Making a House a Home

It has been well over a year since I’ve last written. A little too obvious since the date is proudly stamped beneath the title of this post. To be honest, I don’t know what has kept me from writing sooner or has pushed me to write now. A lot of life change has happened in the past few months that has tested the foundation that my house is built on. At times it feels like an earthquake has passed through and I keep searching for the cracks that I know must have formed. It can’t be that my foundation is that solid, can it?  Through the earthquake and the storm, my house is still standing.

I’ve learned that a house is not a home unless you let love in. It is simply four walls that holds your stuff. You can live in your house, with your stuff and it will keep you safe. You can hang a few good memories on your wall and play whatever you want on the TV. The fridge is stocked with the foods you like and everything is kept safe by that dead bolt that only you have a key to. Sure you can look out the peephole when someone knocks and let them in for a little while or you can go to someone else’s house for a visit, but at the end of the night, it’s just you in your safe house. But a home is messy.

When you let your house become a home, others come inside.  You allow the walls to be a shelter for other people and not just yourself. Suddenly, it’s not just your stuff, and what you like in the fridge, but you start sharing your space with the people you allow inside. Sometimes you give a key out and allow another person full access to your home. Sometimes they come over when you’d rather be alone or they don’t clean up their mess. But there’s a warmth inside, not just because the thermostat is set to 70 degrees, but because there is life in your house. When you allow others into your house, you let love in.

It hasn’t been easy to be a homeowner. There are times my guests leave a big mess and break a few things, but there’s nothing like when a friend comes to stay. When someone comes in a leaves more than they’ve taken or offers an invitation for you to come into their house.

Have you simply been a houseguest or are you a homeowner? What’s stopping you?

Revelation 3:20 – Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.

Healing In The Remains

I’m in the healing business.  As a nurse practitioner my job description includes stomping out diseases and saving lives. Although I’m somewhat new to my career, I’ve already started to become jaded.  I see patients not follow advised medical regimens and fall victim to their own devices and then I’ve seen healthy patients battle cancer only to succumb to disease. Getting better is something that we so often take for granted.

This past month I’ve felt my heart be challenged about my concept of healing; I’ve seen it and felt it going deeper than the simple physical manifestations of getting a cut and slapping a band-aid on it. My heart is scarred with old battle wounds, some of which have never completely healed, but I’ve learned to live with them and limp along. These scars have become a part of who I am and I’ve grown accustom to the pain that comes along with it, hardly noticing anymore. Recently, God has been showing me how He heals, how perfectly and seamlessly he can mend a heart and how healing from within can be more important than any physical healing.

I’m in a relationship. This may not seem like big news, but the fact is I tend to choke on the words as I write them, so me telling such a public forum is a big step for me. However, I do believe that God is using this relationship and this man to heal my heart of so many past hurts. I have a person who has prayed for me, been patient and kind, put me first and shown care for me unconditionally. I’ve felt old bandages fall away and a beautiful healing from these Godly actions. I’ve felt my parts of myself that I thought were dead breathe new life and I’m starting to stride again. I know that God has had a part in this healing process and it’s finally because I’ve let Him.

It causes me to think, how am I being a healer in other peoples’ lives? Instead of an antibiotic, what do they really need?

What do you need? How can you bring healing to someone today?

Like a Cockroach

I remember it being said that even if the world undergoes a nuclear war, cockroaches would still survive, unchanged. Right now, I feel like a cockroach.

It’s a week out from the Dominican Republic missions trip, I just came back from a funeral of a very untimely death, my dad should be pulling into the driveway any second to spend the next week and half in my house and my mom is flying in on Wednesday to do the same and I graduate in a week, finally done with school for all time and heading back in the real world. It’s like this hurricane of activity around me, but I’m just a happy little cockroach not being swayed by any of it.

There are some things that I want to have a profound effect on me and to cut me deep through my shell. I want the trip to the Dominican to have impacted me in such a way that I will not put God in a tiny box any more or deny His power or desire to care for His children. I want to grieve with my friend over the loss of his mother and allow his pain to touch my heart. I want the accomplishment of finishing graduate school to mean something and to realize that the past two years have shaped my future.

Do you ever feel as though you’re a cockroach? Or that things should be affecting you more than they are?

The Orchestrator

I’ve taken a hot shower and bath, have done two loads of laundry, and slept in my air conditioned room on a queen sized bed and I woke up this morning missing the sweat and street noises which were my usual morning greetings for the past week.

It will take a while to fully process everything that I experienced in the Dominican, however, the one thing that I saw over and over again was how God intricately orchestrates everything. Like a master conductor at the symphony who takes the various instruments and uses them to weave their notes and tones in and out of each other to create something beautiful, God took people and used their strengths, weaknesses and experiences and knit them to create something magnificent.

From the stories of how people came to be on the trip, to how this trip was shaping them, every account seemed masterfully planned. Like a delicate melody there were stories of children from years past showing up and encouraging the hearts of those who remembered them and instances of right time-right place when something would happen and someone else would just happen to be prepared to help or have a solution.

Before this trip I was struggling with God over His divine power and why He didn’t use it more. If He did have all power, why didn’t he heal? Why didn’t he stop things from happening?  I felt like I had castrated God. This trip has afforded me the opportunity to strip away all my distractions from seeing God work. I had become jaded and deaf to that still small voice. All week small medical events would happen from headaches and scrapes to bumped heads and cracked elbows. It seemed I was always around to help out and offer something and at times it even seemed like a divine appointment that I was there. However Sunday night there was a little girl at church who’s knee was swollen, she could hardly walk and all I could offer was an ice pack. I knew that this kind of injury would take time, a lot of icing and Advil, but she had fear in her eyes because the pain was so great. I knew that she would not get any medical care other than what I could offer her during that church service, so I prayed. I believed that God would heal her knee and God impacted on my heart why can I believe for her, but not for me or for so many others. She left, knee still swollen and I still prayed and believed. Twenty minutes later she came back. I noticed that some swelling had gone down and when she sat next to me she was able to bend her leg for the first time since I saw her. It wasn’t completely healed, but I knew that it would be.

Sometimes the conductor doesn’t seem to be doing much, flinging his tiny wand at a mass of instruments, but without him there guiding each person along the music it would sound like a trainwreck. Just like the conductor, sometimes God doesn’t seem to be doing anything, but He is delicately guiding us in and out of the arrangement, letting us know when to blend our music together to create the perfect melody.

You can read more people’s account of this trip at the Cross Point Missions Blog.

The Illegal Post

Technically, I’m not supposed to be writing this….I’m supposed to be unplugged.

However, I just took a 3 hour test on-line and need some time before heading off to siesta. It’s about midnight here in the Dominican and everyone is in bed, as far as I know.

Upon arriving here, I was taken in by the lush, green mountains and vibrant landscape. Then a closer look revealed garbage lined streets and buildings that would never pass a building inspection in the U.S.

The past three days, we have been working at the church site that Cross Point bought a few years ago and has been a work in progress ever since. I’ve come to know a group of people, who’s mix of personalities blend together creating an interesting vibe, who are coming together to create something beautiful.

Something as simple as moving a pile of dirt can teach this hard heart a lesson. One person could move that dirt, bucket by bucket, up the steps, one by one, however when we called for a line something incredible happened. Person to person, hand to hand, we moved a pile of dirt. Relying on the person before us to get the bucket to us and depending on the person after us to take it off our hands. How many times in my life have I tried to move whole piles of dirt by myself thinking that I can do it on my own and I didn’t need anyone? When I admit that I can’t do it on my own and allow others around me to come aside me, so much more can be done.
Matthew 18:20 says “When two or three come together in my name, there I am with them.” What happened today when there was over 20 of us gathered together? I’m sure more than my small mind can comprehend.

You can follow the team at the Cross Point Mission website.

T Minus Something Hours

The question of the day has been: Are you ready?

And the answer is admittedly, No! I am not ready.

It is 2:38pm on Monday afternoon and I am getting picked up at 4:15am tomorrow to go to the airport. I am not packed. Not at all. I don’t even know if I have enough clothes. Between then and now I have to write a SOAP note for school, a 10 page paper, post on two discussion boards and figure out how I’m supposed to take my 3 hour exam while I’m in the Dominican. If I haven’t mentioned it before, I’m getting my Master’s in Nursing from Vanderbilt and I graduate in 20 days. It’s not that I’ve procrastinated on getting this stuff done, it’s that I’ve had so much to do before I could even get to it.

Is my heart ready for this trip? I don’t know.

This has been a journey to come on this trip. There have been some obstacles that made me want to turn and run.  It’s obviously not the best timing, but when is the best time to leave everything for a week and run off to serve only God’s interests? I don’t even know what I have to give. Who am I to offer anything? Why is God even bringing me here?

Yesterday in church my pastor, Pete, spoke about perserverance and walking even though you don’t know where you’re heading and what’s the ending. Trusting that God’s plan is greater than yours and that He will not lead you astray. Sometimes I have a hard time trusting that God will give me a good ending to my story. At the end of church Pete asked that we believe that God will be our healer and bring redemption.

I’m learning that God knows my hurts and places that need healing more often than I do. I did my best to trust in that moment. He sent healing the form of a friend who, unprompted, asked if he could pray for me and prayed about this upcoming trip. It showed me that God did have a plan for me going and that I could trust Him to work through the details of my journey.

So, is my heart ready?  God’s working on it…

A Lack of Expectations

Four days from now I’ll be in the Dominican Republic. I’ll be joining my church, Cross Point Community, in assisting a Haitian pastor build a church and feeding center with G.O. ministries.

I haven’t been on a foreign missions trip in 11 years, when I had just graduated from high school, and it was also the last time I had been out of the country. Even though this experience isn’t completely new to me, it’s been so long and I’ve changed so much I feel as though I should have a flood of thoughts and emotions about the trip, but I don’t. I’m experiencing a complete lack of expectations.

I want to see God do great things on this trip and I want to be changed.

Primero

Like a lot of people, I used to play a part.  Frightened to let anyone really know me, I’d become whatever you thought I was or wanted me to be….The tough one, the strong one, the scandelous one, the nice one, the quiet one, the funny one……But for a long part of my life I was covering up who I really was; so well at times, I forgot who that person was altogether.  I was good at becoming who you wanted me to be.  It’s not that I was a completely different person than how I acted, but I just hid parts of myself for survival, I’m still all of those things in some degree (maybe not the scandelous one anymore), but none of them define me.
So who am I now?  I’m doing and being what is important to me.  I am a youth leader.  I go to church on Sunday.  There’s a lot of things that I used to do that I don’t do anymore.  This doesn’t make me any better than anyone else, but this Christian that I’ve become and that I continue to become every day is the person I am now.  I find purpose in working with teenagers and I’ve found acceptance in a God that I rejected and hated for so long.  I came back to the faith that I had as a teenager and the passion for this life that I tried to shed for years. 
This leaves me trying to reconcile who I was for so long with who I am now.  I’m still not perfect; I still make mistakes.  So I’m nervous that these past indiscretions will cloud your perception of me now and make whatever I say worthless to you.  In many ways I’m still the same person I’ve always been, but my priorities have been turned around.
There’s this part in the Bible in a book called Lamentations, chapter 3 (this version of the Bible is called the Message) that says,

“GOD’s loyal love couldn’t have run out, his merciful love couldn’t have dried up. They’re created new every morning. How great your faithfulness! I’m sticking with GOD (I say it over and over).  He’s all I’ve got left.”

What this is saying is that no matter how much I mess up, no matter how many times I turn my back on God, no matter how many times I do the same thing wrong; God will still forgive me.  When no one else sticks around, He will still love me.  He will forgive AND forget.  To me, that’s so amazing and it’s what I choose to believe.  Since I’ve decided to go down this path, I have not regretted it.  This has been one choice that I haven’t had to second guess or apologize for. 
So, from now on I will not be scared to share my heart.  I will not be frightened to show who I am.  I will stand firm in the knowledge that I am found in Jesus.  So call me what you want; I know who I am.