Just give up: the real meaning of losing your life to find it!

Enter the kingdom as a little child, the first shall be last and the last first, you can only save your life by losing it, gain the world by forsaking it?  It sounds like nonsense, foolishness, ridiculousness, if ever we've heard it!  Perhaps a better word is paradox: a riddle that makes no sense until you're on the inside looking out.  What else could start as a minor scandal in some uncouth province of the greatest Empire known to man, started by fishermen of all people!, and quite literally 'turn the world upside down?'  But it isn't a nation or culture it was meant to transform, though that can be the result, if taken seriously by enough people, but it is a very personal question asked of each and every individual ever born: what will you make of this nonsense?  He calls it nonsense Himself, a foolish little thing, used to turn nations and powers and cultures and the very way the world works, on its head.  What will you do with this impossible thing?  Don't just acknowledge that it exists and move on with your life, even the demons do that!  Don't just bring it into your life, another facet of who and what you are, another hobby or interest or intellectual pursuit.  Don't chase after it thinking it will be your ticket to success or prosperity, it won't.  Don't think you can just incorporate it into who you think you are or the life you currently have, it won't be slipped into place like a book on a shelf.  Don't wait until you're perfect either, because you never will be.

Come empty, come broken, come just as you are.  Leave all your expectations, opinions, desires, sorrows, and everything else at the door.  Just come.  Quit trying to make it about you, what you want, what you need, just come.  Like a little child to a loving father.  Like a beloved bride to her groom.  Like one friend to another.  Like an employee to a great boss.  Just come.  Your expectations, your desires, your ideas are just too small, throw them out and discover what you are, who you are, but most importantly Whose you are.  We are like children playing at pretend, insisting our make-believe is real.  It sounds like nonsense, but it is what you've been looking for all your long, weary life, what humanity itself has been seeking since Eden fell, but you need to decide what to do with it.

Amen!

Unwitting guest blogger: here!

Behind that perfect family picture

We've all fallen afoul of it, even before social media, the internet has just made it that more pervasive.  I finally have a great family photo (mostly because I didn't try taking it myself), looking at that beautiful picture (even with me in the photo!) I can't believe that lady has such a nice, beautiful family and such a great life!  Wait, that's me!  Yep, it's my family and I think that lady's life (mine!) must be all sunshine and roses, but even taking that picture wasn't sunshine and roses, let alone getting to the place where our family could actually look like that!  How often do each of us see something that triggers that sort of thought and the inevitable jealously and disappointment with our own lot?  How often have we configured our pictures and social media content to portray the ideal life rather than being real, most especially with ourselves.  Even my son's school pictures offer me the ability to pay extra to airbrush the kid, that we can remember him as he's never really looked?!  Can this culture, and we ourselves, get any more feckless, insipid, shallow, and utterly focused on the externals?

Take our perfect picture for example.  I just wanted a family snapshot, taken by a friend of mine with my camera.  She's a photographic perfectionist and decided she'd do a mini photo session approximately 20 minutes before our husbands and sons had to leave!  We trekked all over her woods, getting bit by mosquitos, my toddler crabby and uncooperative, her unsatisfied with anything so far.  Finally she plopped us down on a hillside and a cat miraculously appeared over her right shoulder some 20 feet behind her, enchanting my otherwise unenthused daughter, and there it was, a family picture worth smiling about, but you wouldn't guess the trouble and effort and pure good luck that went into that shot.  Nor would you think about the abuse, neglect, infertility, job loss, chronic illness, debt, adoption, and the other thousand little sorrows and tragedies behind those smiling faces, the stuff that never makes it onto facebook.  We're just another smiling family that has it all together and has never suffered even a rainy day, let alone a life of struggle and pain, except there is no such thing!  But if we never admit we have problems, we never have to deal with them, we never have to face the messiness that is life, yet neither can we heal and learn what it is to actually live and love.

There's nothing wrong with a nice photo, but there's everything wrong if that photo is what you've convinced yourself that your life or someone else's is.  Behind those smiling faces are sleepless nights, tears, disappointments, grief, and loneliness.  But we don't need to live like that, pretending we have it all together when inside we're falling apart.  Forget airbrushing your life, be real, especially with yourself and allow others to do the same, that's where real friendships and relationships and love can thrive, healing those things we thought we'd carry the rest of our lives, chronic and unhealed.  But it's messy, it's slow, uncomfortable, and we can't even pretend to be perfect, but that's what reality means.  Our thoroughly edited virtual reality has about as much in common with real life as that airbrushed photo portrays who you are on the inside, or who you are when no one is around to make you smile on command.  Let's make the real thing more interesting and three dimensional than your latest social media post; be real with yourself and others, and allow them a safe place to do the same.