advent

waiting for promised freedom... promised joy.... promised life. i am waiting too.  the air around me is heavy with suffering and with expectation. i cannot fear the painful loss as one who has no hope. i have hope. not a timid hesitant wimpering clutching at straws. no. it is a fire that all the blackness of death cannot put out or dim. it is bold, beautiful and it shouts a victory cry in the face of what only looks like defeat. it is rooted in my heart, and yet in another world simultaneously. i feel the winds of heavens comfort and cool the burning shame, when the earthly air lies dead and hearse-like all around me. the stirring of something coming that will shake every evil thing free from our spinning child-earth... it is almost here, and through the sheen of tears i see the glimmer of a ray that will widen into the first true day. every fiber aches with the anticipation of an emotion i have never felt. come Lord Jesus.

new favorite song

gabe introduced me to future of forestry this weekend. http://www.futureofforestry.com/ really amazing group, as everyone reading this may already know - liked all that i heard; my favorite song, though "slow your breath down" (travel two) is this incredible love song from God. here's the words (if you get a chance to listen to the music, though, i wouldn't pass it up). i wonder if emily sees-m. knew these guys at hume lake.... anyways, enjoy!

This chest is full of memories

Of gold and silver tears

I’ll give you more to own than

All of this

And I’ll give you more than years

For you were once a child of innocence

And I see you just the same

Your burdens couldn’t win or

Lose a thing

Oh, I’d tell you once again

But you’re always on the run



Slow your breath down

Just take it slow

Find your heart now, oh

You can trust and love again

Slow your breath down, just take it slow

Find your smile now, oh

You can trust and love again



If you leave I’ll still be close to you

When all your fears rain down

I’ll take you back a thousand times again

I’ll take you as my own

I would sing you songs of innocence

‘Til the light of morning comes

‘Til the rays of gold and honey cover you

In the sweetness of the dawn

But you’re always on the run



You’re not alone

You’re now a part of me

You feel the cure

I’ll feel the toil it brought you

recipe for a great evening

ingredients:

• 1 amazing little nephew..... (& parents)
• 3 cooing aunts and 1 mesmerized uncle.

assemble on nearest available floorspace.
watch hours fly by in a heartbeat.

yield: 7 servings.

oh how i miss this little guy!

confessions of an unforgiving woman

the above picture has little to do with unforgiveness... except that it's a great shot of the "losing" team at a recent shindig. (the winning team has already published their victory photo on facebook - we were, understandably, not so eager to broadcast the outcome). losing to the other team that night was just hilarious fun, but sometimes losing is anything but. and here's the thing; forgiveness and losing can sound about the same to me. what i've been learning in some really amazing ways lately is that that might not be the case....

cut to today: after sitting down to tea, cookies & collared greens with a dear friend, the topic of forgiveness (ever on my mind these days) comes to the forefront again. i have learned so much about this over the past few months. i am the perfect pupil for this subject matter because, as i may have already alluded to in previous blogs, i have years and years of proof of what an unforgiving life looks like. feels like. here's what it feels like: it sucks.

i won't take up the few minutes i have to write this on the many stories of past hurts & all the valid excuses i have to hold on to unforgiveness, but i will say to the person who just HATES this topic; i'm pretty sure i know a little of how you feel! when i was 18 i stood up and walked out of a seminar because the admonition and encouragement to forgive was even mentioned. i have in my repertoire of "flying books" (books i have thrown across the room in a fit of anger), a book about bold love, which detailed the absolute necessity of forgiveness if you want to be healed from your past. i have been forced to sit down as a young girl and to hear from an abusive person from scripture, all the verses about how i would go to hell if i did not forgive him. i am well acquainted with the emotions of deep hatred and aversion to the subject.

but here's what else - i have been freed like nobody's business, and it has all come through the miraculous work of 1. God forgiving me, and 2. Him empowering me to forgive others. it is blowing my mind.

i've been hearing about & experiencing this forgiveness in what feels like every direction, but one that i want to share from recent experience is a class i attended where the guest speaker devoted the entire time to the subject of...you guessed it.

here's the basics;

nina (the woman who spoke that night), had come from a family background that many people i know could relate to. she'd grown up in a christian home where there was some violence & probably some level of physical abuse going on. as kids they were taught about "forgiveness" as something that you had no choice about. you forgave because that was what the bible said to do - end of story.... but what a wacky forgiveness it was!

in her mind, forgiveness meant losing. she thought that her two choices were;

1. unforgiveness (and withholding relationship) or 2. forgive & be abused again.

the problem with unforgiveness in this scenario was that withholding relationship from others resulted in her not developing into the person God made her to be.

so she did what many of us have probably done. she tried to forgive & forget, not realizing that she was stuffing unforgiveness all the while. sure, she was "forgiving" on the outside, but at the same time she was burying unforgiveness on the inside.

thankfully, God stepped in and has started setting the record straight, telling her the truths she had never heard before. truths like:

• i have a God is is out for my good.
• i have a protector.
• i can set godly boundaries (yes, overused term, but it'll have to do for now), and i can discontinue relationship (short-term, like leaving the room, or even long-term). i have choices.

so she proceeds to lay out what she's learned about forgiveness in these past few years. starting with the anatomy of unforgivness. i'll just pass these along to you in bullet-style format:

• unforgiveness starts with an offense we receive. an offense is anything that crosses a boundary we have set up for our protection.
• in response, unforgiveness is a guard we put up to protect ourselves.
• the more often, and the more severely we are hurt, the higher & thicker the walls become.
• as was already mentioned, this approach of self-protection doesn't work, because it blocks the very reason God made us (to love & to be loved).

• 2 ways we can be offended:
  

1. when we're looking to someone else to meet our needs & they fail us. (the problem there being that we're not looking in the right place / have a wrong perspective about God)
2. when someone pokes us in an area that's already wounded (agitating a lie we already believe about ourselves)

• *quick example; in my early 20's i would bristle at any jest that targeted my being spacey or ditsy.... why? because i already knew i could be easily distracted (truth) and "ethereally-minded" (ha!) at times. the real problem, though, was the major lies wrapped all around that true thing. lies like; "spacey people are ridiculous - they deserve ridicule & scorn - they are inferior to other people - they annoy even those who 'have' to love them" - (just to name a few). so when someone would try to joke around with me about this issue, i had this internal inferno spill over in my heart in response. oh,  i'd try to pretend i was cool with it, but it felt like dying on the inside. the jest was hitting a place where i was believing a lot of painful lies... i don't respond the same way now, though. i'm pretty sure it has to do with being freed from believing those lies. the truth remains, but jests about me being "lost bear" and the like, really crack me up now - the sting is gone. and yes, i am "easily distract..."(linda can tell you)
 

• judgement follows close behind unforgiveness, which set's in motion a curse; "you'll be judged as you judge." the way this curse seems to work itself out is twofold; you either become just like the people you can't forgive and/or you become a magnet to that type of personality. (ouch! have definitely seen both)
• walls beget more walls - which go from defensive to offensive ("i'll hurt you before you hurt me " / unhealthy boundaries & anger)
• healthy boundaries are possible when 1. i know who i am, and 2. who God is - not desperate for others to meet my needs.
• unforgiveness takes you onto a path with only one possible destination: hatred- which is the exact opposite of God's character & design for us.
• any offense needs to be forgiven....blazingly important (to me) side-note: any offense; intentional or not, real or not, valid or not - needs to be forgiven!) *i side-step forgiveness all the time by telling myself; "well that's a stupid reason to get mad at someone, julie! you don't even have a leg to stand on." or "you're 99% in the wrong, and their only 1% in" - after hearing nina speak, i can say first hand that forgiving the "stupid stuff" is actually really really freeing!
  
• in nina's ministry of healing prayer, unforgiveness is the #1 sin that they encounter, and forgiveness is the single most freeing thing they've seen a person do.
• during one of their healing prayer sessions with a particular woman (who was struggling with unforgiveness), the woman told nina that Jesus was showing her a picture. it was of a dank, dark, stinky dungeon, and as she looked around she saw in every cell a person she could not forgive. what hit her was that in order to make sure none of them got out of their cell, she had to stand guard at their doors. she was a prisoner in the dungeon too, right along with them. (wow)
• nina also shared some amazing stories that seem to imply that when we forgive a person, we release them to God - and sometimes, without ever knowing about our forgiving them, it can free them to repent. (several stories along this vein - definitely a new thought, but what if it were true?)
• reconciliation was also discussed; forgiveness does not equal reconciliation. (although many would say that it does). reconciliation takes time, and it takes the other person being trustworthy over time.
• just because you forgive doesn't mean that it still won't hurt. if you're still hurting it doesn't necessarily mean that you haven't forgiven. sometimes even after we forgive, there is still deep hurt that we need Jesus to heal. we can ask for this. (for people with a lot of painful experiences in their past, this is really important to hear).
• in the awesome paradox of the gospel, we get to grow up to be little children. as kids we did the best we could to protect ourselves. now that we're adults we can hand the job of protecting ourselves over to Jesus. (isn't that beautiful? - sure is to me)
• don't know if what you are engaged in is discernment or judgement? quick test: discernment brings life. judgement bring death. wait a little and look at the fruit. it'll become clear!
• don't exclude anything God might be bringing up to forgive. (even if it's "again") nina said that when God brings up memories from her past now, that she "bathes everyone in the memory in forgiveness" - awesome.
• at the very end, nina went into what God is calling us to; a lifestyle of constant forgiveness. waking up each day preparing to forgive the offenses that will come. (even "pre-forgiving") she encouraged us all to take this home and start forgiving anything. everything. she gave us a really helpful tool to use in walking through the process of forgiving someone. it sounds a little cheesy, i know. but i've been doing this, and i don't care if it sounds cheesy or not - it works. here's the deal;
  
• you just sit or stand in front of an empty chair and imagine the offending party sitting in it (or in the absence of a chair in the near vicinity, imagine the chair AND the person).
• start with; "so-and-so, i forgive you for.... (and then list every offense! - sometimes this can take quite a while and get a little heated. that's okay - list every single thing you're upset about - valid, real, intentional or not!)
• once the listing of the offenses is done (for the moment), take a minute to say to the person in the chair what you wished had happened instead. ("what i wanted from you was....") *when nina said this in class, i wrote it down, but didn't really understand it. now that i've gone through the process a few times, i find that this is a really healing step to take. i think it's partially a time to grieve the good things that didn't happen or the good things that were taken from us. the benefits to this are twofold; 1. we get to grieve (which is really important in the process of forgiving! often i won't forgive because i don't want to really feel the sadness that's underneath the anger.) and 2. we define the shape of the hole that we are holding up to Jesus to fill. when He does come and fill this, we actually get it, because we have put words to our need.
  
• last step is simple. "so-and-so, because i have been so incredibly forgiven myself, from all the evil in my heart & life, and because Jesus tells me to do so, i forgive you." (one of the word pictures nina used for unforgiveness was that of holding your hands around someones throat. when you forgive, you're releasing the throat of that other person.) when i'm speaking forgiveness over the person in the chair, sometimes i find myself saying "you're free to go! i release you." but the person who's really been released? it's me.