes was written, but the modern world seems to have forgotten it in the meaningless busyness and bustle of our daily schedules. 

Moving back to a big city, I've noticed once again the hectic lifestyle modern American people live.  We need to go, go, go, and do, do, do.  Nothing can satisfy our desires better than to see the products of our efforts.  We need to continuously surpass each other in our accomplishments, and put ourselves as high up in the "caste system" as we can before we die.  But in reality, that's not what life's about. 

Life is about living.  To the best of your ability.  Not to become the most influential American of all times, or a well-known and famous inventor, or the millionaire of the century.  Our job here on earth is to live up to God's standards—to use our time wisely.  Not to build ourselves up, but to encourage and strengthen others in the faith.  And if the Spanish book waits a day in order to fulfill that job, the world is not going to end.

So many times we get caught up in the wiles of the world, sure that we need to "go above and beyond" and become the "top man," when all that we really need to do is live our lives to the fullest extent that God wants us to live our lives to.  To become the best is the world's way, and we are called to be a light to the world, not to become part of it.  This doesn't mean that you need to stop working hard, or quit trying to become good at something.  It just means that your top priority should not be to "look good" in the world's eyes.  Being the best and brightest, the top in your particular field, isn't always the adventure that the Lord is choosing to send you on.  Sometimes we simply need to live slowly, quietly, so we can impart peace in the chaos of this world. 

And that's the truth I relearned today.

Hate and Humility, part 1

I'm going to be completely honest with you for a few minutes.

I hate myself.

Not just in a cliché, "it's the Christian thing to do" type of way, but in the actual, "I'm a despicable person" type of way.  I lie.  I cheat.  I steal.  I idolize.  I do so many "wrong things," at times I think I'm beginning to compose a dictionary of antonym actions for the Ten Commandments.  It's not like I try to do wrong things; I don't awake in the morning, sit straight up in bed, and suddenly yell, "I want to be bad today!"  No, sin is an action that's much quieter, stealthily creeping up on you when you least expect it.  I was reading in Romans the other day, and stumbled upon a set of verses (chapter 7:14-25) that describe what I'm talking about to a T. 

"We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.  I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.  "

Paul seems to be going through the same phase I am here; he's unspiritual, a slave to sin.  He doesn't understand why he sins, and doesn't necessarily want to sin, but it happens anyway.  This next passage makes a bit more sense, and helped me to understand how this "living in sin but not knowing it" thing came to be.

"And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature.   For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.   For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it."

That passage was a bit longer, but I want you to read it anyway, and slowly.  It makes sense after reading that passage why I do sin when I don't want to.  It's not me sinning.  It's my sinful nature.  Now, we can't give up that easily though—we can't just say, "oh, it's my sinful nature, not me doing the sin, so it's not my problem."  We need to battle the sin.  As a servant of the Most High, I don't want to botch my job and become a servant of my sinful nature (by letting it do whatever it wants) instead of God.  But how do I do that?  Paul is asking himself the same question here in this next passage:

"So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?"

Continued in part 2.

Martial Arts, Trees...and our Destiny

Today is dreary.  And rainy.  And cloudy.  And cold.  All in all, it's a perfectly lifeless sort of day—one of those days when you just want to curl up with a good book and a couple of warm, freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies.  But instead, I went to martial arts for four and a half hours this morning, cleaned my room, walked the dog in the cold and cloudy and rainy and dreary world outside our nice warm house, and now I'm thawing frozen chicken in a bowl of warm water in the sink and trying to write a satisfying blog post.  It would help if I could define the troublesome word "satisfying."  I think it's sitting on the couch, with a good book and a couple of warm, freshly-baked... oh, never mind.

I did get a pretty neat look at our lives (as in, the meaning and purpose behind them) today, though.  Mr. Hite, our martial arts instructor, talked about something really neat in class today.  He's a Christian, and he often rolls a Bible study into lesson time while we're all standing there sweating.  I think that there's something about the hard work and Bible lectures going hand in hand that helps us remember them both better, and I know that I'll remember this one for a long time.  Mr. Hite was telling us about how we need to go at our forms with passion, since we know how to do them, and that we need to think of the end of our forms when we're doing the beginning, because we need to set the mindset that we will end up at that ending, even if it's hard to accomplish.  Then he went on to compare it to... can you guess?

A tree!  (Of course...what else would you compare a martial arts form to??)  He explained that a certain tree was in God's plan at the very beginning of its life—when it was in the seed, and even before it was in the seed.  He said that God saw the tree at its full potential, all grown up, and then took that image and squished it up smaller and smaller until it was just a seed.  Even though the seed didn't look much like the tree God envisioned it to be, He knew what He wanted the tree to look like in the end, and held the image in His mind, shaping the tree to become a masterpiece.

Then Mr. Hite compared us to the tree.  He said that God did the very same thing with us.  God thought us into the person He wanted us to be, and then squished and squeezed us until we were really little and put us inside our mothers.  Then he said that God has an image for us, too, just like the tree.  He wants to see the destiny He made for us be fulfilled.  The only catch is that it doesn't happen unless we let Him shape us into the image He wants us to be.  The problem lies in the fact that we don't want to be shaped into that image—that it takes time, and learning the hard way, and being passionate about our lives, and according to Mr. Hite, that's why we're born screaming!

Who knows, maybe it's true!

And that's my satisfying blog post for the day.  Now I'm going to go make chocolate chip cookies.