an account of God's grace and love as he blesses and teaches me each and every day

Passport to Heaven

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1 year ago   

I have said many times throughout the last year and half that at some point I’m going to escape from Cornell to explore NYC. Well I guess I get that chance … Just under much different circumstances.

As much as I hoped and prayed that God would soften the hearts of the Continental baggage checkers to let me through to Costa Rica with my passport expiring one day short of 3 months - I needed 3 months to get through- I also hoped that God would give me a day to prepare my heart for Costa Rica, free of rehearsal, free of stress, and with no one to disturb my time of peace …. Strangely I got my latter wish with a little more stressing than I really would have liked.

I am now on the train, praying that if all goes smoothly, I will be on a plane to Costa Rica tonight. If you know me, this is the situation I would be freaking out in … I was too tired to stress out yesterday, but today, having caught up on sleep, I am surprisingly calm.. And this for the first time since I arrived at Cornell a couple days ago…

God’s grace really is something … Even if I try to stress out, God is suppressing that within me… I actually feel as though nothing went wrong in the first place…

Another funny thing, years ago, I read a book called “messy Christianity” and put it away in the suitcase I had brought to China. I tucked it away in a back pocket, and just yesterday I rediscovered it. The first lines say something about the mess we make of our lives even as we seek God. My inner perfectionist seems to always give way my many short-comings and, failure after failure, God’s grace keeps me going …. It’s not that God’s grace makes us into spiritual, put-together Christians; it’s that God’s grace takes our messy humanity and makes of it a messy Spirituality. The reality is that until our “perfecter of faith” returns, our faith will never be perfect, our attempts will end in failure, we will sin… But the beautiful thing is God is there through it all.

So as I sit on this train, 4 am, and looking forward to 10 pm tonight when I arrive in Costa Rica, I just can’t help but think of my “passport to heaven.” The difference is that while I’m running around doing a lot of work and everything can still go wrong before I get my passport to Costa Rica, I have no doubt that much more will go wrong, I will fail, I will fall short before going to heaven, but I have no work to do to get my “passport to heaven” …that work was completed on the cross.

I’m a mess. You’re a mess. Let’s face it and embrace it. God already knows it. Thats what grace is for. :)

My Prayer in My Hunger and Need

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1 year ago    |   Notes: 1

I’ve heard the phrase “good Christian” so many times over the last couple of weeks in describing goals for 2012 that I even found myself using it in prayer … it didn’t really phase me until last night at the CU Winds party when a drunk girl (stranger) started flirting with me and was surprised that I wouldn’t drink or have sex before marriage because of my Christian integrity… apparently that made me a “good Christian.”

So what exactly is a “bad Christian” and a “good Christian”?? 

To the non-Christians I have witnessed to, this distinction is strangely both a deterring and attracting factor in becoming a Christian. I have met non-Christians who say that the Christian life restricts them from being able to what they want to do in life … to them, following Christ is like being his slave (good Christian?) . I have also met non-Christians who see Christ as the free pass to sin because of his grace… to them, following Christ is being set free to sin (bad Christian?). Both are grave misunderstandings of God’s grace. It is not that we are slaves to God or free to sin, it is that we are set free from sin’s bondage by God’s grace such that our actions and decisions reflect the inner transformation of our hearts and minds to the likeness of Christ. 

But that brings me back to the the distinction between a bad and a good Christian. Biblically, I don’t believe this distinction exists; I am either a follower of Christ or I am not. Of course God’s grace covers our sins and makes us blameless before God, but if our minds are not being renewed by the Holy Spirit so that we may become more like Christ by God’s power and grace are we obeying God? Is our outward display of “Christianness” a reflection of this inward transformation or is it just a performance for non-Christians to see a “good Christian”? .. or arguably “worse”, is it a performance for our Christian brothers and sisters so that we may seem “better Christians” or “more spiritually mature” than they are when we are actually spiritually dead? 

Where in the Bible does Jesus tell his disciples to compete for His favor? 

Where in the Bible does God make his commands optional?

Where in the Bible does God use the proud instead of the humble? 

I haven’t read through the entire Bible, but I am almost certain that in all three cases, the answer is ” no where”. The Bible is very clear: By faith alone we are justified, and by Holy Spirit working in us we are continually sanctified. 

So what does this all mean?

Well, first off, I am simply a Christian- imperfect in every way, but in the hands of God, willingly being pruned and molded to become more like Christ and perfect for his purpose for me on the earth. I am being humbled from the place of pride that being told I am a good or a better Christian than ___ has put me. I have resolved to clarify that misunderstanding of God’s grace with each non-Christian that God leads me to.

(Especially this coming 12 days in Costa Rica, surrounded by non-Christians, I know that my pride will inhibit the work that God seeks to do in and through me, especially if it becomes a performance. I will devote each day to God, that his will may be done in and through me, but I will rest assured that nothing I do or say will be counted against me nor be for my benefit. All glory to God.)

^This is my prayer in my hunger and need, my God is the God who provides -Desert Song by Hillsong 

One

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1 year ago   

 “If there be any one point in which the Christian church ought to keep its fervor at a white heat, it is concerning missions. If there be anything about which we cannot tolerate lukewarmness, it is the matter of sending the gospel to a dying world.”
-Charles Spurgeon
I used to think that God gave me a heart for China, for the people of the villages isolated from ever hearing the words “shen” or “ye su ji du” (God and Jesus), for my students who were just beginning to get a glimpse of the joy that I experience and desired to share in Jesus Christ. I used to think this because I can distinctly recall the exact circumstances, hardships, and pain I had endured in order to be comforted by the presence of God for the first time in my life.
All the time people ask me what I mean by “experiencing the presence of God”. No I do not mean I saw God face to face, but nor do I mean to trivialize it to something explainable by our natural world and natural standards. As I became paralyzed with fear of being an ineffective missionary, fear of my Communist spy students who were going to foil all my plans, fear of disappointing my team and God, fear of saying too much…  one fear froze me to the core: the fear that one day I would be living the life of a missionary in China, constantly running, hiding, but trusting in the lord. Fear that I would give up the life that I had worked so hard for in order to risk it for the glory of God.
That night, I came before God with each of the fears that I have named and he reminded me that “perfect love casts out fear” … I was in tears, curled up in a fetal position as I quivered on the floor, maybe on the verge of insanity. I felt like a baby, at least in my faith, immature as can be and unwilling to open myself up to His words of comfort. Suddenly, my body just became tight. Even if I wanted to sprawl out on the floor I couldn’t without enduring great pain… so I just stayed there. Curled up… crying… wondering why the God that supposedly loved me would be allowing all this pain!
I was petrified and stubborn, but in all my anger, I still knew that my God was with me. I cried out to God, my comforter, God, my father, God, my tower of refuge and strength, and maybe for the first time in my life, realized that until this moment my faith was dead. I would read the Bible and pray to my Holy Spirit vending machine in times of need, but I never spent time with God and surely I never trusted God with my life as I had declared years ago.
I look back to this moment, when God freed me from the burden and pain and I long to feel this same comfort again. If you have talked to me any time in this past semester, you have probably heard me saying something along those lines, but things have changed. I used to believe that God wasn’t at work in Thousand Oaks or even at Cornell simply because I was surrounded by wealth, happiness, success, and prospects of a great, worldly, future … in my little bubble of comfort I didn’t need or want God. But ever since returning from China, my life has become wholly dependent on guidance from the Holy Spirit. People have looked at me and told me that I am being crazy, stupid, ridiculous.. you name it, and at some point during the semester, it sank in. I was beginning to revert back to my lukewarm ways of trusting in myself, ignoring the sovereignty of God, and yielding to the advice of the world. Satan was planting many many seeds in my mind and my heart, and that one precious seed that had been planted on that hotel room floor in China was getting choked by the weeds.
As I longed to return to that same dependence on God that I had in China, I realized that God is the same in Cali as he is in China, as he is in Ithaca and God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. His presence never leaves me because He dwells within me and no barrage of Satan’s flaming arrows can penetrate the armor that God has given to protect the seed he has placed in me. That seed God has given me is not a heart for just China, but a heart for the world. He breaks my heart for the poor in Tompkins County, hungry in Guatemala, dying in Costa Rica, thirsty in China, sick in Mozambique and for every person that He will one day call his children. God has given us all a heart for the world. We are stewards of the Gospel and we are united with the mission that God has given us so let us step out in faith, trust in God, and go as one body, with one heart, on one mission, for the glory of one God. 

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1 year ago   

"One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove at the Last Day that prayerlessness was not from lack of time.” — John Piper"

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