Saturday, June 03, 2006

LBY Week 10: The Biggie (self-control)

What a finish... and what a start.

Wow, did I need this week. As I would tell Jenn when we would be having our IM sessions during the video segments, Beth was POKING me this week. Tonight, yeah, as I was watching the video (more on that in a minute) but she was poking me most energetically through the five days of Bible lessons in Week 10 in the book. I needed every one of those days. I think most people probably do. I needed to think about what comes out of my mouth, and what goes into it. I needed to think about a respectful life of self-control vs. the opposite. I needed to think about the waste of effort that it is to pursue things. I needed to think about what I allow to enter my mind, what I allow to cling to me. And most of all I needed to think about the self-discipline -- self-control -- that I lack in the area of a daily walk with God.

There have been times in my life when I got up early. These times have never lasted long, except for the two years that I got up at 5 AM three days a week because I had to be at work at 6:15. During these times I would get up, get some housework done, get some exercise in, and spend some time praying (often with my husband) and reading the Bible and just communing with God before all the distractions of the day set in. Every time I've managed to do this I've been blown away by how much better it feels to be looking at work completed and reflecting on my spiritual breakfast at 8:30 or 9:00, instead of rolling out of bed and stumbling to my e-mail. And yet I always fall back into the pattern of sleeping late and foregoing the very real satisfaction I get from self-discipline. Self-control is like that -- it feels so good after you exercise it that you wonder why you ever don't. Until the next opportunity comes along. In my case, anyway. I have always envied people for whom this sort of thing came more naturally. But you know what? If it came naturally to me, then God wouldn't be about to use it to teach me what I hope I have the strength to learn, and that's the good that comes out of doing it even when it doesn't come naturally.

Tonight in the video session (after we were introduced to the Beth puppet in possibly the funniest scene I've seen on the Internet this year) Beth spent a good amount of time talking about our bodies, and moderation, and being temples of the Holy Spirit, and that's all well and good. I needed to hear it; I know I fall on the Neglect side of the scale and that's something for me to work on. But what I most needed from tonight was the Hannukah section at the end -- my own Hannukah -- my own rededication (Hannukah, for those who don't happen to have just watched a video discussing the topic, being the Jewish holiday that commemorates the rededication of the temple after it was profaned during the second century BC). And I think I need some accountability partners in this. It will be especially difficult since right now we don't have an alarm going off at our house; since T's been off work we've all just kind of slept until we felt like waking up. Which is a wonderful kind of feeling, especially when you have your husband in bed all warm next to you. But even more than I need that wonderful feeling, I need some time to build the foundation for my day in prayer, in the Word, in some good old virtuous labor, before I get caught up in stuff like school and child-tending and the Internet (I am a little fly, stuck in the world-wide web, all wrapped up. Speaking of addictions and new starts). Would you other LBY ladies (and of course anyone else who feels led) pray for me in this? Would you even check up on me -- ask me how I'm doing in it? Thank you.

So. I might as well start tomorrow, Saturday and all. Ack. I can't do this. But He can through me.

Addie	Heather*	Carol
M	Rach	Jeana
Jenn	Amanda	MamaB
GiBee	Boomama	Maria
Blair	Heather	Nancy
Janna	Flipflop	Robin
Sherry	Patricia	Tara
Lauren	HolyMama!	Faith
Christy	Eph2810	Karin
Leann	Rachel	Janice
This is a list of the women participating in the study and the links to their blogs. New postings on the study will be published for the next ten weeks, between Friday 8pm - Saturday 8am. Please feel free to visit each of us and comment. Everyone is welcome to participate in this discussion as we seek to live beyond ourselves. May God bless you richly from the hearing of His word.

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Living Beyond Yourself, Week 6

What do you mean, it's not Friday? It's Thursday? Oh, so I'm early? Ah. Six days late. I see.

Ahem.

I might have gone ahead and let this one slide by without a post, seeing has how I should be doing one tomorrow evening for week 7, but this was possibly a life-changing study for me, so I wanted to share a few things, even though it's way off-schedule and will confuse everyone and they'll have to reset the atomic clock because Rachel is never late with anything so it must be wrong.

Ahem again.

Anyway. Life-changing, yes, back to that life-changing bit. Much as the first week of this study revolutionized my prayer life (thinking of it as 'pouring out' and 'pouring in' rather than the drier kind of confess/thank/ask paradigm I've heard discussed makes a wonderful difference), I think Week Six, which I actually completed earlier this week, is going to revolutionize my thought life and my practical day-to-day existence, in two major areas. If I let it.

First was that bit about judgment. I've always kind of pushed aside the judgment issue by bringing forward the idea of discernment and making right judgments and not being hypocritical. Not to downplay any of those; it's very important to use discernment and make right judgments and avoid hypocrisy. But that doesn't give me carte blanche to throw around condemning comments and snide thoughts like I have been known to do. (Not to anyone's face. Not that that's an excuse. It's just that I'm so nonconfrontational, you see.) I'll give an example. There is a person I know. This person has, well, really ungodly priorities, and really non-family-friendly priorities (do you see how neutral I'm being here? I'm not saying "screwed-up priorities" even though I really wanted to. Oops.), and these wrong priorities affect my husband (and hence our family) in a very real and negative way. Now, I don't think there's a problem with that sentence, if you leave out that first parenthesis; it's a simple statement of fact. Where I have gone wrong so many times in the past is in going beyond that simple statement of fact and into some really ugly territory where I assume things about this man's relationships with his family members, and I call him rude names when I'm talking about him with my husband, and I complain about him to my friends, and the things I have thought about him are really not fit to type. I've always known that this isn't really a Christian kind of attitude to have (especially that last part) but I did a lot of rationalizing. I was entitled to think and talk like that. The man hurts me. He endangers the man I love. He angers me.

I can't rationalize it anymore. And this person isn't the only one who has inspired this kind of reaction in me, as God showed me when I asked Him to. God has really laid on my heart that this reaction is wrong, plain and simple. I'm putting this in writing here so that I have some accountability, to myself and maybe to others, so that I don't ease back into a wrong mindset, quench the Holy Spirit, and give up on the painful and difficult Eustace-the-dragon type of change that I know God wants me to experience in this area.

Now for the second major change God is bringing about in me. I cannot even remember what passage triggered this thought, but at one point during the study on patience I had a sudden mental image of what would happen if God reacted to me with the same merciful patience (what a beautiful, wonderful concept all by itself -- merciful patience) as I show my children. I mean, let's take, for a quick example, something that happens in my house on very nearly a daily basis: My children have just thoughtlessly made a mess of something I have just finished cleaning (or folding, or whatever). My reaction is to, in super-intellectual psychology parlance, blow a gasket. Sometimes I yell. I rant and rave about how if you CARED at all about your mother's feelings and sanity you would THINK about what you're doing and not just WRECK half an hour of her work in one fell SWOOP (emphasis in original).

Which is exactly the opposite of how God deals with me. And that's a good thing, or I'd have been struck by lightning and smashed flat as a pancake, oh, say, five thousand times by now.

But really, how often do I thoughtlessly discard what God has done? How often do I cause people to think less of Him because I am His child? How often do I undo His good work because I'm just not thinking? Too often to contemplate, really. Probably far more often than such a thing is done to me.

And how often does he rain down a (justifiable) punishment on me?

Um, never. He never does. He pours down grace instead. I kind of picture him standing there with his hands on his hips and one eyebrow arched, waiting for me to turn around and see him and go, oh yeah, oh gosh, I'm so sorry, and fall into his arms, and stay there until the next time I wander off and do something stupid.

So. This doesn't mean my children will now live in a free-for-all. Merciful patience does not preclude well-administered, thoughtful, gentle, loving discipline. It does mean that I hope -- I pray -- that I can call that mental image to mind, the one of the pancake-flattening lightning-striking God who doesn't exist, the next time I am about to let loose with an impatient and unmerciful reaction to one of the people whom I love most in the world.

And this is why even if I got nothing else out of this whole study -- and I did, I'm loving it, I'm loving seeing other people's reactions to it, and wasn't Beth's hair in the week 6 video so nice and puffy and Texasy and 80's-ish? You know what's really fantastic, is to watch the video at the same time as someone else and then you can IM each other when Beth reaches right through the screen and POKES you with that sizzling-cattleprod-of-conviction thing she uses sometimes -- anyway, I digress. If I got nothing else out of it, it would be worth every minute and every penny a thousand times over to have got the message that God used this study to give me this week.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Living Beyond Yourself, Week 3: Rejection

Once again, this is mostly lifted from notes I took as I was listening to the session this week, and so it's got a kind of utter lack of coherence stream-of-consciousness flow thing going on. It doesn't help that it's 2:30 AM as I'm posting this. Um, yikes.

I know this is in the middle of the week -- too late for last week and too early for this week. It's my hope that I'll post again on Friday night with things I learn from the homework this week, and this will be a sort of makeup lesson for what I should have done last weekend.

I don't know if I ever made a conscious decision not to open myself up to people. I have noticed throughout my adult life that I have a very hard time getting close to people and making friends in real life, but I have always assumed this is because I am unlikeable, because nobody wants to get close to me. Which is definitely possible; I can be pretty annoying. But maybe part of the issue is that I find it easier to shrug and say "whatever", and avoid making the effort, because I'm afraid of the rejection that could well ensue (see above re: pretty annoying). What Beth said about loving the people we already love without adding any more actually rang quite true for me. Most of the people in my life who are close to me, from my family and my husband to my dearest friends, have known me for ages, in many cases since my childhood. These are the people with whom I feel comfortable, because I know they can't give up on me this late in the game. :) Actually, I'm close to a few people who live far away as well; I have more online friends than real-life ones. I have never tried to deny that this is at least partly because I'm more confident in online settings: I have time to collect myself, I know nobody's looking at my ugly nose or my upper lip that needs waxing or my stupid expressions. It isn't that I'm not myself online; it's just that I'm... maybe a slightly better version of myself. A slightly Photoshopped version, if you will. I'm more at ease, that's for sure. Overall, I have built this little life for myself, with a solid inner circle of people (husband, family, friends) who love me unconditionally, and outside of that there's this small cloud of friendly acquaintances who care about me but with whom I don't have the kind of relationship where I would feel comfortable, say, exchanging embarrassing secrets or letting them see me in a swimsuit, and then there's the rest of the world and I don't let myself be bothered by whether they care about me or not. And that's been the way of things since childhood, when the outside world (school) was a world of torment and the inner circle (home) was... well, not exactly perfect. But full of love and very, very safe. It's not even an effort to maintain this separation anymore. In fact I never even thought hard about it, until just now.

Beth talks about "taking off our rejection," as if it were a garment or (in her illustration) a pair of sunglasses. The thing is, rejection formed so much of the foundation of my life, I don't think I can "take it off". Hmm. I know Someone who can. But I don't know if I can let Him do that. Which reminds me of Eustace the dragon in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, even though that's a picture of sin and salvation. (sooner or later it all comes back to literature, doesn't it, Rachel.)

re: Rejection leaving a vacancy that we'll allow undesirable stuff in to fill: That is the story of my high-school love life. Do we need to go into more detail than that? I don't think so. Praise God for sending me this wonderful man early in my life before I had time to give myself any more regrettable memories in this department.

Beth talked at length about being rejected by people whom we have loved. I couldn't think of a situation where I've truly loved someone and they've rejected me, other than the traumatic-at-the-time-but-somewhat-silly-in-retrospect breakups with boyfriends when I was a teen. And I can honestly say that (probably thanks to the fact that I have such an amazing marriage and I know that this marriage and not those relationships was God's will for my life) I've never carried those around the same way I carry around the pain of the daily cruelty at the hands of my peers in elementary school and junior high. At first this inability to think of a rejection from a loved one sounds like I must be very lucky. But then when I really think about it, I think maybe it means that I shut people out before they can get that close. Thus far and no further; I can like you and you can like me, we can enjoy each other, but let's not go so far as love, I say to most people -- not that I ever have to say it out loud, because honestly not that many people want to come close. Which comes back to that unlikeable bit. But anyway. I think about attempting to let more people in -- about making the effort, about, I don't know, what do people in real life do? call up that other mom from the nursery and see about getting together for lunch? -- and my first reaction is, why would I want to do that? I have enough people who love me. Then I scratch a little below the surface and realize that the real reasons behind that thought are that a) I'm clueless as to how you do things like that and b) I'm scared stiff. Lord help me, I'm petrified.

Something to ponder: I had never thought about my painful childhood memories as a way to empathize with Christ's sufferings. It's not that I sit around dwelling on the awful stuff that people did to me at school -- well, not much of the time anyway, although it is something that affects many of my decisions and passions -- but in the future when I feel compelled to relive some of the more painful moments (hmm, would this be the dog biscuits in the lunch bag? The Rachel Germs on the playground? No, I know, it'll be the Xerox copies of the embarrassing crush letter -- with the picture I drew of the two of us dancing -- posted on every vertical surface at the junior high), I can remember: This, and so much more -- so AWFULLY much more, He endured, for me. And maybe that's part of why He allowed all that painful stuff to happen. Which, honestly, helps a lot.

Addie	Heather*	Carol
M	Rach	Jeana
Jenn	Amanda	MamaB
GiBee	Boomama	Maria
Blair	Heather	Nancy
Janna	Flipflop	Robin
Sherry	Patricia	Tara
Lauren	HolyMama!	Faith
Christy	Eph2810	Karin
Leann	Rachel	Janice
This is a list of the women participating in the study and the links to their blogs. New postings on the study will be published for the next ten weeks, between Friday 8pm - Saturday 8am. Please feel free to visit each of us and comment. Everyone is welcome to participate in this discussion as we seek to live beyond ourselves. May God bless you richly from the hearing of His word.

Saturday, April 08, 2006

Living Beyond Yourself, Week 2: The Practicalities of Living in the Spirit

I'm actually on time. Wow. (I took notes while I watched the session and took a few minutes before heading for our Awana car race day to fill in gaps and post them.)

Being filled with the Spirit is practical in two different ways. First, being on fire for God changes your life. Living the Spirit-filled life is a completely different experience than living in the flesh.

Conversely, a life in the Spirit *requires* some practical differences. I can't be filled if I don't actually take the time and make the effort to allow that to happen. God will fill me -- that's His job and not mine -- but I have to let Him. I have to make it a priority for myself.

How do we get filled?

First, you can't be indwelt by the Holy Spirit without trusting in God, accepting his Son's sacrifice, etc. That's the indwelling of the Spirit.

The filling is a slightly different concept. That's a day-by-day thing. As Beth Moore put it so simply and eloquently, you have to have a pouring out (essentially confession), a pouring in (asking the Lord to fill me with Himself), and a pouring forth (going about living the Spirit-filled life). Practically. Daily. Without this, the Spirit still lives in me -- I can't shake Him -- but trust me I know from much experience that a life without this sort of daily interaction is a life where the life of the Spirit is on the back burner at best. It's rockier, emptier, more trying, more hectic. And far less fulfilling.

A couple other things Beth Moore said in this session that stood out to me:

• Nothing that sin can give us is worth what it takes from us.

• Rather than spending our lives 'squashing' desires, if we let the Lord, he will change our desires.
  

Also, I have to say, this getting-in-the-Word-every-day thing is doing me a world of good. It truly is. I've tended to stay away from "fill in the blank"-style studies, but this one really has you turning pages, and as I told my husband, it's almost like having a discussion. The book talks and I answer and then the book talks again. I can recommend it, even though chapter summaries have generally spoiled me for this method. :)

Addie	Heather*	Carol
M	Rach	Jeana
Jenn	Amanda	MamaB
GiBee	Boomama	Maria
Blair	Heather	Nancy
Janna	Flipflop	Robin
Sherry	Patricia	Tara
Lauren	HolyMama!	Faith
Christy	Eph2810	Karin
Leann	Rachel	Janice
This is a list of the women participating in the study and the links to their blogs. New postings on the study will be published for the next ten weeks, between Friday 8pm - Saturday 8am. Please feel free to visit each of us and comment. Everyone is welcome to participate in this discussion as we seek to live beyond ourselves. May God bless you richly from the hearing of His word.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

This is still not my Living Beyond Yourself post.

I seriously have been thinking a great deal about the Living Beyond Yourself study. I have a lot of thoughts rattling around, and if I sat down and put them together, I think they'd make a pretty decent post about the fruit of the Spirit and what that means to believers, what it meant to me when I was first a believer (it was a husband-seeking checklist. I'm serious! and look how well that worked out for me!), and overall what it means to be a believer in the first place, in order to have the Spirit and hence have the fruit. But there are so many other things that want or need my attention -- my children, as I am in single-mom mode for a few days; this new photography project I'm doing; the actual homework for the LBY study; the laundry oh my gosh the laundry. So. As I do all these other things, I think. I stew, and I meditate, and I pray. And that might just be all the post you get for last week's LBY study. Or it might not be. I am not sure. We'll see what happens after the laundry-folding marathon.

The photography project I mentioned consists of a month-long 'challenge' sort of thing, just for myself (well, several of us from dpchallenge are doing it, but it's outside the site; it's not a contest, just a learning experience) wherein I post one new self-portrait per day for a month to this new photoblog. You read that right, self-portrait. Be afraid. Be very afraid. (I know I am.)

And with that I'm out of parentheses so I'm going to go watch the BBC P&P and fold clothes until I can't stay awake any longer.

Saturday, April 01, 2006

Living Beyond Yourself -- Week 1

Yesterday God made something serendipitous happen (as He often does) and as a result I am going to be participating in an online ladies' Bible study called Living Beyond Yourself. By virtue of having started late, however (everyone else started last Monday), I'm a little bit behind. It's my hope that by the end of the weekend or early next week I'll have today's post for this study ready to share, and from then on I'll try, by the grace of God, to be regular as clockwork (because, you know, that's just the way I am... not) and post my thoughts each Friday night or Saturday morning.

Addie	Heather*	Carol
M	Rach	Jeana
Jenn	Amanda	MamaB
GiBee	Boomama	Maria
Blair	Heather	Nancy
Janna	Flipflop	Robin
Sherry	Patricia	Tara
Lauren	HolyMama!	Faith
Christy	Eph2810	Karin
Leann	Rachel	Janice
This is a list of the women participating in the study and the links to their blogs. New postings on the study will be published for the next ten weeks, between Friday 8pm - Saturday 8am. Please feel free to visit each of us and comment. Everyone is welcome to participate in this discussion as we seek to live beyond ourselves. May God bless you richly from the hearing of His word.