I Second the Motion

“When you are determined in going a certain direction, it is quite possible

that God would step aside and second your motion.”

--Ravi Zacharias

I have never in my life cried over an election season or an actual election. Until 2016. I have done a lot of thinking as to why I have felt so strongly about this particular one. Political policies aside, I didn’t have, as many others did, a strong affinity for Mrs. Clinton. I will be honest and admit that I did have a very strong aversion to Mr. Trump, mainly because of the horrific and vile things that came out of his own mouth. I actually do not completely adhere politically with one party or the other. But, although I have deep concern, I am not (as I have seen many Republican friends of mine so beautifully say on social media) “butt hurt” that Mr. Trump won.

You know what has bothered me the very most about this election?

Christians.

Yes, I am a Christian. And I know that all other Christians are my brothers and sisters in Christ, having been adopted into the same spiritual family. I also know, logically, that even in a flesh-and-blood family everyone doesn’t see eye-to-eye on everything, 100% of the time. Disagreement and debate are healthy, a breeding ground for growth and deeper understanding of one another. Right?

Here’s the rub for me. I am okay if we disagree on policies that are best for our civic lives. We are going to be alright if we can’t come to a consensus on what should happen fiscally or with small businesses or the problem of healthcare costs.

But if we aren’t unified when it comes to who we are as followers of Christ and children of God?

We have a problem.

And THAT very thing is what tears at my heart and grieves me.

I learned a little song in church when I was young, and it went like this:

“Beloved, let us love one another (love one ano-o-ther), for love is of God, and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not (clap-clap-clap), knoweth not God, for God is love (God is love). Beloved, let us love one another, First John four seven-and-eight!”

Let us love one another.

God is love.

Later in the same chapter, the apostle John says, “We love because HE first loved US. If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

Ouch. If we say one thing and then do another, we are liars.

Think this through with me.

IF God is love (and I think we would all say that He is)…

And IF His Spirit is alive within us as believers (which we agree upon)…

Then shouldn’t the world be able to see God in us because of the lavish, indiscriminate love we pour out onto others?

Do we only love those who think like we do, live just like we do, and believe just like we do?

…Because I don’t see that mandate anywhere in Scripture. In fact, Jesus sought out and explicitly chased after those whom the religious people of His day shunned…

Do we only love those who make us feel better about ourselves?

What are we telling the world around us when we condone and champion the antithesis of this love?

Are we telling the world that Christian = Republican? Or Christian = Democrat?

Are we telling those around us that it doesn’t really matter what someone who is hired to work for us says or does, as long as that person alleges alignment with us politically?

I am worried for us as a body, as a family.

I worry that we have set up many idols to worship:

Our opinions,

Our political affiliations,

Evangelicalism,

Westernized/Americanized Christianity,

Our denominations,

Our personal beliefs,

What our so-called leaders – whether behind pulpits, lecterns, or teleprompters – tell us  

to believe/think,

Our standard of living,

Our color,

Our nation.

How are non-believers supposed to flock to our Good News, when we don’t even know who we are?

**NEWSFLASH!!!**

HERE IS WHO WE ARE

We are fallen and broken.

We are ALL (Jew, Gentile, black, white, brown, American, African, Russian, Mexican, Baptist,

Episcopalian, Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and so on and so forth) in desperate

need of a Savior.

We are ALL (gay, straight, academician, student, mother, child, homeless, poor, rich, annoying,

tolerable, marcher, peaceful protestor, rioter, and so on and so forth) recklessly loved

by a God that none of us have seen.

But, as John says, we do have the possibility of seeing one another. Can we? Can we really recognize and SEE the Imago Dei in the person who is so incredibly different from us? Can we also recklessly love those people?

I don’t see Jesus tell the lawyer in the Gospel of Luke:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your strength and all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself, as long as he or she agrees with you and lives the same lifestyle you do and believes the same things you do, and, and, and…”

He says, “Love your neighbor.” PERIOD.

What is love, if we are never challenged by actually doing it?

It is easy to love those who are like us. What if God calls us to more?

I am so upset that we can’t get this one simple thing right. We are unbelievably caught up in hateful memes and calling names and sharing pictures of a white Jesus carrying suitcases proclaiming He is “moving back into the White House”, as if He EVER promised our nation sovereignty among nations. We are so distracted. And our enemy is having a heyday with it.

We need to wake up, Church. It is time we looked into who Jesus really is and what He really called us to do.

Otherwise, I fear God will leave us to our devices and second our motion to have exactly what we want and therefore deserve.

My DTR with God

Growing up as a musician, I took some kind of lesson every week for at least 21 years. I started out as a pianist, but began singing in high school. Once a week, I would walk to my music teacher’s home to spend either a half hour or a full hour learning the necessary skills. I then spent two hours every week in piano and voice lessons in college, and two hours per week for voice lessons and vocal coachings in graduate school. That’s a lot of time and concentrated energy and brain power spent. And that doesn’t include the endless hours of practice required.

Why and how have I made it this far into adulthood before realizing that, in order to have any hint of success at living, I had to submit myself to spiritual lessons and practice? The picture of what I was doing in order to have a shot at a life as a professional musician should have easily translated into a picture of what I could also do to have a healthy, thriving spiritual life. But I never connected those dots.

What did become clear to me, however, was that whatever I was doing before I finally came back to God was not working. Please let me be as clear as possible here: My life on the outside was working just fine. People would’ve looked at me and considered me successful, happy, the lady who “had it all”. I am married to a wonderful and very fine-looking man (if I might say so myself). I have two beautiful, smart, and healthy children. I was singing a lot and working at a university. What could possibly not be working?

Everything. Everything on the inside was jumbled, confused, angry, torn, and upside down.

So, God and I…We had ourselves a little DTR (as we called it in the 90’s, “Define the Relationship”). Once I stopped running, stopped kicking and resisting, and finally looked up, it was as if He said to me, “Ok. Are you ready t;o do this? Because if you are, it’s going to happen on my terms this time around.” I agreed. Admittedly, I was a little scared to agree, but I went with it. Since I didn’t really know the One True God all that well, it makes sense that I would have some trepidation. But as He has continued to reveal Himself to me… His terms aren’t at all what I thought they were going to be. 

What the DTR helped me identify is this:  God is God, and I am me.

Which means I am not God.

I am not even “a” god.

There is order in the universe, and there should be order in my world, too. What this necessitates is that I fall into my rightful place in the order of things. I am not important, God is. I do not call the shots. God does. God loves His children enough to give us boundaries. And can I tell you?...When I jumped back over His fence, back into the fold, my heart and my mind and my entire world exploded with all of the wild freedom I was chasing on the other side.

Once God helped me straighten things back out as to how this whole thing was going to work, He began to move. Almost immediately, it was as if He pulled back great big, heavy, black velvet curtains that had been keeping out the light. Honestly, I felt like He was speaking to my heart through His Word and through sermons and through books* and through saved blogs I had never taken the time to read, and they all had the same patterns and messages.

Nicole, these things must be in place before we can move forward:

Authenticity – Get off the stage.

Surrender – Your life is not your own. And what are you resisting, anyway?

Admission and Confession – You have been addicted to approval, you feel entitled, and you have idols.

Forgiveness – This is not an option or a process. It is a command.

These God-terms I started acknowledging sounded a whole lot like they were going to bring life to my bones, rather than somehow work to subdue or control me.

I have written about the fact that I made a decision that I was going to believe the real God and follow Him. I shared with you how I ran from God like a maniac, denied Him over and over, and how (unbelievably) He gave me hope and reached down to pull me up off of my face. And now that I am at least standing on my feet again, I am re-learning to walk. Actually, no…I am still only at a crawl. So I am on my hands and knees. But I plan to get to my feet so I can walk. And then run. And I hope I never stop running, even though the road may get rough and I may still take a few undesirable and stupid detours…I pray to God that He keeps my eyes totally and completely fixed on Him until I take my very last breath and cross that finish line. After the beating I have put my own self through, I pretty much know I personally can’t do it any other way.

My next few posts will be all about the lessons I mentioned that He is continually teaching me.

Authenticity, Surrender, Admission and Confession, Forgiveness

You’d better believe that I’m gonna keep showing up for my regular lessons so I know what and how to practice.

*The book I mentioned above was truly life-changing for me. It is Anything by Jennie Allen. I highly recommend getting a copy with the Study Guide included!

He loves me...He loves me not.

I told you in my very first post (read here) that I would share with you some of the poor decisions I made in response to life circumstances which quickly led me into captivity.  So…Here it goes.  Out of respect for the privacy of other individuals, I will not go into specific details.  However, I will be very explicit when describing my unhealthy reactions and the subsequent consequences. 

HE LOVES ME…

Up to my early twenties, I had done pretty much everything by the book.  I was the good girl.  I followed the rules.  I might as well have been living in the Israelite camp when Moses brought down the Ten Commandments from the mountainside, because I honestly thought that if I was good enough, performed well enough, and kept the law perfectly, I would therefore be… enough.  Enough to be saved.  Enough to be “good”.  Enough to be worthy.

Laws.  Laws were easy for me to follow.  If I followed them, then God loved me…Right?

Rules worked for me for a while.  Until they didn’t.  And then I found myself, at age 24 (a full-on adult), utterly terrified.  I had finished graduate school, and I was pursuing a performing career, traveling, auditioning, taking regular lessons and coachings.  However, I made some personal choices that completely derailed me.  None of it was on my radar or anywhere in the sequence of The Five-Year Goals or The Master Plan.  I freaked out.  I stopped answering my phone.  I wouldn’t see my friends and avoided my loved ones.  For two weeks, I just dropped off the grid.

Shame, fear, and condemnation had never been my bedfellows…But they certainly were now.  Failure and Disgrace were the names I could hear whispered in my heart, along with countless others.  I had disappointed everyone in my life…Including God.  I just knew He was mad at me.  In my estimation, I had broken the law.  And I could not see how God could possibly still love me. 

HE LOVES ME NOT…

In the midst of an ensuing amount of inner chaos, some really major life events happened.  I moved.  I got married.  My husband was accepted into a graduate program.  We had our first child.  And we moved from Texas to New Jersey when our son was 4 weeks old.  After 4 months of being there, we got a phone call late one night telling us that my grandparents had both been killed in a car accident.  Two of my most beloved people.  Every word you could imagine in the English language that would describe love and adoration, I felt that and more for my Nanny and PaPa.  I remember sitting on my husband’s lap and just screaming in pain.  I cried guttural, agonizing, raw tears. I really just wanted so badly to tell them one more time how MUCH I treasured them.  It was a bomb that just obliterated any remaining threads that were holding my heart together.  

It was from this broken, confused, tumultuous place that I made a lot of extremely faulty spiritual decisions.  Shame and grief together made me do and think really awful things.  All of a sudden, God’s promises to me about His never-ending love, presence, and peace seemed like a bunch of crap.  Sorry.  Just being honest.  I decided God had removed Himself from relationship with me, because I couldn’t hear Him or feel Him anymore.  I decided I would just take charge and make everything work, since I needed to somehow pay for my mistakes.  I decided I would look to my new husband to take the throne of my heart, since in my messed-up fog of a brain, God had apparently abdicated it.  Furthermore, I was losing family who had been on that throne before.  When my husband didn’t actually fit there, I decided to get very angry.  I decided to allow my emotions to control me.  I decided to isolate myself and pretend all was well.  I just simply decided to live life on my own terms, yet I felt completely out of control and desperate.  I don’t know what good I thought was going to come from that kind of disaster zone.  It was pure pandemonium between my ears.

I was in an insane amount of bondage.  I felt like a caged animal (something I actually wrote about and will share soon).  I am not lying to you when I tell you that I spent a good 10 years here.  It is a miracle that I made it out.  And that my marriage survived.  And that I didn’t lose my ever-lovin’ mind. 

HE LOVES ME.

Fast forward with me almost a decade.  I had waited almost 10 years for another child.  (See? Yet another reason I could be mad at God. I was just stacking the deck against Him.)  And there I was, sitting on the end of my hospital bed, holding my brand new baby.  My daughter.  Something within me opened up.  Or maybe it closed up.  Maybe there was an open, gaping wound that finally sealed with the blessing of another child.  And a little girl.  I could feel it.  Something about my heart seemed…immediately softer.  I remember it like yesterday.  I remember quiet moments at home holding that tiny new life and thinking, Could I have been wrong?  Could God have seen this secret desire in my heart all this time?  Even further, could God have seen the desire and then…given it to me???

Another shapshot of hope. 

You see, what I am learning now…oh-so late in the fight…is that God doesn’t play flower-petal-picking games of “He loves me, He loves me not”.  He loves us.  Period.  God doesn’t get disappointed.  Disappointment is never even mentioned alongside God in the Bible.  That is a human attribute I haphazardly applied to Almighty God.  God’s love is a fact, not a feeling.  Doesn’t His Word tell us that GOD IS LOVE???  Earth to Nicole!…Please get your facts straight.

What does or does not happen in our lives, and what choices we do or do not make could never ever even remotely change God’s love.  It’s not up to us.  It’s up to Him.  And He never has changed.  It’s not about what He gives and what He allows to be taken OR what He never gives.  The deductions I made in my fear-ravaged mind were completely and totally, 100% flawed, scared-to-death human conclusions.  They were not based in Scripture.

God had loved me all along.  Like a parent who just steps back and lets the toddler wrestle the thing out until she just gives it up, sweaty, tear-stained, and utterly exhausted.  God watched me throw an epic tantrum suitable for the stage.  Had He not stepped back and allowed it, I would’ve never understood.  I was living an Old Testament kind of life, completely disregarding the New Covenant that Jesus ushered in.

Instead of working so hard to keep the law, I should’ve been working to truly understand, receive, and then give grace.

Instead of making myself literally crazy by allowing unsound thoughts to run rampant through my head, I should’ve blocked every single thing except the healing truth of His Word.  It could've bathed my mind. 

Instead of working so hard to make and keep my own jacked up rules, I wish I would’ve learned and kept only the rules of Christ in my heart.  They are the only ones that lead to freedom.  And they aren’t what most people would expect.

Now I don’t care a big dang darn about being “good”.  It isn’t possible, anyway.  Not for me.  I know what existed in my head all of those years.  I care about loving God back for the remainder of my days.  I care about loving his people, deeply and fully, with everything I have.  I care about teaching my children that it isn’t about the rule, it is about freedom.  Because I have been given so much grace and mercy, I long to give the same away to those around me.  Be free. Live free. Set free.

What was it that John said in his First Epistle?  Oh, yeah.  “We love because HE first loved us.”

Earth to Nicole.