Failing Forward

I think I've failed.  It's the first day of the second month and I'm pretty sure I failed.  I expect to do that a lot this year.  Last year felt like such a success.  I learned, I prepared, I rested and I completed.  When I was praying about my resolutions for 2019 I was nervously excited for the direction God was leading.  As I was asking God what He wanted me to work on, and set as my intention, He brought those three awful words: 

Fail with Grace 

UGHHHHHH!  I do not fail gracefully.  I have a little tiny hiccup and then I give up in a huff and get depressed.  At least that's been my pattern for a very long time.  I tend to bury my head like an ostrich in the sand of my own negative self talk.  

The lessons God has planned for us are intentional, well timed and for our good.  I have been working on breaking the habit of capitulating at the first hint of difficulty for a long time.  So I know, this year is a test.  A chance for me to see my progress, practice the lessons God has taught me and develop healthier reactions.  It requires that I am keeping my head up and my thoughts aware of how I am dealing with the challenges of learning, making mistakes and stumbling over obstacles.  

Failing with grace is the act of failing forward.  It's the intention of failing without castigating myself.  The power to chose hope over despair.  

Failure has the special challenge of misdirection.  Failure is used by the enemy to shine a spotlight on our shortcomings and mistakes.  Our enemy loves to point out our failures in every aspect of our lives.  If it doesn't cause us to stop in our tracks immediately, then it certainly gets us focused on the wrong thing and walking in the wrong direction.  A failed connection with a potential friend can send you into a tailspin trying to figure out what's wrong with you and why no one likes you.  It may lead you to the conclusion that putting work into a friendship isn't worth it.  It may cause you to strike out in anger.  What those trains of thought forget is that God uses failure to shine a spotlight on what God is doing.

God is ALWAYS going to glorify His name and is working for our good, which is just a fancy way of saying God is always teaching us.  Always.

Failure often makes us feel inadequate but that feeling often leads to the false conclusion that we can't do it at all.  Whatever that "it" is for you, trying looking at your failure through God's spotlight.  Is it calling you to endure?  Teaching you how to do better?  Showing you a different way?  Calling you to a new task?  Convicting you of sin?  Reminding you to show grace, to yourself and others?  Giving you the opportunity to be a witness?

So, my goal this year is to see my failure from God's perspective and not the enemies.  Not to see my failures as the end of the road, but just another step in the learning process.  How about you?  How do you view failure?  I'd love to hear from you!

What is Rest

I am finally going on a real adventure.  If you've been keeping up with my blog, this will sound very strange to you.  I've traveled a lot this year.  I have had tons of new and exciting things happen.  It all started when God gave me a glimpse into what He has for my future.  This doesn't happen to me very often.  God doesn't usually give me a heads up.  I know it's because I am firmly in the "Martha" camp.  When God gives me a nudge, I go into extreme prep mode.  I am so excited to have a plan to follow that I often forget my best resource and guide.  I suspect that is why, after giving me a glimpse into what He has planned, God asked me to rest.  I've talked about it on the blog, so I won't go over it again but I have been struggling this year with the question "What is rest?"  

It's been clear that God is convicting me about my definition of rest.  I fully confess that my definition of rest is "the chance to catch up".  Vacations, weekends away, I think of them as places to hide so I can finish the backlog of tasks that have built up because I couldn't say no to people.  I fear becoming lazy, or resting wrong, more than I have feared the Lord.  Over the last couple of weeks I have been having random encounters with Godly people in my life, and in my Bible study, that have brought this problem up.  

So I'm walking away.  I'm walking away from the need to fulfill any need I come across.  I'm walking away from technology.  I'm walking away from the list of things I have moved too far up on my priority list.  I am walking away from noise.  I have fasted from noise before, you can read about that here, and I expect it is going to be terribly hard.  Giving up the things I have attached my purpose and significance to is going to be hard.  That's the reason why I'm giving up all the things I distract myself with so I haven't had to address these things.  That's the reason why I have to give up these things so I can actually hear my God.

So, I am truly going on an adventure.  A quest into the deepest, darkest wilds.  I am going to leave the beaten path, the familiar trails of my life, and stop trying to make adventure happen.  I am going to dive into aloneness with intention.  To sit in the stillness.  It's going to be full of frustration, tears and sorrow but this adventure is going to teach me how to exchange those things for joy, contentment and the ability to recognize treasures of greater worth.  

Has the Lord been convicting you of something lately?  Is He asking you to do something you don't want to do?  I get it.  Let's do this together.  

The Search for Real Friendship

Pam sat there with her book open and wouldn't meet anyone's eyes.  Her hurting heart radiated off of her like a palpable wave until finally the dam broke and she began to speak, her voice raw with suppressed emotion.  Pam's story is hard but what came pouring forth wasn't her story, it was her current need.  She wanted a friend.  No one would get deep into the places she needed a companion to share with.  No one would even commit to spending time with her.  I sat in that Bible Study with a group of wildly different women in various stages of life and overwhelmingly the conversation that followed revealed a great need.  Friendship.  I thought it was just me, this loneliness, this ache to pour my heart out.  I had trained myself over the years to resist the urge.  No one had demonstrated the desire to know me.  I can barely get people to commit to hanging out.  In Christian circles we are told that's only right because we only need God.  Only He knows our hearts.  Only He can be a proper receptacle for our struggles.  But as I sat there and listened to woman after woman agree that they couldn't gather good friends no matter how much they pursued it, I was shocked.  It wasn't just me?

Is it a product of our age?  A teaching of the church?  Are we too busy getting out from under our own struggles that we can't spend ourselves on others in times of sorrow or joy?  Is it a generational thing, that we've forgotten how to hold onto people no matter what life brings?  Are there such things as deep friendships anymore?  While God will always be our best friend, the only one who will truly and completely know us and is the only perfect receptacle for our struggles, God absolutely designed us for community.  We are meant to sharpen each other, encourage each other and love each other.  

Proverbs 18:24 English Standard Version (ESV)

24 A man of many companions may come to ruin,

    but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Proverbs 18:24 is often used to remind us that God is always a better friend to us than any other but an examination of the verse reveals a more subtle truth.  There is a difference between an acquaintance and a friend.  The Proverbs are full of exhortations to surround yourself with wise people.  We are called to avoid isolation; instead, we are called to fellowship.  To hold each other accountable and encourage one another.  To love one another.

While marriage and family seem to be understood as areas of our life that are full of struggle, and therefore require effort to maintain, we have forgotten how to put effort into our friendships.  How to love through disagreement.  How to spend our time lavishly on a friend in need.  How to be more interested in being real with and for someone.  The frightening truth is that the lack of practice giving and receiving real friendship has handicapped us as we practice a friendship with a God who wants to be closer than a brother.  For Pam, she has no idea how to resolve a relationship with a God who hasn't been the friend she wants.  She can't even find an example of the body of Christ being a friends heart to her.  Like many, a disappointing attempt at friendship means walking away.  They weren't real friends to begin with, our hurting heart says.  Can you see why that proclivity might not be serving us in our friendship with God?  

It is clear that this truth has been noticed.  Blogs and sermons are trumpeting the call to hospitality.  They are encouraging us to open our doors and invite people in.  I want to add my voice to that call in a slightly different timbre.  Don't just open your doors out of Christian duty.  Open your hearts along with your doors and share yourself.  Take the time to get to know someone, don't just wave at them in the hall at church and consider them a friend.  Know their struggles and be a safe person they can talk to.  The church has taken the call to be the hands and feet of Jesus literally.  We fulfill our obligations to greet or serve communion or teach Sunday school and forget that the call to be like Jesus includes other "body parts".  Our ears, hearts and minds are also tools God uses to minister.

Be a real friend.  Reach out.  DON'T STOP!!!  

If so many of us have experienced the disappointment of failing to find real connection, that hurt is going to take some effort to overcome.  Be persistent, find your tribe.  Invite someone to join your adventure!

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Comparison - Inspiration or Pitfall?

Greetings you awesome people!  God has been working on something in me for a while and so today I'd like to talk about comparisons.  There are a couple reasons for this.  

One -  the blogging/writing word demands that you self promote until your sick of yourself, and the idea you ever wanted to be a writer in the first place, much less have time for actual writing.  All of this means you are constantly looking at other peoples stuff so that you can figure out how to do the blogging/writing thing better.  

Two -  it's a common problem.  It isn't reserved exclusively to us creative, writer types either.  It feels pretty impossible not to compare ourselves to others.

The problem of comparison is a tricky one because it has some slippery slopes that lead most people to recommend you avoid the hill all together but that's not really practical.  Learning and growing usually requires reference material.  Looking at a reference means you are looking at someone with more skill than you.  In fact, Jesus is our ultimate reference material.  The ideal to which we strive but will never attain on this side of heaven.  Not to mention we are observational creatures.  We look around.  We see stuff.  Some of that stuff is what we want for ourselves.  It can inspire, or it can lead us into a pit.

One of my groups of Bible Study ladies felt prompted to start a study on this subject and so we went and picked up the new Lifeway Study, Rachel & Leah.  At the time we decided to start this study, each of the ladies in my group shared how they were struggling with comparision in their lives.  For me, it was looking at all these well put together websites, social media accounts and blogs.  It was observing those who had acheived a level of success in writing and recognizing my lack of skill in comparison.  It was disheartening.  What's worse, I didn't think I had a comparison problem until I was prompted to share.  

This is going to be a mini review of the study itself because the journey that my group is on can't be communicated without sharing how we're interacting with the Bible Study.  

We don't like it.  Each of us has struggled to get meaning or insight or connection with any part of this study.  Some of that is because we just think differently than the author.  Some of it is because my ladies have been in consistent Bible Studies for decades and this study is just not our speed.  It doesn't erase the need or the prompt we've had to address our comparision issues.  We are praying this study has impact because it's a neccessary topic but we've been disappointed that this wasn't the huge revelation we expected when God lead us to this study.

Well, God wasn't finished with me yet.  My husband and I just started attending a new church in our area and in the bulletin was an invitation to a Summer Ladies Small Group covering the book, Unseen.  I stepped out of my comfort zone and decided to join.  I knew from the description I saw of the book that this is what I needed to continue the learning process of addressing comparison in my life.  I'm only two chapters in at this point but I can tell you God is building a lesson plan for me.  A side quest on my adventure.  A beautiful reminder that what I see as delays on my journey towards something amazing or significant aren't delays at all.  

Comparison can be a tool that you use to inspire yourself; to give you hope that, with endurance and practice, you too can reach your goal.  It can also be a tool you use to build envy, resentment, despair and surrender.  

There are many ways to combat negative comparision but I'm going to start with what I believe is the foundation.  As I have been reading Unseen, I began to look at how I viewed my mundane moments. If my mundane, nowhere, "normal", boring moments are actually the perfect opportunity to hang out with my best friend, that changes everything.  Doing chores is so much more enjoyable when done with a friend nearby to have a conversation with.  

And suddenly we aren't comparing our lack against someone else's bounty because we are full up!  Your bounty may be different than mine but we can rejoice in our mutual abundance!  

God is always going to be the catalyst to a healthy view of your life.  I can look at my friends immaculate taste in design and sigh with joy or sigh with envy. I'd rather sigh with joy and share in the look on God's face as He looks with love on His precious daughter.

I do recommend you pick up Unseen.  I invite you to join me in reading it.  Let's talk!  Your invited to come on the journey with me.

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