If You Want to Progress in Your Relationship with God

“But I do not know how to awake and arise!”

“I will tell you. Get up, and do something the Master tells you; so make yourself his disciple at once. Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because he said, Do it, or once abstained because he said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe in him, if you do not anything he tells you. If you can think of nothing he ever said as having had an atom of influence on your doing or not doing, you have too good ground to consider yourself no disciple of his.

But you can begin at once to be a disciple of the Living One – by obeying him in the first thing you can think of in which you are not obeying him. We must learn to obey him in everything, and so must begin somewhere. Let it be at once, and in the very next thing that lies at the door of our conscience! ”

 ~George MacDonald, Creation in Christ

If You Long to be a Perfect Christ-Follower

"What are you doing, Mom?"

Her crayon is suspended mid-air. She's been watching me, filling these notebooks full of black ink to define all these frustrated words. Black and white. That's how I prefer things. Simple, and understandable, with expected, learned curves and lots of straight lines.

I loosen my grip on the pen. "I'm writing stories for you." I look into all her uncontainable, never-seen-on-this-earth-before beauty. All this life blooming and colorful and anything but predictable.







She smiles and draws out a bright green in long, sweeping arches. Her color doesn't stop entirely at the bold, pre-set lines and this girl has blurred all the edges of my nice, neat assumptions and models for me that what I may tend to call imperfect can be beautiful, too. She has let me know I really limit the art when I demand everything to be within the pre-set lines.

She picks up a pupleish-blue and looks up at me without slowing down her flying comet-hand, meteors of colored wax landing across her creation. "I like stories. What is it about? Can I hear it?"

I look down at my own scrawling and sigh at the blurriness of it all. I want her to know the Truth and we all meet Him in story and I am trying to paint a glimpse of Him but it is shaping up to such a dim reflection. All that Life and color and anything but predictable Glory who came to draw lines in the sand and never ones that were expected. How do you clearly describe One who all the books in all the world could not contain?

"I'm writing a series of children's stories about our emotions. This one I'm working on now is about anger. I think I'm going to title it: Even God Gets Angry."

She stops and considers, searching my face and the depths of her own infinite seven-year-old wisdom. "Good. I like it. And that's true. God does get angry about things too. What matters is why we are angry and what we do with our anger." She slides over a fresh sheet of clean white and begins to make her mark. "So will you read it to me?"

I smile and glance down at all my black on white. I wonder if maybe I should just let her write this story. Quick, pharisee-like judgement and strict rules and unbending definitions come so much easier to me than discernment and learning and living out all that childlike wisdom.

"Not just yet. I've got a few things I need to work out first. It's about a girl who is learning how God made her to have very intense feelings, and about how He has them too, and that there is a right and good and Christ-like way to deal with those feelings."

I never realized how much I like things in controlled, neat boxes until I had three little souls that I couldn't stuff or shape or contain into anything other than what they are. The Biggest, she grins and stretches her arms way out and then runs her hands through her masses of wild curly wisps, shaking everything crazy for no apparent reason. "Is that girl really me? Is it about me?"

I grin. "That's what we all want to know, isn't it? Is the story about me? And kind of. It's about you. And me. But mostly it's about Him."

                                                              *     *     *

It's about Him being perfect and shaking up that picture in my head of human perfection. 

He was human perfection.

He felt weak and hungry. He felt deep passionate anger and He made a whip himself and overturned tables and scattered coins. His shoulders shook with sobs from weeping. He got tired and sat down wearily. He suffered anguish and agony and anticipation drew sweat like drops of blood from His perfect all-knowing head. He cried out in a loud voice to God.

Even Jesus did not carry His own cross alone. 

These are true colors of Jesus that I'm letting seep over my pre-set lines. These are the images that blur what I have long defined as perfection. I need to stop trying to stuff my made-in-the-image-of-God emotions and God-given, Christ-like physical limitations into neat little boxes I've mislabeled "self control" or "maturity" or "weakness" or "immaturity".

He lived perfectly. He felt deeply. He made me that way, too.

I've got to shake this picture of Him always physically calm and strong and emotionally at peace. It's a false, incomplete image of Him that I've accepted for too long. 

He is who I want to be like. I compare myself to Him and pray to conform ever more to His likeness, His character, His strength. I want to be perfect as He is perfect.

Is it any wonder then that if I forget or gloss over these truths about what His perfectly lived life really looked like that I will wrongly see my own God-given limitations and emotions as "immaturity" or areas that "need to be worked on"?

So instead of trying to excuse or mute or cover over these God-designed elements of who I am, I am looking to the Master Artist to learn how He uses them boldly for gloriously highlighting Beauty.

I am letting Him redesign what I have long pictured as perfect.

When You Want to Encourage Others but Feel Like a Mess Yourself

I usually try to keep at least an itty bitty pathway through the toys. And I like to have one countertop clean so my perfectionist eyes can find a refuge from the stacks of dishes and crusty-stuck things. And I really, really try to get enough laundry done so it doesn't begin piling up in an almost life-size version of Everest directly in front of the washing machine because, that is visible from my kitchen, and much more importantly, from my front door.

But the day when two... two... sweet elderly neighbors decided stop in at separate times for a visit? And for one of them it was her first time to step foot in my home?... There wasn't a clean surface anywhere. Not one. I couldn't even offer a seat on the couch because that had been swallowed by laundry, too.

At least my oldest daughter had on decent clothing and looked like she had a shower within the week. The other two looked as bare and wild as Indian children that had spent the better part of the day chasing a pack of stray dogs. Or were they playing stray dogs? I couldn't tell if the shockingly loud noises coming out of their mouths were attempts at barking or just ear-splittling indecipherable toddler language. Sometimes I just look at them with all the love in my heart and say "where is your mother??".

It's ME. I'm a mom of THREE. Oh Lord help. 

It's really wonderful. I want another one already.

But I digress...

So for a moment I considered panicking. I considered diving in between my neighbor and my life-mess like I was protecting her from a spray of bullets that was headed her way accompanied by a slow motion soundtrack of me yelling "nooooooooooo!!". Instead I just took a deep breath and internally threw up my hands in surrender and went to give her a hug.

I couldn't help mumbling an excuse, though, about how I'd been sick the previous three days, which any Mom who has gotten sick with little ones still at home knows this means it is a free pass to take at least two weeks to catch up on all the work you got behind on. I didn't even attempt to divert her attention from the new blue crayon-graffiti that reached impressively high wall-levels considering it was scrawled by my foot-and-a-half tall artist.





And she really looked around. And there was a lot to look at. And she just took a deep breath like it was all a great comfort to her and said "honey... you should see my house! I don't even have three little ones!". I wanted to give her some kind of door prize for best neighbor visit ever.

Because really? She was relieved my home was a complete and total disaster zone. She was relieved my kids were dirty and noisy and all over the place. She was encouraged because I didn't "have it all together" because that meant to her that I wouldn't expect her to have it all together.

Sometimes the best encouragement is vulnerability. Sometimes the best encouragement to someone else is letting them know when you don't have it all tied up in a pretty Pinterest bow. 

So often I can be tempted to feel that I can't help or encourage someone else when I'm having a just-trying-to-survive kind of day. But it is exactly in those tough and messy days that I am learning I can sometimes offer the most encouragement.

So if Jesus brings someone across my path on those days... I'll try not to put those walls up. I'll try to let them see the train wreck in all it's glory.

And I'll give them a hug. Because Jesus can have my pride and I'll take real relationships instead and I think maybe, just maybe, I might be ready to grow up into this now.




More on this topic of encouragement, and comparison, and perfectionism, and relationship coming in the next couple of days... Much love, friends!