Monthly Archives: November 2005

I never quite know where to draw the line…when I’ve stopped seeing God in little things and when I’ve started over-spiritualizing. This one is walking that thin line, I think, but here I go anyway…

So I’m running late the other day (as usual), and run through a Chick-Fil-A for lunch. This is Chick-Fil-A is one of those double drive-thru restaurants, where you go through one lane if the driver is ordering and the other lane if the passenger is ordering. So I’m sitting in the line, a very long which wasn’t moving at all (it was backed up to the street), and thinking, great, class starts in five minutes!, when my eyes slowly drifted over to the passenger lane, which was, as fate would have it, empty. I’m sure mine were not the only eyes that drifted toward the empty lane as I was caught between my empty stomach, my continued tardiness to class, and the frustration with the fact that I was now locked into the line as two more vehicles had pulled in behind me. One of those days.

Then this white SUV (it’s always an SUV) slips past us all, into the passenger lane, orders, and goes through. Immediately my fiendish mind is trying to invent ways, wondering if I could just hop over into the passenger seat, and somehow still manage to drive long enough to get through the passenger lane to get my food. Isn’t it possible to sit on the center console and drive? I mean, there’s that whole gearshift issue, but rural mail carriers do it all the time, right? I mean, surely there’s a way!

It would have been so much more perfect had I just had a passenger in my car. Someone that was there to help me out…hungry or not, we could have gotten through the line by working together in half the time, by teamwork, helping each other out.

(of course, I would have made this fictitious person late for class also, but…)

I heard a pastor speak on community a few weeks ago. That’s become a buzzword of late in our Christian subculture, but there’s something to it. Ecclesiastes tells us that, “Two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor. For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up” (Ecclesiates 4:9-10, NASB). The thrust, I think, of what God’s trying to tell us is that we just aren’t really experiencing the Christian life if we’re not living in community, closely connected with other Believers. And the bottom line is that we can’t produce that with church programs. It has to come from within us, within our hearts, ultimately from Christ.

He never meant for us to do this alone. Ever wonder why we so often try?

By the way, someone let me know yesterday that the settings were set too restrictive and not everybody could leave comments on here. So I fixed the settings, and everyone should be able to comment now. Let me know what you think!

I’m sorry, but when I wrote the title in this thing, I was flashing back to the first Batman movie like back in the 80’s, when the Joker’s riding that big float in the parade at the end of the movie right before they release the gas, and Prince’s song was playing in the background…”Trust, who do ya?”

Okay, that was a total butterfly…

I’ve been reading through John in the mornings, and I had an “ah-hah” moment this morning. Like, you know how you’ll read something that you’ve read over and over and over since you were a kid, and then one day the Spirit just reaches out of the page and slaps you right in the face, and you get something out of it that you’ve never gotten before? Well, I had an “ah-hah” moment this morning, and so I had to share it tonight.

We’ve all read the verse over and over and over, and probably even memorized it. Jesus was saying, “Your heart must not be troubled. Beleive in God; believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if not, I would have told you. I am going away to prepare a place for you” (John 14:1,2, HCSB). Great verse. There’s a lot in there. What I’ve always gotten out of that verse is that we shouldn’t stress over stuff in this life, because He’s coming back for us.

But I read that this morning, and a different set of words literally just jumped off the page at me. “…if not, I would have told you.” I can almost hear Jesus saying, “Guys, if wouldn’t tell you this if it weren’t true.”

But when I read that this morning, and I stopped, and re-read it like 3 times, the Spirit just whispered in my ear, “You can trust Me!” And that sounds simple, but think about it. I get stressed sometimes. I’m a full time grad student, and I have term papers coming out of…well, let’s just say I’ve got a lot of them right now. Time is an issue. Money is an issue. Friendships can be an issue. And I get stressed. I get stressed because I stop realizing that God will handle it. “You can trust Me.” In fact, here’s how The Message paraphrases the 1st part of that passage: “Don’t let this throw you. You trust God, don’t you? Trust me.”

He can handle whatever it is that I’m stressed about. I just need to trust Him to do it.

Trust, who do ya?

If you listen really close, I think you’ll hear Him whispering in your ear.

“You can trust Me.”

Remember, when you were a kid, how amazing balloons were? Balloons signified birthday parties, New Year’s parties, carnivals…they symbolized many things, but one thing was always in common…fun! Balloons meant fun!

(well, I knew a girl once who had a phobia of clowns…so they probably didn’t mean fun for her…but we won’t go there)

Did you ever pop a balloon on purpose? I did. It used to be hysterical to sit on it and pop it, just to scare someone else in the room. Ah, the things that used to amuse us! The balloons that symbolized so much fun to us, we destroyed, and somehow thought it was cool.

My emotional balloon gets really full of hot air sometimes. I get way too proud for my own good. About a year ago, God really started working on me about pride. I remember asking Him to show me the areas of my heart that contained pride, but really being horrified at what He showed me. I struggle with pride. I suppose it stands to reason. Artists love appreciation. I love it when people read something I’ve written, watch one of my plays, hear me speak at an event, and tell me how great a job I did and how much it “moved” them. Because I was educated in a secular performing arts environment, where the ultimate reward, the only thing worth seeking after, was the applause of the audience. I had no clue until about a year ago how proud I tend to be.

So I had to start taking that balloon, and popping it. Sit on it, blow it up, get rid of it. Because pride is never held in high esteem by God. It’s what got Satan kicked out of Heaven. It’s what caused the Fall…Adam and Eve wanted to be like God. We don’t want to get rid of it though, because it makes us feel good. Something happened tonight that, as much as I would never admit it, trashed my pride. Slammed it to the mat. But by trashing my pride, God did exactly what He needed to do.

He woke up the right people…He just chose to pop a balloon to do it.

My balloon.

Good for Him.

I was watching this special episode of “Cops” tonight (go ahead…laugh!)…it was a special about NOPD dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. So this one officer that the camera was following went into his own house, and it was a disaster…furniture smashed up against walls, walls green with mold where water had been…a mess. He was salvaging some pictures off the walls, and he said something like how he was glad that his wife wasn’t there to see it, because all of their dreams had been built there and to see the devastation would have been more than she could bear.

I guess I started thinking about building dreams. I have the worst habit of building my dreams on financial stability and professional success. I concern myself a lot with my bank accounts, investments, and where I’m going to get published. Sometimes I forget why God called me to write in the first place…to reach people, to encourage people, to communicate Him. That’s where my dreams should be built, not in how much money I get from it all. Being a grad student has been good for me, because my income is about a quarter of what it once was, and it’s forced me to be less materialistic. Funny how God works, isn’t it?

Jesus reminded us that, “…where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Luke 12:34, NKJV). The place where we are focused is where we will build our dreams. God wants us to focus on Him, and build our dreams there, to invest in what will last forever, not what will go away in a few years.

I guess I build my spiritual dreams on investments that have a low expectancy of return, when I could just as easily invest them into something with a huge rate of return. If that were my retirement portfolio, it would be a no-brainer.

But I guess that, spiritually, it is my retirement portfolio, isn’t it?

I hope I retire well, don’t you?