Is HE good?

I have been wrestling, pondering, discussing, thinking, mainly consumed for quite a while by the goodness of God. Probably not in the way that you'd think. This attribute of God is the hardest one for me to believe. How can God be good when I've been through crazy stuff in my life, there's war, famine, etc. Although I know that my own experiences in life have lead me to even entertain these thoughts. The thoughts that doubt the goodness of God.

I know that the process started a lot sooner than this, but the place where I started to confront my disbelief of God's goodness with the Word of God was last summer. We did a whole Bible Study one night on God's goodness to His people. It kind of felt like an inconvenient truth. Over and over and over again in the Bible, people talk about the goodness of God. "Every good and perfect gift comes from above." "The Lord will supply all my need according to His riches in glory." The references continue.

I don't even know how I had come to disbelieve it, but I think that I had failed to protect that belief and slowly the world and my enemy started to chip away at that belief as I saw what was going on around me without looking through the lens of scripture. I stopped being satisfied in what God have given to me and started looking in other places for satisfaction.

I won't say that this issue is laid to rest in my life. You know what, it may never be. However, there have been some things, including the Bible Study that I did that have challenged my thinking and have started me asking the questions: when did I stop believing He is good, and how can I change that? As I opened up with God and told Him what I thought, He started to bring some things into my life. (Sorry for the ensuing list)

1) One of my friends was diagnosed with cancer and this is a blogpost he wrote that rocked me.
2) This song.
3) I realized that I believed that God was withholding good from me. That there were things that I thought i deserved for following Him. I thought i deserved wealth, friendships, a relationship, that I wouldn't have to experience brokenness.
4) This season. How can I believe that God is not good when everyday I see Him at work as I trust Him to go to Berlin. He's providing in more ways than I can ask, think or imagine!

i believe He is good,
Kimberly

Electricity Dependent...

The lights flickered before they went out. The storm that brought darkness at 6pm also brought copious amounts of rain and our lights went out. These lines could no longer hold on against the storm. Here I sit seventeen hours later, and there is still no electricity in my house. I came to the library to send a few emails and on my drive I thought about the night and the morning. How many times I flipped the light switch just out of habit. I definitely did not freak out because I mean there's plenty to do right? Well, everything I thought of doing like checking e-mail, or opening the refrigerator for something to drink, well it takes some amount of energy. How dependent we have become for those currents to come into our house. You know what I'm realizing? I actually like it. How much quieter it is without the hum of the lights, the clocks, the refrigerator. How that does something for my soul. I'm not suggesting that we all go Walden and get rid of everything that needs to be plugged in, but instead that maybe we could unplug some things and just listen.

Beyond that, I wonder this, what if I was dependent on God the way that I'm dependent on the lights or the refrigerator or even running water (which takes electricity). I walk in a room and out of complete habit I flick the switch. Even if I told myself like five seconds ago that the electricity doesn't work. My body has been conditioned to turn the lights on. What if that were true, that I instantly turned to God instead of, well anything else. That it was completely a way of life. Not just a habit for the sake of habits, but one thing that by faith I taught myself to do.

Hoping the lights come on soon,

Kimberly

To never need anything???

I wonder what it would be like to never need anything. To have unlimited resources. To never need to eat, or drink, or need money or even a car or anything at all. Imagine what it would be like to never have need of anything in your life or to have never needed anything. I have been thinking about this a lot recently. I don't even think my human mind can imagine or think about what that would be. You see, I've always needed things and I'll always have needs.

The reason I was thinking about this is I have been confronted with the fact that the God of the universe has never needed anything. He's never needed friends, food, water, he's never needed sleep. The God that I serve has never needed anything. This is mind blowing to me!

My life is defined by need. I eat and I sleep because I need these things. I think that this is a really good picture of what we are like most of the time. I think the most astounding part of it all is that this God who has no needs would choose to associate with us needy people or delight in giving us what we need. That He who has never known need would look on our needs with compassion and not disdain that he would even consider giving us what we need. Wow.

What do you think, what blows your mind about God?

A little poetry

Oh heart of stone

These feet of lead

Knotted tongue

Asking & hoping you won't.

Doubleminded.

Selfish.

Since when is this me?

Loving Father

Merciful

Slow to anger

Abounding in steadfast love.

Calling my name.

You never change.

Mold me Jesus!

Running feet.

Tongue of praise.

Desiring you to wreck me.

Single minded

Selfless

Remember when this was me?

You never change.

We serve a God who never changes. We however, are a people who change. We forget who the God is that we serve and we push God out of our lives. We are so often two people. Yeah. This comes out of a place of me having a reality check of my relationship with God and really stopping and looking at how am I really doing. God can handle the truth. I think that when we allow 0urselves to admit it, then we can change... So this is a prayer!

No longer living the College Dream.

It's been awhile. I have been feeling the need for a new BLOG post, and was wondering what I should write about it, being one of the sorts of people who doesn't like to force words onto a page, but prefers instead that they flow from my heart to the page.

Living by myself gives me much time to think

and ponder, which is both a good and bad thing. I do believe that the unexamined life is unworth living, however there is the overexamined life as well. That life is too careful and forgets that life is messy and that mistakes will be made.

Though I am no longer a college student, I did spend the four days last week at a conference for college students. It was sweet to forget that I was a teacher for a few days and spend sweet time with my friends. However, this was no mere reunion. God also had a few messages that he wanted to speak into my life.

My alarm clock. It's squealing at a frequency that not only awakens me but every animal within a five mile radius, elicits the only response of a groan and a quick hand to make it stop. There is nothing I dread more. Not that I don't l

ove life, or being awake, but rather that I enjoy sleep and find the transition from sleep to awakeness one of the hardest worlds to traverse. The theme for the conference I attended was, "Awaken". I'm glad to say that I didn't sleep through any session, I think the irony of that would have been too much for me to handle.

Have we fallen asleep? I think I have. How quickly we can move from a point of passionate pursual of Jesus Christ to one of complacency forgetting what it was we were made for. One speaker said the gospel is the message that awakens. I like that. We can only be be asleep so long, we all slept before we became believers and the message of the gospel was our loud, ringing alarm clock. How easily I forget the gospel, that wake up call, in my life. I have so many tendencies to fall into performance, trying to earn God's favor, show Him how good of a Christian I am. Funny, huh? A good Christian? Does that even exist? Will anyone ever be a good Christian? I mean, on their own. Like Christianity is something that we can just try harder to do. What an assault of grace I am prone to walk in.

Do I believe that my salvation is a gift. One with no strings attached, a free one, all I have to do is make it my own: accept it. The rest of the Christian life

is about our hearts being more and more captured by the one that we've put on the throne. Our lives changing thr

ou

gh the work of the Holy Spirit. Certainly we must yield and be obedient, but there is nothing to do, nothing our hand can do that give us salvation, or even the right to be saved.

It's freeing, almost too freeing. You see, I think that in my brokenness, I want to be in control. I want to have that five year plan, that checklist. If you do these things you will be sanctified. If you attend this amount of Bible studies, share your faith this many times, read your

bible for x amount of hours, pray for a prescribed amount of time. But Jesus, he doesn't just want my actions, he doesn't just want what I can do. He wants me. He wants my heart. He wants to be King in my life. He wants me flat out flabbergasted, fully in love and falling more and more in

love as the minutes pass.

I love thinking of Jesus like this...

I saw a strange sight. I stumbled upon a story most strange, like nothing my life, my street sense, my sly tongue had ever prepared me for. Hush, child. Hush, now, and I will tell it to you. Even before the dawn one Friday morning I noticed a young man, handsome and strong, walking the alleys of our City.

He was pulling an old cart filled with clothes both bright and new, and he was calling in a clear tenor voice: "Rags!" (Ah, the air was foul and the first light filthy to be crosse by such sweet music.)

"Rags! New rags for old! I take your tired rags! Rags!" "Now, this is a wonder," I thought to myself, for the man stood six-feet-for, and his arms were like tree limbs, hard and muscular, and his eyes flashed intelligence.

Could he find no better job than this, to be a ragman in the inner city? I followed him. My curiousity drove me. And I wasn't disappointed.

Soon the Ragman saw a woman sitting on her back porch. She was sobbing into a handkerchief, sighing, and shedding a thousand tears. Her knees and elbows made a sad X. Her shoulders shook. Her heart was breaking.

The Ragman stopped his cart. Quietly, he walked to the woman, stepping round tin cans, dead toys, and Pampers. "Give me your rag," he said so gently, "and I'll give you another." He slipped the handkerchief from her eyes. She looked ups, and he laid across her palm a linen cloth so clean and new that it shined. She blinked from the gift to the giver.

Then, as he began to pull his cart again, the Ragman did a strange thing: he put her stained handkerchief to his own face; and then HE began to weep, to sob as grievously as she had done, his shoulders shaking. Yet she was left without a tear. "This IS a wonder," I breathed to myself, and I followed the sobbing Ragman like a child who cannot turn away from mystery.

"Rags! Rags! New rags for old!" In a little while, when the sky showed grey behind the rooftops and I could see the shredded curtains hanging out black windows, the Ragman came upon a girl whose head was wrapped in a bandage, whose eyes were empty. Blood soaked her bandage. A single line of blood ran down her cheek. Now the tall Ragman looked upon this child with pity, and he drew a lovely yellow bonnet from his cart.

"Give me your rag," he said, tracing his own line on her cheek, "and I'll give you mine." The child could only gaze at him while he loosened the bandage, removed it, and tied it to his own head. The bonnet he set to hers. And I gasped at what I saw: for with the bandage went the wound! Against his brow it ran a darker, more substantial blood-his own!

"Rags! Rags! I take old rags!" cried the sobbing, bleeding, strong, intelligent Ragman. The sun hurt both the sky, now, and my eyes; the Ragman seemed to more and more to hurry.

"Are you going to work?" he asked a man who leaned against a telephone pole. The man shook his head. The Ragman pressed him: "Do you have a job?"

"Are you crazy?" sneered the other. He pulled away from the pole, revealing the right sleeve of his jacked-flat, the cuff stuffed into the pocket. He had no arm. "So," said the Ragman. "Give me your jacket, and I'll give you mine." Such authority in his voice!

The one-armed man took off his jacket. So did the Ragman - and I trembled at what I saw: for the Ragman's arm stayed in its sleeve, and when the other put it on he had two good arms, thick as tree limbs; but the Ragman had only one. "Go to work," he said.

After that he found a drunk lying unconscious beneath an army blanket, an old man, hunched, wizened, and sick. He took that blanket and wrapped it round himself, but for the drunk he left new clothes.

And now I had to run to keep up with the Ragman. Though he was weeping uncontrollably, and bleeding freely at the forehead, pulling his cart with one arm, stumbling for drunkenness, falling again and again, exhausted, old, and sick, yet he went with terrible speed. On spider's legs he skittered through the alleys of the City, this mile and the next, until he came to its limits, and then he rushed beyond.

I wept to see the change in this man. I hurt to see his sorrow. And yet I needed to see where he was going in such haste, perhaps to know what drove him so.

The little old Ragman - he came to a landfill. He came to the garbage pits. And then I wanted to help him in what he did, but hung back, hiding.

He climbed a hill. With tormented labor he cleared a little space on that hill. Then he sighed. He lay down. He pillowed his head on a handkerchief and a jacket. he covered his bones with an army blanket.

And he died.

Oh, how I cried to witness that death! I slumped in a junked car and wailed and mourned as one who has no hope - because I had come to love the Ragman.

Every other face had faded in the wonder of this man, and I cherished him; but he died. I sobbed myself to sleep. I did not know - how could I know? That I slept through Friday night and Saturday and its night, too. But then, on Sunday morning, I was wakened by a violence. Light - pure, hard, demanding light - slammed against my sour face, and I blinked, and I looked, and I saw the last and the first wonder of all.

There was the Ragman, folding the blanket most carefuly, a scar on his forehead, but alive! And, besides that, healthy! There was no sign of sorrow nor of age, and all the rages that he gathered shined for cleanliness.

Well, then I lowered my head and trembling for all that I had seen, I myself walked up to the Ragman. I told him my name with shame, for I was a sorry figure next to him. Then I took off my clothes in that place, and I said to him with dear yearning in my voice: "Dress me."

He dressed me. My Lord, he put new rags on me, and I am a wonder beside him.

The Ragman, the Ragman,

The CHRIST.

* Ragman by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

That Matchless Love

Some of my measly thoughts about the Love of God.

Yet, the love of God.

I forget it.

I disbelieve it.

I take it for granted.

I misunderstand it.

I don't get this love that passionately pursues the unworthy.

That chases after my heart and motivations.

This love that demands nothing, but asks me to give up everything.

How I want to get it.

It is like a sunbeam that warms your skin-and goes directly to the heart.

The clouds come and we forget the sun is still shining-we go about our business everyday and start to forget about the sun, not really noticing it-our minds consumed with smaller things, forgetting the kiss of its warmth and how blessed we are.