Love Like Jazz

August 7, 2007

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Sugar is sweet.
And so are you!

What a poem of childhood and love! I would guess that most people in America know this poem by heart. I just read a chapter in a book I am reading during my devotional time. This most recent chapter in Blue Like Jazz was about love. I guess the topic of love and the color blue made this silly poem pop right back into my head!

Love. What does it mean anyway? I heard that there are seven different words in Greek for our one word, love. I guess that is why we have to say things like “I love ice cream!” and “I love you, Sarah!” using the same word! I think that the English language has cheated us in this regard. I “googled” the Greek words for love and found a couple of interesting ones.

The word Philia is brotherly love…hence the city name, Philidelphia. This is the love we feel for our best friend or that person who went an extra mile for us. I love a lot of people with that word. Storge is the love we feel within our family. I love Kenna and Hanna, my daughters in ways I have never loved before. There are less people that I love in this way, mostly because my family and extended family isn’t large like some of yours might be. Eros is that love they so often depict on TV…boyfriend and girlfriend love…husband and wife love. This is the love that so often gets us in trouble. It is also the love we use as a drug to mask our feelings of self-hatred and low self-esteem. We try to get that special someone to love us, no matter what it costs us, hoping for an abundant and overflowing type of love only found in the love of God and through God’s love in others. Let me share a paragraph from Blue like Jazz that struck me. Miller writes,

And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it. I think apart from the idea that I am a sinner and God forgives me, this is the greatest lesson I have ever learned. When you get it, it changes you. My friend Julie from Seattle told me that the main prayer she prays for her husband is that he will e able to receive love. And this is the prayer I pray for all my friends because it is the key to happiness. God’s love will never change us if we don’t accept it.
(Donald Miller in Blue Like Jazz, page 232)

When have I refused to receive love? I know that I have spent a good part of my growing up life rejecting that love from my Creator. I was too unlovable, too ugly, too dumb, too everything to be loved by someone like God. I didn’t love myself. How could God ever love me? That is just our mistake though, isn’t it? We forget that God knows our insides and our outsides. In Psalm 139 it says, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.” We cannot escape that God knows us…all the good and all the bad. Why do we let our imaginations get away with ourselves? Why do we think that what we have done is so bad that God will not love and forgive us?

In 1 John 3:18-20, the author writes, “Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.” Let us not just love ourselves with words, let’s do the hardest thing…receive love from the one who loved us first and loved us best. Let us confess all that we do and not keep that sin in our hearts thinking that God cannot see it. Let us live with the strength of God, knowing that God knows us, the real us, and still loves us deeply! God loves us with Agape love. This love is the most used word in the bible for Christian love. Agape love is unconditional, sacrificial, abundant, and amazing love! We are called to spread that kind of love around! What does this crazy, over-the-top abundant love allow us to do as Christians?

Agape love, over-the-top love, allows us to talk to someone who has hurt our feelings rather than the usual human way of talking badly about the person behind their back. Agape love, over-the-top love, allows us to open our church to the homeless during Interfaith Hospitality Network week. Agape love, over-the-top love, allows us to pray for our enemies. Agape love, over-the-top love, allows us to send our dear children to Poland to spread the gospel to those who may not have heard it or experienced it. Agape love, over-the-top love, allows us to rake pine straw at Hope House when most teenagers would rather be home watching TV. Agape love, over-the-top love, allows us to build a building out back, which will be a place to do ministry long after we are taking our dirt nap. Agape love, over-the-top love, allows us to tithe knowing that money belongs not to us but to God. Agape love, over-the-top love, is some amazing stuff!

If you haven’t experienced that agape, over-the-top love, I invite you to open your heart to God. Being humble enough to receive God’s love and God’s love through others is difficult but worth it! I invite you to let God love you. I invite you to let others love you! We do! You will gain the inner strength only found in God’s love and the love God enables in other people. Be brave and let God in!

I love you! God loves you!

Peace out,
Mary

Gracious and ever loving Lord, I invite you into my heart yet again to love me. Enable me to receive and embrace this love you give to me every day. Let me live like I am loved. Let me love others in your name. Let me be a vessel of that abundant, crazy, over-the-top agape love. In the name of our Love, Jesus, I pray. Amen.

Starbucks and Scripture

OK, I confess. I love Starbucks coffee. I know it is expensive. I know it is trendy. I know it is an emblem of American consumerist culture. Yet, they know coffee and they do it well. It tastes delicious! I know they at least treat their employees well…I even investigated working part time at Starbucks in the recent past simply because they provide health insurance for part time employees. More power to them for that!

One of the things I have found interesting at Starbucks lately is the quotations on the side of the cup. For you who are not privy to Starbucks culture… When you purchase coffee in a paper cup at Starbucks, they have quotes from normal, everyday customers printed on the side in their trademark black and green. The one on my coffee cup today struck me cold.

The Way I See It #247
“Why in moments of crisis do we ask God for strength and help? As cognitive beings, why would we ask something that may well be a figment of our imaginations for guidance? Why not search inside ourselves for the power to overcome? After all, we are strong enough to cause most of the catastrophes we need to endure.”
--Bill Scheel
Starbucks customer from London, Ontario. He describes himself as a ‘modern day nobody.’”

Why do we ask God for strength and help? Is God some cosmic genii who answers to our ever whim? Well, no. Does asking God for help makes us feel better? Well, sometimes. So, does asking God for help do anything?

I turned to the Scriptures for some answers to my questions. Paul writes to the church in Philippi, “I can do everything through him who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:13, NIV). So with God’s strength, I can do anything…OK, good…

Paul tells Timothy, “But the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. And I was delivered from the lion's mouth” (2 Timothy 4:17). God gives strength if you ask for it. God is even with you in the tough times….That is comforting…

Back in the Old Testament, the psalmist writes, “You are awesome, O God, in your sanctuary; the God of Israel gives power and strength to his people. Praise be to God! (Psalm 68:35). The power and strength of God is not just for the super holy or the saint. It is for all people…That is REALLY comforting to me, the sinner…

Paul tells the church at Colossae, “And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light (Colossians 1:10-12). God gives us strength so that we can have endurance and patience and so that we can give thanks because of our inheritance as children of God. Life on earth is difficult. We do need endurance and patience in order to withstand the brokenness of our lives and to resist the temptation of sin…Whew! This is good stuff!

I think that Mr. Scheel has it wrong. God has been present with me in too many places and I have felt the presence of God too many times for me to write God off as a figment of my active imagination. Mr. Scheels is right in that I do know that I am strong. Now that I have had to withstand some storms in my life, I know that I am even stronger than I had originally given myself credit for. Yet, my strength does not come just from my personality or tenacity or even pure dumb luck. It comes in my grounding of faith. I am unafraid of death, because I know whose I am. I am unafraid of life because I know that Jesus walks beside me in all that I do. I am unafraid of change because God is the same today, tomorrow, and forever.

I invite you to ask God for strength in your daily life. Calling on the name of the Holy of Holies when you are about to loose it with your kids or with your boss invites the strength of the Creator of the universe into your life. God is waiting to be invited into that space with you.

Great and merciful God, be with me in the daily difficulties of life. Walk with me at Wal-Mart. Sit with me Starbucks. Follow me at the Ford dealer. Give me strength to deal with all that is on my plate. Give me endurance to withstand all that tugs on me. Give me patience with my friends and my family. Be my strength and my shield. Amen.

Do Over...

There are times of life when you get a do over. Perhaps yours was when you moved in the middle of junior high and got to lose the nickname, Skippy. Perhaps, you had your do over as you headed to college and could shed all those constrictions and assumptions about you from high school. I am in the middle of my latest do over. I have spent the last 4 years at beautiful Duke Divinity School cramming my head full of Christian lingo, doctrine, polity, and biblical knowledge. I am done! I have my diploma, nicely framed I might add!

I have also spent the last four years watching my life crumble around my ears and then fighting to put it back together bit by bit. One of last bricks of this part of my life is about to be put back....I am now a home owner again! I have my own place! It is small but is all mine! What a blessing it will be! We have blackberries growing behind the house. We can put up a fence and get a dog. I get to mow grass again! Woo Hoo!

I am also blessed to be sent to an amazing and wonderful church. They really love Jesus and other people. I cannot wait to see what God has in store for my ministry there! God has led me there, and I am excited! Check out what is up at Salem!

www.salemfnc.org

Four years ago I could not picture being in this spot. I could not have made it to this point without God guiding and protecting me. I could not have made it to this place without people loving and caring for me, making sure I ate, making sure I had some fun occasionally, and praying for and with me! God is good! Thank you!

Peace out,

Mary

Skeletons

I have been blessed to do three years of counseling. I have gone through a lot of pain, sweat, and tears in that time. As a result, I “know what my stuff” is. I now respond to others rather than reacting because I know my story and how it affects me. I have not been afraid to deal with my own stuff with a counselor. In fact, I have been blessed by wading through my stuff. This is my personal image for that process: we all have skeletons in our closets. When we do not deal with the skeletons, they rattle around, are noisy, take up a lot of space, and can hurt us when we bump into them with all the bones they have sticking out. When we do therapy and repent of our broken places to God, accepting the forgiveness God offers; we deal with our skeletons. While the skeletons are still in the closet, they no longer control us. Instead being out where they can hurt us, we have folded them neatly up, and put them away. They are still part of our story, but they are not our whole story nor do they control the story. I have worked to put away my skeletons of negative pastoral identity. I am free of the power my stuff used to have over me. Truly, with God, all things are possible.

Peace out,

Mary