I don't like....

I don't like where I am at in life right now.

A friend of mine when talking about their very painful situation said "Christ is ever present in this pain. May I come out of this a stronger more faithful child of God."

At one point this is where I was too. I thought "This, this is what God is going to use." And he did but then I stopped allowing myself to be directed. Somewhere in this journey from pain to redemption I allowed the healthy self-protective mode to do the directing. I don't know when. Somewhere along the line my self-protection moved to self-preservation which has become an large increase in self centeredness.

Self self self self.

Somewhere on this path of one week, one day, one moment at a time it became one person and her survival.

Don't get me wrong, there is a time to be protective. You need to stick up for yourself, but it's funny how the moral of my recent chapter of life- trust God...no need to try to be in control- has quickly faded into the background.

I've stopped paying attention to how God can use my hurt. I stopped paying attention in everything. It has become about my survival, but this survival is lonely and the passivity of my nature right now does not encourage growth and I let it be this way. Time to change huh?

Pastor Jim talks about how prayer is one of the first spiritual disciplines to go. I think that he's right and I know that it shows in my life right now.

Walls, walls, and look more walls.

I was sitting in church this Sunday and it hit me- I'm so disgustingly self-centered. I mean I knew this, but every once and a while I come out of my self-absorbed shell and catch a glimpse of my wretchedness and Sunday was a beautiful day of just that.

All of us have walls.

All of us cope with our insecurities, our life circumstances, our pain, our hurts, and our battle scars that we feel come from others.

Little by little we allow brick by brick go to be added and the wall of protectiveness grows in height and depth keeping us safe from the hurt that is waiting around the corner. Little by little we allow that wall to become a daily part of our personality. Brick by brick our reactions to uncomfortable, bad, or even good situations are established and ingrained into our hearts.

Pretty much everyone I know has coping mechanisms that involve their walls. Some hide it better than others, some are defensive, some make jokes.....

I moved to Nashville in the spring of 2007 and self-absorption protected me. I found that it was easier to just to worry about myself rather than trying to cope with the uncertainty around me. It was easier to retreat within myself. I eventually got out of that phase and made amazing friends and probably experienced the best months of my life.

I was the new girl again recently. For a few months I worked at the Opryland Hotel.
My self absorption had taken hold again. I've been hurt and so I operate almost as a dog that has been beaten. Before people had a chance to get to show me who they were I cowered and ducked, but the way that I did this is (and I still do) is by talking about myself and not asking anyone any personal questions. If I don't know, I don't have to care, I won't get hurt.

I'm working with a lot of people that don't share my faith. How is this attitude portraying the love of Christ? It's not. How am I being a witness to the wonderful things that God has done in my life if I'm so concerned about people hurting me that I can't see past my current wounds and my potential wounds to the hurt that others feel? I'm obviously not paying attention to the wonderful things that God has done in my life. If I was, I would be secure in the fact that he's taken care of me thus far and will continue to do so. I guess as soon as we stop looking at how we've been blessed and start dwelling on how we've been hurt, we start building those walls. God forgive me for all the times that people need hope and I fail to deliver it because I'm lost in myself.

I hope this makes sense. I'm practically falling asleep as I write this.

Living in the Moment

I am literally in the final hours of my vacation. Within the past week I have spent significant time in 2 different cities and have spent approximately 40 hours of that time traveling. Most of these hours have been spent in the Atlanta airport which is where I sit now waiting for my flight.

Waiting has been a huge part of this trip and I'm not good at it. I have been described as a mover and a shaker. I don't know what that means or if I am one but I do know that I'm always on the the move. Supposedly I have been that way since day one when I decided to lift up my head not long after I was born.

I'm 5' 1.5" and my normal walking pace is faster than most, even those that with a good 6 inches on me. Fast food here in the South is not fast enough. In a group of people I usually end up making the decisions because I don't want to wait for people to make up their minds.

I don't like to wait.

I like to know what the plan is and what it will take to execute it.

But that isn't always how life works...if ever... and that causes me great anxiety.

I've been reading a lot about waiting. Waiting for God, waiting for life, waiting for change. I'm starting to think that although waiting on the Lord is a must, maybe constantly waiting for the next opportunity to happen is really not good for us. I don't mean that we need to be reckless, careless, or irresponsible, but maybe we're missing the point.

I think I've been missing the point. All I have is here and now and most of here and now I'm spending on wondering what is going to happen next and what I need to do to get there. Most days I'm so worried about what is going to happen 3 days from now that I miss the beauty that is going on around me.

We're taught to plan for our futures, our college goals (boy did I fail there!), our future spouse, our retirement, our future children. None of this is wrong in itself! But when we are no longer present because our life revolves around the future, then there is something wrong.

I've noticed this as a problem for me especially in the special someone category. When I am worrying about how I'm going to find that person and worrying about the years ahead being alone, I'm missing out on the joy that God gives me today. He has everything taken care of. I can pine and fret about the fact that I'm 27 and still no sign of Mr. Right which means I'm not going to be Mrs. Right anytime soon which means there won't be any Right children for awhile, but what the heck does that solve? What it does is it keeps me from enjoying the life I have now and that is the only life I have. I'm not promised anything but now and now is what it is supposed to be and what it is good.

I have finally finished Ruthless Trust by Brennan Manning. I have to say that it has been absolutely instrumental in me crawling out of the dark pit that I was in and it is probably the most eye opening and life changing book that I have ever read. It spoke to the heart of my anxieties and helped me find peace in my Father's arms.

I read the last few chapters in the Atlanta airport on my way to Florida. I write this now on my way home to Nashville. I never imagined when I started this blog that my "safety net" would be unsafe or be pulled out from under me. Thankfully I didn't wind up splattered on the sidewalk. God doesn't allow that. He does allow for us to free fall for awhile though.

I don't want anyone to think that I have this all down or think that I have this all together. I still wake up occasionally in a panic or am driven to tears. I still feel like I should be blessed in the ways that I feel that I should be blessed. I'm human.

Let me leave you with a few things that touched me from my friend Brennan (I've never met the man but someday, we will get coffee. I will see to it!)-

We formulate plans to fulfill what we perceive to be the purpose of our lives (inevitably limited), and when the locomotive of our longings gets derailed, we deem ourselves failures..... Our disappointments arise from presuming to know the outcome of a particular endeavor.... Entrusting ourselves to Mystery, we move forward fearlessly, knowing that the future of the planet probably does not depend on what we do next....
However, in our faithful listening to God's Word, we often neglect his first word to us--the gift of ourselves to ourselves: our existence, our temperament, our personal history, our uniqueness, our flaws and foibles, our identity. Our very existence is one of the never-to-be repeated ways God has chosen to express himself in space and time. Because we are made in God's image and likeness, you and I are yet another promise that he has made to the universe that he will continue to love it and care for it....

Trust yourself as one entrusted by God with everything you need to live life to the full.

Thanks for reading.

Love,
Erin

Enjoying the moment and dancing with Michelle in the streets of Savannah.

So I just discovered that I can blog through my phone. This could be really dangerous. I wonder if it will let me use more characters than twittering does. Probably not. Which would defeat it's purpose.

Sitting at the Thompsons

Tonight I spent the evening at the Thompson's house watching a 4 1/2 year old Jesse Thompson. We had a wonderful evening. It's been awhile since Jesse and I have had one of our "dates" and I have forgotten how much I enjoy them.

For those of you that haven't been reading my blog since the beginning of my Chicago to Nashville journey (I think there's 3 of you that read this and you all pretty much know the story), I lived with the Thompson's a year.

I moved down to Nashville with the idea that God was going to do something huge. I was awaiting what that was and while waiting (or honestly while among it because God is always doing something) I fell in love with the magic that I felt here in Nashville. And as I've talked about before everything was supposed to work out in the fashion that I thought it should.

There are a lot of memories here in this house and although I had a great time with Jesse, I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes. I realize now that I came to Nashville as a little girl and now I'm an adult (maybe I should say reaching adulthood). The Thompson's house was a place of safety for me a stepping block into the real world.

I apologize that these blogs haven't been as cheery as they were in the past. I long for the wide eyed optimism I once had. I know that I shouldn't wish it back because that was a period in my life and this is the current period of my life, but the magic, the dreams that were once there have been replaced with reality. This all sounds really depressing and although I have my moments (a moment spurred this blogging on) I'm actually doing well. Everything right now comes down to trust and trying to dream what God has for me. I want to dream again, but I've learned that my human dreams can crash and burn with more explosive power than a fuel delivery truck (that visual is for all you boys that love the action movies). I want my hope and expectation come from the knowledge that God has a purpose and a plan for me and that He is trustworthy and faithful and loves me more than any human ever could. I want to wait in anxious anticipation for the next thing that He's going to do.

Addendum to Missed the Boat

Just so everyone knows, the prior blog is about how we as the church miss the essentials sometimes. It's not a knock against anyone just an observation. If it comes off as a rant to anyone or an accusation, it was not intended to and I'm sorry.

Erin

Missed the Boat

This is whole Modernism vs. Post Modernism is frustrating. To me it seems like anytime there's a name for the era, we've probably missed the boat. Anytime we try to correct what a previous generation overlooked or overdid, we over do it or overlook it in the opposite direction. To me (and excuse my ignorance because I am not very educated in this area) it seems like the farther and farther we get away from the basics of faith and the more humans try to figure it out (I'm not condemning searching or study at all) , the more we miss it completely. It almost seems like all the profound theologians of our time are just reeling us back into that boat that swam away from.

Again I could be wrong completely, but this is what I've observed recently in myself.

So here I am at an essential part of the Christian faith again- God's Holiness. It appears that I've been swimming next to the boat while holding on to the side with one hand (I don't know if it's been port or starboard. I looked up the correct term for the side of the boat so I'd look intelligent and it appears that there's not a generic term. Oh Well.). I knew that God was holy because I was told that God was holy, but I really had no concept of what that meant.

I feel that as a product of (dare I say it) the modernist movement I was taught theology in an outline format. Here's Roman Numeral One which leads to Point A, B, and C and all their subpoints. I don't think that I ever growing up heard a sermon on God's holiness or was encouraged to relish in the mystery and expanse of it. I mean I knew that God was perfect and we were not but the vocabulary stopped there.

And again, just like love, you miss the whole point without it and I'm again a pawn in the Karma game. Everything about God is boxed in nice and neat in my little "This is What God is" box, but life is so unpredictable and terrifying when you attempt to put God there.

Sometimes I wonder (and the emphasis is on wonder) if growing up in a Christian environment did me more harm than good in the truth department. Do children's stories about God, Sunday School, and little songs do us any damage? Again, I'm wondering, not stating. I definitely see the benefits, but I also wonder about the harm. When stories about our creator become stories told with a felt board and cartoon felt characters and cute songs, when youth group becomes a quick lesson in order to maintain a teenager's attention and in that time, syrupy lessons of why they should stay morally upright, and when sermons are bullet pointed and non thought provoking, are we doing more harm than good? I know that everything I listed has it's good merits, but I'm wondering (let me stress again WONDERING) why don't we encourage our children, teenagers, and young adults to have an awe of God, an awe of his power and his love, an awe of the weight of his glory? I know that the stories are intended to do that, but I feel like we stop short of the point and make them just stories. I know that there are churches and people that are encouraging awe, I just personally feel like I didn't attend one of those churches growing up. There were probably even people at those churches that I attended that were right on the mark, but I just didn't know about them.

I feel like I'm a product of an agenda Christian upbringing and I know that I have been an agenda pushing Christian. I wish that I would have taken the time earlier on to marvel at the Holiness of God, but I didn't. I don't think I knew to and to place the blame on my upbringing completely is foolishness because at some point in my life, it became my problem. I do believe that I now have the benefit of connecting the dots of what I was taught. I have to back pedal a bit but perhaps it's better than starting with nothing. I honestly can't say, I am where I am and there's no use dwelling on it.

Okay, I didn't intend for this blog to come out this way. So I'll leave you with a bit from Ruthless Trust that I read this morning and that prompted me to think and write.

The more we let go of our concepts and images which always limit God, the bigger God grows and the more we approach the mystery of his indefinablity.....

Yet I have never in my entire life heard a homily or a sermon on the glory of God shining on the face of Jesus (2 Cor. 3:18). Perhaps the reticence that contemporary preachers feel about preaching on this topic is due to the fact that we have never been brushed by the divine kabod (my note- Early this was described as the weight, greatness, eminence, power and authority of God.). Or perhaps we simply feel incapable of articulating the concept, we sense that to address it would plunge us and our congregations into absolute mystery. And mystery is an embarrassment to the modern mind. All that is elusive, enigmatic, hard to grasp will eventually yield to our intellectual investigation, then to our conclusive categorization- or so we would like to think. But to avoid mystery is to avoid the only God worthy of worship, honor and praise.