Have you ever felt like you are standing with your hand waving in the air, ‘pick me, pick me?’ Maybe as adults we don’t really do that but I think we all have that desire to be picked. Chosen. We ask: Pick me for the job. Pick me because I have something valuable to offer. And sometimes it seems that everyone else is getting ‘picked’ except for you.
I can remember those school play yard games where two kids were picked as ‘captains’ for a rousing game of dodgeball and then proceeded to pick team members. I hated those days.
I was usually the last of the kids picked. It could be because I hated the thought of throwing a ball– hard!–on purpose at someone and having it thrown–hard!–at me. Ouch!
It’s not that I didn’t try at athletics. In middle school I tried track, basketball, and volleyball. I discovered I didn’t like running. Ugh. And I really didn’t like having a ball flying through the air at me. That ball always seemed to connect with my nose as evidenced by a permanent black and blue mark across the bridge of my nose that shows up when I am exhausted. I know, I know…my hands are for catching the ball, not my face.
But really? I think it was those traumatizing days of school yard dodge ball that made me hate trying to catch a ball or toss one over the net. Suffice it to say–I was not in the first round pick or the second or the third, but dead last. I tried not to let it hurt, I mean I completely understand why I wasn’t picked first, but being last? over and over? It felt like rejection to me. I was in a different elementary school every year, and every year became a year I could ‘start over’, but the outcome was the same: ‘last pick’.
It’s funny how we carry childhood wounds and hurts into our adult lives, some of those wounds being pretty obvious, but the innocuous ones, the ones that are easy to hide beneath bravado and arrogance and pride and independence, those are the ones that affect our lives in a subtle, but significant way.
One of the ways this epidemic of being picked last in is evidenced in the difficulty in accepting the truth that I am chosen by God–because he wants me not because he has to.
‘For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight,’ Ephesians 1:4. How about if we replace the pronoun ‘us’ with our name? What if we read it like this: ‘For he chose Jessica in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight’. Try reading it with your name in place of the ‘us’. What is your reaction? When I first allowed that truth to be revealed to me, I followed it with a ‘but…’.
But as I go deeper with God, this truth becomes something I cannot ‘but’ away, but need to face head on and decide if I am going to embrace this truth that God chose me, long before I raised my arm, waving, ‘pick me, pick me’. For this truth to become embraceable I need to lay aside the identity of ‘last pick’ and decide that God’s opinion is ultimately the most important one there is to cling to. He calls me chosen.
He picked me. He picked you. Long ago. Before we even got to the playground of life we were ‘picked’. Chosen. That’s part of your identity. That’s part of mine. That’s one of the words we should hear when we look into that mirror. Will you open your ears to hear that truth or are you stuck following it with a ‘but…’.
Friends, I pray that you will embrace ‘chosen’ as part of your identity and if embracing chosen is an area where you are strong in, find someone to encourage in that truth. Tell them God chooses them. Tell them that God picks them first. I’ll go first….
You are picked! By our loving, loving God. In fact he says:
Mirror mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all….
The face looking back at me runs through the litany of comments….
fat
ugly
selfish
prideful
wounded
graceless
blunt
tactless
opinionated
dominating
controlling
manipulative
jealous
this list could grow and continue and morph into whatever you see or hear when you look into the mirror.
Mirror mirror on the wall….you are a liar or maybe I am the one with the warped perceptions of myself.
I have seen the truth of these words in myself, but also within these words I have seen the lies.
The reality is that I can be domineering. I can be controlling. I can be ugly. I am wounded. I have wounded. I can be graceless. I can be blunt.
But the truth is that my wounds can be used for God’s glory. The truth is that when I wound, I can experience the beautiful gift of forgiveness. The truth is when I am domineering I have the opportunity to submit to the control of my holy, loving, gracious God. The truth is that all the parts of who I am–the good, the bad and the ugly– are all a part of me and who am I to reject what I see in the mirror. Rather than rejecting the ‘less than’ part of myself what if I were to offer those parts of me up to Jesus and surrender to whatever he wants to do to turn those weaknesses into a strength.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not giving myself license to be the worst side of me, I am giving myself grace to grow into the best side of me and that side is only found in Jesus Christ. If I am going to grow then I can expect failures. But failures are not a sign that I failed per se, they are an opportunity to grow in a specific tangible way. Only in him can we be our best and if we detect patterns of thought that produce our worst, and we don’t hold them up to him like a child holding up a broken lovey and saying ‘fix?’ then I am not submitting to whatever he wants to do to turn those weaknesses into strengths.
the truth within these words is that there is redemption through Jesus Christ.
Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all….
Is it our name that makes us who we are or who we are that marks us with our identity?
How many feuds have been won and lost simply over a name: The McCoys and Hatfields, The War of the Roses, or The MacDonalds and the Campbells. If you were born a Campbell you were feuding with the MacDonalds whether you were aware of it or not. You were entwined into the family feud based on your birth, not by your choice.
Our identity is found in many things: Our family name. Our family history or our lack of family history. Our accomplishments. Our failures. Our fears. Our successes. Our strengths. Our weaknesses.
And it is those very things that can stand in the way of identifying ourselves in Christ. He is where we find our identity, but so often life confuses us and blinds us and we come to Christ recognizing him as our Savior, but struggling to recognize him as Lord. Is this where we fall short in surrendering our identity for his? We recognize him as our Savior, but don’t know how to make him our Lord? The battle for lordship begins and ends with identity.
Who do you say you are?
I say I am a wife, ‘just’ a mom to some, but ‘mom!’ to the four people that matter. I homeschool and in some circles that is celebrated and in some circles it is ridiculed. I am flawed. I find it difficult to forgive myself. I label myself: failure. reject. My mistakes replay in my mind like a broken record.
Who does Christ say you are?
Christ says I am chosen. I am blameless. I am enough. I am approved. I am free. I am righteous. I am an heir. I am a royal priest. I am a minister. I am loved. I am forgiven. I am His.
Did I become each of these things the moment I accepted Christ as my Savior? Yes. However, did I believe them immediately? No. Honestly, accepting my new identity in Christ has taken me many years to embrace, and it has become part of my transformation.
Gideon (Judges 6-7) hid in a winepress while threshing grain because he was hiding from his enemies when an angel appeared to him and called him a ‘mighty man of valor’.This angel proceeded to launch Gideon on a path of bravery and courage. But, Gideon had to be thinking, ‘Are you kidding? I am hiding! I’m too scared to thresh this grain in broad daylight and you call me what?’
Could Gideon have called himself a coward? Did he take that on as his identity? I believe he might have. But God called him by another name. God wanted him to grow into his new identity.
Craig Groeschel writes in his book ‘Altar Ego‘: ‘Gideon, empowered by God, grew into the true meaning of his name. God will do the same of you, but you must be willing to let go of the old name to grow into the fullness of your true identity.’
There are two things that I see in this quote and in the story of Gideon:
Gideon was empowered by the Holy Spirit
Gideon had to be willing to let go of his old identity
We can do nothing outside of the power of the Holy Spirit. Absolutely nothing. We can tell ourselves we are chosen and hope that we will begin to believe it if we repeat it to ourselves long enough, but for that belief to become really real to us we must turn to the Holy Spirit to empower that belief in us. Rather than repeat ‘I am chosen’ we say ‘Holy Spirit, empower me to believe that I am chosen.’
The second thing we have to do is to put aside our old identity. So that means we put aside the label of rejected. or failure. or loser. or successful. We have to be willing to let it go and be willing to grow into the fullness of our true identity in Christ through whatever means he chooses to use.
This is where our identity in Christ and his lordship in our life come to a cross roads because sometimes the ‘whatever means he chooses to use’ leads us down a road that we would not willingly choose to go on if we knew exactly what was around the bend. Sometimes that identity of who we are in Christ comes to us like a sunrise and sometimes it comes to us through a disaster, but the means is not the end goal. The end goal is for each of us to become who Christ says we are:
Which does the Lord want? Does he want my commitment or does he want my surrender? What exactly do these two words mean? I tell myself that I need to be more committed to spending time with the Lord. I need to be committed to loving people and serving others. But it is hard. I have weeks where I fail more than I succeed. And then I have weeks where I don’t do so bad. But it’s in the empty weeks where I stumble and fall and see just how clearly wretched I can be and how I just don’t want to do ‘this’ anymore because it is so so hard. So I looked up these couple of words and I found something I hadn’t known before.
Surrender:
to yield something to the possession of power to another
to give oneself up in to the power of another
to give up, abandon, or relinquish
to yield in favor of another
Commitment
to pledge
to bind or obligate
to give in trust or charge
to entrust for safekeeping
to do, perform
to engage oneself
The differences are subtle and it would be easy to exchange one for the other and mean the same thing, but I see something different between the two that is vital. It appears that with commitment I still retain authority over whether or not I commit. Commitment involves me doing something–pledging, obligating, or giving someone charge of something. Surrender involves yielding. Yielding is getting out of the way and giving authority of oneself up to the Lord.
I have been committed without surrender. Commitment without surrender has led to my lack of consistency in my walk with Christ. When I commit without surrender I am telling myself that I get to choose when and where I am committed to Christ. Maybe it’s just on Sunday mornings or when I am out and about, but the commitment can wane when I am with my family and I allow myself to act and say things that I would never dream of acting or saying to anyone else.
But surrender is where consistent Christ-living occurs. Surrender must be active and present for commitment to become woven into our daily moments no matter what we face. Maybe I need to be less of a committed Christian and more of a surrendered Christian. Maybe our churches need to preach more about surrendering instead of committing. Maybe we have it backwards.
Surrender first. Yield oneself to the power and grace of the Lord. Surrender all we are and hope to become. Surrender our pain and our joys. Surrender our wills to the one who knows us better than we know ourselves. Surrender to the One who holds us in his palm and whispers love to us in the darkest of days and deepest of nights.
Commitment second. Once surrender occurs, commitment is a natural progression. Surrendering leads to a people working through the power of the Holy Spirit and commitment alone leads to a people working through themselves which leads to inconsistency and legalism. Surrender is a yielding to the Lord’s authority and then giving him our pledge to live as he would have us to live. Without surrender commitment is empty and becomes a choice.
I know that each day I need to get up and surrender again. And sometimes I need to surrender every moment to the One who is my hope. I wish I could say this is an easy thing, but my heart deceives and who can know it? It is a fight to remain in that surrendered place and so I often I slip out of it without even realizing it.
I can only describe my experience with slipping out of that surrendered place and it usually starts with a dissatisfaction with the way things are. I begin looking around at all the pain and hurts in those around me and myself. I begin to focus on the unanswered prayers or the news that smacks me around and down. I begin being too aware of my present and not aware enough of his presence. These are clues that I have slipped out of surrender. Another clue is when commitment wanes and becomes too hard.
It’s both surrender and commitment. Working together. Complementing each other. Bringing purpose to our days. I need to choose both. Surrender and commitment, but commitment becomes a whole lot easier if I surrender first. Surrender is a loss of freedom that gives me freedom to commit and live for the Lord. It’s both and.
I have been pondering growth a lot lately. It is probably due to this conference I have been asked to participate in that has me thinking about soil and seeds and water and nutrients.
I watched my babies grow and celebrated each milestone and worried over each delayed milestone. In parenting I have felt the pressure that all children should be experiencing this or that by a certain age even though it is common knowledge that not one child is like the other and therefore have different rates of growth and achievement.
At times that’s been difficult to remember.
I am at a point in my parenting where I am, at times, anxiously waiting for the seeds that I planted into my kids’ hearts to take root and grow. When they were young I amended their heart’s soil by adding in the nutrients of unconditional love, which did what was best for them and not necessarily what they wanted.
I planted the seeds of kindness, selflessness, respect, responsibility, repentance, and forgiveness. I hopefully gave them the right tools to tend to the garden of their souls.
I watered it with gentle responses (at times not so gentle and thank God for their forgiving hearts). I watered it with showing them kindness and respect. I watered it with humbling apologizing for my own parenting failures. I water it with prayer.
Now I wait. I continue to plant those seeds, but now I wait.
I wait for God to give the growth. I can walk my kids through the steps of what selflessness looks like. Maybe it’s seeing trash on the floor and instead of walking by it, we go together to pick it up and throw it away. Or maybe it’s doing a sibling’s chore. And sometimes it’s walking with them through the repentance and forgiveness process for something they did wrong.
But I wait for God to cause those seeds to grow in their hearts. I cannot make them grow. I cannot force them grow. I want to though.
Especially when it’s hard to wait on God.
This is part of my rest. This is part of my desperation for God. It’s the waiting on him. It’s the stilling of my mind and soul and emotions to be still in his presence and whisper, ‘God? Here I am. I am a jumbled mess. But here I am.’ and then be quiet.
Being quiet in God’s presence takes practice. It takes discipline. It takes moments of failure to train our minds to be quiet. To be quiet of worry, but to be loud in pondering the nature of God:
The goodness of Him.
The mercy.
The kindness.
The love of God, the love so overwhelming that it drives out all fear.
The power of God that causes those seeds to grow.
You are a seed planter. Plant your seeds and wait on God to water them and grow them.
Resting is one of the most difficult thing for me to do. I usually have a book in hand, design articles to peruse, photography tutorials to practice, or talking to whoever is nearby. If I actually rest, where I close my eyes and still my body and quiet my mind, I last for about 30 minutes. I call it my power nap and it is really effective, but the kind of rest I am pondering for the new year is a different kind of rest.
It is the first week of 2016 and I am surrounded by resolutions and goals and I have decided to rest. Here I have a new year at my finger tips to accomplish goals and I choose to rest? Is it really a code name for ‘lazy’? Is it a cop-out?
Just as desperation is my resolve this year, rest is my means of feeding that desperation.
Isaiah 30:15a ‘In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength’.
I believe that God is for me–he is for everyone who put their trust in him– and if I believe he is for me than I know that he says that I am an overcomer.
The thing is, when I hear the word ‘overcomer’ I don’t think of desperation and rest. I think of fighting and battling and not giving up. However, this verse talks to me of repentance and rest.
Repentance is one step to overcoming.
Repentance is turning from that which hinders my walk with Christ.
Rest is being confident that I cannot save myself, it is a gift of God.
Rest is a unencumbered trust in my Lord.
When I repent and rest in the Truth, I find my salvation. I find peace. I find that the everyday gunk of life is not insurmountable.
Rest is my strength.
I don’t feel strong after a session of worrying. I feel weak and hopeless. I don’t feel desperate for the Lord. I feel desperate to fix a situation that I have no way to fix. Worrying and fretting weakens the power of prayer and prayer becomes the last thing I resort to instead of being the first weapon I pick up.
It sounds a little like upside down thinking, but I have found that quieting my mind, will, emotions, and trusting God’s heart for me to be the greatest thing I can do to strengthen my soul.
