Is it chance or God?

Often I will attribute some great event (safety driving, a break-up that led to someone dating a better
person, a random encounter that changes someone's life, or even a snow day) to the providence of God. 

But, then, aren't these things just chance? 

Don't they happen to people who don't believe in God too?

I found the following quote from Frederick Buechner, an author, to be insightful on this subject.

"The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God's things because, of course, they are both at once.  There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak--even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere.  He speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our selves and of our own footsore and sacred journeys.  

We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music.  Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement...."for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world."  He says he is with us on our journeys.  He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began.  Listen for him.  Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him."

Frederick Buechner Sacred Journeys

Top Teen Topics 3: Pressure

The most common topic to come up in my survey of "What are the issues on the minds of 14-15 year olds" was feeling pressure about grades.
 
I felt them too.  To this day, I remember getting my first B.  When I brought my report card home to my parents, I wasn't praised for the 4 or 5 As, I was asked, "Why did you get a B?"  That stuck with me a long time. 

There is a lot of pressure to be smart these days.  It goes all the way back to babyhood!  Did you ever watch those "Baby Einstein" videos growing up?  The premise behind these was that they would make babies smarter.
 
There was also a movement that encouraged pregnant parents to play classical

music to their kids in utero believing that it would stimulate brain waves!
 
No wonder there's so much pressure on kids to achieve grand academics.  Our society seems to think that intelligence will provide you the best life.
 
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this is an ideological lie. 
 
  People within the Pharisee-driven Judaism of the first century lived in a framework that said, "If you follow all the kosher rules, you can have standing before God and people."  Since the people lived in that ideology they didn't think it existed...it just was.  Jesus helped people see the ideology and that they could, and needed to, rebel against it. 

Jesus fought an ideological lie.
 
He hit this so clearly when he told a parable of a tax collector (someone not following the right rules) and a Pharisee (the assumed good guy).  In the end, it is the loser who gets honest with Father that goes home justified, not the guy who tries to act like he follows God even though his heart looks down on others.
 
Many young people today live in an ideology they don't know exists that says: intelligence is the gateway to the best, most meaningful life. 
 
Let's play a game.  Guess the answer to the following questions.
 
I have 5 daughters.  If I had to choose, would I want them to:

have a good degree or a good marriage?

graduate at the top of their class or be a good friend?

get all As or learn how to play a musical instrument?

be CEO of a successful company or raise loving children?

get a PhD or be an honest person?

go to an Ivy League college or feel loved by God?

make six-figures a year at their job or have a healthy, meaningful marriage?
 
I think the answers are pretty obvious right?  That's because you just saw through the ideological lie.  Intelligence, academic achievement, and book smarts do not necessarily make for meaningful lives.  What does, then?  Becoming a person of character, authenticity, and, finally learning how to love and be loved, or, in other words, studying relationships. 
 
If we set our sights on the long-term, we would see what truly makes a meaningful life.  And, if we believe that, we might focus our efforts in very different directions. 
 
But, alas, I leave you with a problem.  You may live inside a family or situation that pressures you to honor the lie.  This is where you may have to begin the massive, tremendously difficult part of life: to choose what's right even if you face opposition.
 

Freaking about Finals

If you look at some of my previous posts you'll see I've blogging about how to be "Ok."  When we let Father be our cup-filler, our source of peace, love, contentment, then we can give to and enjoy the people, places, and things in our lives, instead of using them to make us feel whole. 

Here's how I think this principle can play out in a real life situation: final exams. 

When you're afraid of something (that is not physically dangerous), the fear you feel is ultimately about how it will affect how you see yourself and how others will see you.  Going into exams there are a lot of expectations.  For many it is the expectations of parents that you fear.  If you don't do well, how will they perceive you?  You may also fear the judgment of your teachers.  Finally, there's always the fear of how you will feel about your own abilities.  Do you cut it?  Are you good enough?  How will you measure up to everyone else?

All of these questions come down to: whose opinion will fill your cup?  I suggest you face the fear of finals, the same way you can face every other fear: Because I am deeply loved and enjoyed in my soul of souls by Father, my life has meaning and value, and nothing will change that. 

If you can let yourself trust in your Rock, then you can face the reality of the world: yes, my achievement matters in life.  But, see it doesn't matter ULTIMATELY, meaning in the most crucial sense-your sense of safety and value. 

So, yes, go and study your brains out, but enjoy learning (as much as is possible of course!).  I pray you can do well and reflect what you've learned this semester, but, in the end, even if you don't do well, and even if some people are disappointed with your performance, choose to fill your cup with your Father's love. 

Feeling OK about me - Part 3

A couple posts ago I talked about your life as a cup.  We don't want to feel empty, so we tend to fill it

with people, places, and things.  Yet, all of those are shaky.  Instead, filling our cup with God is more reliable and then allows people, places, and things to be overflow.  How does that work?

As a teen, there were so many pressures.  I felt I needed to please so many people from my parents to my teachers to my friends.  For me, when someone was proud of me I felt at peace, but when someone was mad at me or disappointed, I quickly felt unworthy.

Then, I began to fill my cup with my Father.  The simple fact that He cared about me, helped me.

When I was worried that my parents would be upset with me, I was able to hang onto that fact the God was with me and I would be okay.

When a girlfriend dumped me (and they all did.  I seemed to never be able to be the one to call it quits even when I should have), it hurt badly, but I knew there was still me and God.

When I was worried about the future whether because of some dating relationship, or college decision, I knew the truth that I could, "cast [my] cares upon Him, for He cares for you" 1 Peter 5:7

I wrote that verse all over my notebooks throughout high school.  It was a perspective-altering truth.  My life was very important...to Him.  He cared for it, for me.  It doesn't promise things to work the way I want all the time.  But it promises Father's commitment to care for me.

Making Father my cup-filler didn't mean I didn't get a lot of crap.  I still cried when I got dumped, got

hurt by family and friends, felt nervous before tests, and all the other things that happen to real-life people.  But I had a rock to build my life upon, not sinking sand.

In an upcoming post I'll comment on how this perspective also helps bring freedom and meaningful happiness to your human relationships too.

Feeling OK in the New Year

Tis the season for New Years resolutions, but maybe wanting to be different isn't always a good thing.  A good friend posted this blog post on his Facebook page and I really liked it.  I thought some of
you would be encouraged by it too.

When I returned to blogging about a month ago, you all welcomed me back with open arms. I was away for nearly a year, yet you came back, too. More importantly, I’m enjoying myself again because at some point during my break I got over my obsession with numbers. I no longer get panic attacks if I don’t have a post lined up for the next day. I no longer feel the heart-rending disappointment when a post flops.

Still, I felt a sense of unease. This isn’t really what I want to write, not forever, I told myself at night, staring at the ceiling high above. I want to write fiction. I want to be a novelist.

But a sneaking suspicion had begun to grow in my mind, one that I pondered ever since finishing the book for my kids. And when I didn’t have the strength to say the words out loud, Maile said them for me.

They came after I expressed my novelist frustrations to her one morning. We were making the bed. I went on and on, complaining about my weaknesses as a fiction writer, my unhappiness with the plot of the children’s book I had written. Then she said something, something that I had been thinking but did not have the strength to admit out loud. Something that, if I had let it, could have hurt me deeply.

“You might not want to hear what I have to say,” she said in a kind voice.

“No, go ahead.”

“Maybe,” she said, “just maybe, you’re not a novelist. Maybe you’re a nonfiction writer. That’s your best writing. That’s what people respond to.”

I took a deep breath. Sometimes the truth about ourselves hurts. Sometimes it isn’t exactly what we want to hear.

“I’ve been wondering the same thing,” I admitted.

I wonder how many of us spend our lives trying to be what we want to be instead of embracing who we are? I wonder if this contributes to the truth behind Thoreau’s famous quote that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Maybe we’re desperate because we’re dishonest with ourselves and with each other about who we are.

What would happen if we were honest with ourselves? What would happen if we listened to the loving voices that speak into our lives, the voices of those who love us, those who can sometimes see what we cannot, or will not, see?

Of course there’s a flip side to this coin, the truth that life is a struggle, a journey, and that anything worth having takes some work, some perseverance. Don’t give up on your dreams. Etcetera, etcetera. But maybe the one thing standing between you and the life you were meant to live is a dash of humility, a small measure of honesty, and a mustard seed of hope.

The hope that who you are, who you were created to be, is enough.

- See more at: http://shawnsmucker.com/2013/12/18/stop-trying-so-hard-what-you-were-created-to-be-is-enough/#sthash.GenHgxz2.dpuf

Feeling OK about me - part 2

Imagine that you are a cup.  As a cup, you want to be filled.  It doesn’t feel good when you’re empty. 

But when you’re filled up, you feel good, you feel okay, you feel strong, you feel…at peace.

Most of us fill our cups with three things:

People

Places

Things

This seems to make sense, right?  But all these things do the same: disappoint. 

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t have these as an integral part of our lives, but we can’t use them to fill our cups. 

So, what do we do?  David wrote, “My soul finds rest in God alone.  He is my rock and my salvation.” 

John wrote, “This is love: not that we have loved God, but that He loved us first.”

Solomon wrote, “Trust in the Lord with all of your heart.”

David also wrote that with God his “soul is satisfied as with the richest of foods.”

Nehemiah said, “The joy of the Lord is your strength”

Once I began filling my cup with God something wonderful happened.  When I added sweet friends (people), and good times (places), and a new guitar (things), that made my “cup overflow.” 

What do I mean?  To fill my cup with God means that when I wonder, “Am I okay?” I let God remind me: I am loved, forgiven, enjoyed, and belong.  I have a purpose in life, a meaning, and I will not be forsaken or dumped by Him.  There are many ways to help with this from just being quiet and listening, to speaking to yourself (like the psalms say, “Why so downcast O my soul? Put your hope in God.), to listening to music that reminds you of this, to reading or reciting Bible verses that remind you of your Father’s love for you, etc. 

Let yourself feel, feel, feel God's delight in you, yes you.  Fight the voices that tell you otherwise. 

In the next post, I’ll show how that helped me weather through all the disappointments that people, places, and things send our way.

I want to feel OK about me

Do you ever feel just not good?

Do you ever feel like something’s not right, but you just don’t know what?

Do you ever just wish you felt okay? 

…about your life?

…about you?

Do you ever feel like you are on a roller coaster, sometimes up, and sometimes down?

I did too.  I remember it very distinctly, because it was during my high school years that I first noticed this.  I found that hanging out with friends made me feel good about me.  But, if a weekend went by without hanging out, I felt sort of empty.

Dating had helped too in the past, but getting dumped certainly didn’t help. 

Going on vacation felt good.  I liked to ski, so when I was rockin’ it down a black diamond run, I felt on top of the world.  But, of course, vacations end.

Getting a new AC/DC album was pretty sweet.  Or even a new locomotive for my model train set (I know.  I’m a nerd).  But those got old or broke.

Then I saw this book at a store called Joy That Lasts by a guy named Gary Smalley.  What I read in that book changed my sense of “feeling okay” forever. 

I’ll write in an upcoming post about what I found.

Suffering through Christmas

It's nice when someone asks how you're really doing.

It's nice when someone says they'll pray for you.
It's nice when someone thinks you're amazing because of all you've gone through.

But it puts divine medicine on a chapped soul when someone shares your suffering with you.  They enter into it as much as they can with listening, empathizing, asking, helping, comforting, even sometimes feeling the same things.

That's Christmas.

God doesn't just say, "Wow.  Life is hard for you guys."
or
"I'll send some angels to help sometimes."
or
"Good job facing the trials of life!"

No, He comes INTO it, WITH US.  Emmanuel, is this name that the ancient Jews were told the Messiah would be called.  It means "God with us."

That baby in Bethlehem becomes a man and showed us another time that He would be with us.  Here's a quote from Nadia Bolz-Weber's book Pastrix that captures it:

Every time I go looking for God amidst sorrow, I always find Jesus at the cross.  In death and resurrection.

This is our God.  Not a distant judge nor a sadist, but a God who weeps.  A God who suffers, not only for us, but with us.  Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross.  Therefore what can I do but confess that this is not a God who causes suffering.  This is a God who bears suffering.  I need to believe that God does not initiate suffering.  God transforms it.

Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother's sister, and Mary Magdalene.  When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, "Woman, here is your son."  Then he said to the disciple, "Here is your mother."  After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said, "I am thirsty."

"I am thirsty," he says.  "I am not watching this from a distant heaven.  I too am thirsty."

Why I Loved to Hate Hazel

Have you ever loved something partly because it bothered you?  It's kind of like when you look back on a tough time in your life and recognize that, if you could go back, you wouldn't change it because you're different, in a very good way, because of that experience.

Both of my posts on The Fault in Our Stars have been negative.  Yet, the more I think about it, I think that alone is due to the fact that the book engaged me both on an entertainment level and on a soul level.  It hurt to see this young girl facing death in her own life, and in her beloved's, and having this hopeless outlook at the same time.

While I criticized Hazel's supposed 'honesty' about suffering, I applaud her desire to not accept silly answers.  And that is something I share with her.  I have never been content with cliche answers to life, death, and especially spiritual issues.

I noticed something that began happening in the last few pages of the book that also sweetened my heart.

After her boyfriend Augustus dies, Hazel is angry, yet her loss seems to make her long for more than her "oblivion is inevitable" approach.

First, she reflects on her dad's comments (mentioned in the last post):
"What we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us--not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us, as individuals."

She begins to feel that Something in the universe knows her, individually.  She goes on to say,
"I was thinking about the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could.  I felt I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay."  

In the last few pages of the book, Hazel, for the first time, mentions heaven in an affirmative manner.  Her mom, she discovers, has been taking courses so she can be a grief counselor for kids with cancer after Hazel dies.  Hazel is ecstatic and exclaims:

"This is so great.  If I'm dead, I want you to know I will be sighing at you from heaven every time you ask someone to share their feelings."

In similar fashion, for the first time she also speaks of God.  She has heard that there is a high divorce

rate for couples who lose a child to cancer.  Hazel wants to know if her mom and dad will make it.  Her dad says,
"Your mom and I love each other, and if we lose you, we'll go through it together."
"Swear to God,"  I said.
"I swear to God," he said.

In the end, the fact that I was so irritated with Hazel showed the greatness of a book that did not just entertain me, but pulled at and wrestled with my soul.  And for that, I am grateful to John Green the author, and also to Hazel.

Of Babies and Hurricanes

It was last year around this time when wind and rain tore up our neighborhood.  In fact, it did that to just about every neighborhood from here to the east coast as we suffered the after effects of Hurricane Sandy.

In our rainsoaked state with tree limbs lying strewn about, schools and businesses were closed.  I had certainly never had school called off in the fall before!

There are just a handful of occurrences in life when time seems to stop.  Natural disasters are one, and having a baby is another.

These times when the unrelenting call of "next" for one fleeting moment takes a break cause one to think in more introspective levels than normal life affords.

What's really important?

Money?
Work?
What so and so said the other day that really irked me?
What this or that person seems to think about me?
Having more rooms in our house?

Not really.

This little 8 pound girl.  That's life.  My sweet, beautiful wife.  Her laugh, her smile, how we can just talk and talk.  That's life.  My four other girls in all their strengths, quirks, and ponies.  That's life.  My gentle God, with his way of taking my fragile self and making me feel so warm and wanted inside.  That's life.

I could go on.  My parents, my brother, my friends, the dear people I work with, the students that make me laugh and the students who open their hearts to me.  All of these make life what it is too.

Relation-ship.  Where life is made.  Why did Jesus come?  Sin?  No.  That was simply a barrier to what He was really after: relation-ship.  Why did He even make the world?  Again, relation-ship.

Let's not let the stupid, passing things of life distract us and make us think that they are the real "stuff" of life.  Instead, let's, you and me, seek life where life truly is.

Do I mean anything?

I'm reading two different books right now.  One is called The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, a fiction story about two teens with cancer who fall in love.  The other is Pastrix by Nadia Bolz-Weber, a former addict turned tattooed, f-bomb dropping Lutheran pastor. The differences between these two books is like oil and water.  In Fault, the main character Hazel has to carry around an oxygen tank because her lungs won't work otherwise.  She has terminal cancer.  A young cancer survivor named Gus comes to a support group meeting.  When asked his biggest fear, he responds, "Oblivion," meaning to cease to exist after death. 


Hazel tells him the following:
"There will come a time...when all of us are dead.  All of us.  There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything....Everything we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught....if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it."

Wow.  Makes you feel small and insignificant, doesn't it.  But then...I read a chapter in Pastrix called "Beer and Hymns."  Nadia tells the story of how her church meets in a bar to sing hymns to God each week.  However, one particular week stood out because a few days before that one guy shot and killed some 12 people in a movie theater during a midnight showing of Batman. 

Nadia considered cancelling the meeting, but instead, they did it anyway.  Here are some of her remembrances of that night.

"It took a few minutes for me to pinpoint the uniqueness of how these hymns were being sung [that night].  But then I knew.  It was defiance.

"Mary Magdalene was the very first to proclaim, in the midst of loss and sorrow, that death had been defeated.

"Of course, Mary Magdalene would have very little tolerance for the Christian platitudes and vapid optimism that seem to swirl around these kinds of tragic events.  Those platitudes are tempting, but they're nothing but luxuries for people who've never had demons (or at least have never admitted to them).  But equally, she would reject nihilism, or the idea that there is no real meaning in life or death--ideas present in so much of postmodernity.  Those ideas, too, are luxuries, but they are for those who have never been freed from demons.

"When we sang hymns to God at the bar, it sounded like a people who simply would not believe that violence wins, a people who know that the sound of the risen Christ speaking our names drowns out all other voices.  It drowns out the sound of the political posturing, the sound of cries for vengeance, the sound of our own fears and anxieties, and the deafening uncertainty--because all of it is no match for the shimmering sound of the resurrected Christ calling our name.

"This is the resurrected God to whom we sing.  A God who didn't say we would never be afraid but that we would never be alone.

"Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples.  Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we can stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new.  On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid.  To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles...that death is not the final word.  To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it.  And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, still we make our song alleluia.  Alleluia.  Alleluia."

I'm not done with The Fault in Our Stars yet, but I'm hoping Hazel finds more hope than that sad "reality" that she gave to Gus.

Easy A

Ok, so a movie about a girl lying about sleeping with others in order to help their reputations seems

to be a bit questionable.  See, here’s the thing, though-it makes tons of references to one of my favorite American authors: Nathaniel Hawthorne and his classic novel The Scarlet Letter.  So, I put caution aside and my wife and I watched it this weekend.

I was disappointed.

This movie had the potential of having something meaningful to say.  I recognize that any meaningful story that takes place in real life will be filled with “objectionable content.”  That’s true of Romeo and Juliet from the 1490s to Adam Sandler’s Click from 2006. 

But like so many movies targeted to you guys in your teens, instead of going for the heart of the film, they work so hard to make it raunchy that it loses itself. 

At the movie’s heart was a girl who found herself in a weird position to help outcasts.  Her first rumor, that she lost her virginity to a college guy, was offhandedly started by her in order to impress her friend.  From there, since she has gained a ‘bad girl’ reputation, more guys ask her to lie for them to get them out of situations or to help them not be ostracized. 

As crude as it all is, the beauty of it is that Olive has a sweet heart and feels for these guys, enough to drag her reputation through the mud for their sake.  Jesus, quite honestly, did the same thing.  He got accused of a lot of things and got labeled by a lot of popular people because he fraternized with the unpopular crowd (including so-called ‘skanks’ by the way).

The most powerful moment of the film comes when a guy honestly asks her out on a date.  She finally feels truly cared for instead of being used.  Then, at the end of their date he offers to pay her, not to lie, but to actually sleep with him.  He begins to physically take advantage of her before she finally pushes him away in disgust.

This was such a poignant moment.  I was like, “Yes!  Finally!”  Here was a girl finding out that selling her body out to guys who just wanted to take advantage of her wasn’t worth it.  She has true dignity and worth and she doesn’t ‘deserve’ to be used.  The amount of girls that are sexually abused in some way is 1 in 4.  That’s a terrible reality. 

But, instead of driving home this point, the rest of the plot devolves into the silly escapades of a guidance counselor who has a fling with a student who happens to be in a ‘Christian’ group, the weirdness of Olive’s parents’ past, and, on and on. 

So, what does this mean for us as believers?  Well, there are inequalities.  Notice that the guys in the film get better reputations because of their (false) exploits, while Olive’s reputation goes down the drain.  Both of these are problems.  As believers, we want to develop a healthy sexuality between the sexes where our attractions are honed into ways to honor the opposite sex, for guys to recognize women’s differences by treating them with both equality and extra kindness and gentleness, and for girls to honor guys by giving their affections to men who are worthy of it.

Olive seems to kind of get this at the end.  She finds that sexuality, at its best is romance, not just sex.  Yet, so much of the movie shows what most of us already know: that our sexuality is often used as a means of blackmailing, using, pressuring, and abusing.  God has given us a gift.  Let’s not let it get dragged through the mud like that.

"I'll Show You" Reflections

This poem has a lot of word play, particularly, and ironically so, with the issue of words.  At its center the speaker of the poem is hit with “harsh words.”  Yet, he/she doesn’t just take it.  The speaker combats the harsh words with “my word.”  What is that?  I love this line: “My God is stronger than your words.”  While earlier it says, “You push and shove,” now it says “You push me down / But he catches my fall.” 

This is one of the coolest parts though.  The speaker has been aggressively pushed and shoved, but responds that “I’ll push and shove through all harsh words.”  Yet it doesn’t end there.  This fighter goes on to say “and show you all my God-given worth.”

When I was growing up, I developed the belief that my worth was based on how well I performed (in school, at keeping others happy, being the smiley one in our family, etc.).  I didn’t feel loved unless I

had done well.  Because of this, I learned to be a very nervous, worrisome kid. 

I began to see this about myself in college.  Before that, I just assumed that was how relationships worked.  A number of years ago I went on a retreat called Making Peace with Your Past.  During one exercise, I was brought in the middle of a room with about 15 other people on the retreat surrounding me.  They were told to tell me all those things that I believed about myself.  

They said things like,

“You don’t work hard enough.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“You always screw up.”

“If people really knew you, they’d leave.”

“You’re not really loved.”

Then the woman leading the conference, a counselor that I had gotten to know, told me that I needed to fight the old way of thinking.  I needed something to replace it with.  Just like David used to do in the Psalms when he said, “Why so downcast, O my soul? (old way of thinking) Put your hope in God (new way of thinking).”  So we did the exercise again, but this time I responded back.

“You don’t work hard enough.”

That’s a lie.

“That’s not good enough.”

It doesn’t matter.  I am holy and dearly loved.

“You always screw up.”

That’s a lie.

“If people really knew you, they’d leave.”

That’s a lie.  But even if they did, I am holy and dearly loved.

“You’re not really loved.”

I am holy and dearly loved.

The phrase is from Colossians 3:12.  I wrote it all over my stuff and I memorized it.  There was and is an incredible power, the most incredible in the world, in fully falling into the arms of truth: that you are holy, accepted, pure to your Savior, and that you are not just ‘loved’ in a generic sense, but “dearly” loved.  I knew I had to fight the aggressiveness of harsh words spoken to me in my past, harsh words spoken by my own mind, harsh words spoken by Satan, and harsh words spoken by people in my present life.  With true words, though, now I was ready to reprogram my mind. 

So, join me.  Let’s “push and shove” against the lies that want to tear us down.  We have, not just ‘worth,’ but “God-given worth.”  This is a relief to the heart and a weapon to the untruths that try to pierce it. 

I'll Show You

There were a few poems I got for a poetry assignment toward the end of the year that I thought had a lot of insight or power to them.  I'll be posting them in a little series and sharing some reflections in follow-up posts.  I think each of them taps into some of the emotional, spiritual, and relationship struggles people face as teenagers and also adults.

Here's the third one:

"I'll Show You"

I try so hard to please you all

But inside I’m not too strong.

You push and shove and use

Harsh words but

Now it’s time to take

My word.  My God is stronger

Than your words.  You push me down

But he catches my fall.

God forgives and gives

But I will succeed through it all.

I’ll push and shove through all harsh words

And show you all my God-given worth.