But the other day, one lesson hit me right where I needed to be hit. It was a lesson about love. Don relates a story about hearing a message that starts with a discussion of the metaphors we use to talk about cancer. After Greg Spencer, the speaker, probes the audience, it is clear that our metaphor for talking about cancer is war. It is a fight, a battle, and we triumph over it, or we lose the war. And the metaphor itself actually helps us win the battle, because it encourages an all-in attitude about the struggle.

Then the message moves on to the metaphor we commonly use to talk about love: We value a friendship, we invest in a relationship, people are priceless, a relationship is bankrupt. In other words, we use an economic metaphor to talk about love.

Don and I both realized that we use our love as a payment we give to people of whom we approve. If someone is doing the things we like, we pay them with love, and if they are not, we withhold our love.

As a church we have been studying and experiencing the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We are familiar with the Spirit speaking to us and helping us understand scripture and our lives. The supernatural work of the Spirit enables us to use the gifts we have been given. However, it doesn’t take any supernatural power to know when someone with whom you work does not like you.

I have been guilty of that kind of stinginess. I have withheld my love and approval of those around me based on whether or not they did what I liked. When Don realized his mistake, he started with repentance and then he transformed his thinking. It had a healthy impact on those around him, but more importantly, it helped him tremendously.

I am in that process now. It has already made some relationships much better: I am not waiting for some kind of change to occur so that I can pay it back with love and approval. People sense when they are loved and know when they are judged. Casting Crowns said it the song, If We are the Body:

A traveler is far away from home
He sheds his coat and quietly sinks into the back row
The weight of their judgmental glances
Tells him that his chances are better out on the road

Jesus paid much too high a price
For us to pick and choose who should come
And we are the body of Christ
If you click through to the blog where these articles are posted, you can leave your response. I would love to hear your reactions.

Take the shackles off my feet so I can dance
I just wanna praise you
I just wanna praise you
You broke the chains now I can lift my hands
And I’m gonna praise you
I’m gonna praise you!

(Mary Mary, Shackles (Praise You))

From the time that I was a very tiny girl I knew that I wanted to dance…almost more than anything else. But my parents would keep me from dancing….literally. It wasn’t allowed. They said it was a sin.
They also kept me from dancing, figuratively, in becoming all that God wanted me to be, and to be able to live a life that was a dance of praise to God. They constantly told me that I was not of value, I was a failure in what ever I tried, and that my dreams of who I wanted to be were unreachable. Later, after my parents were gone, my brother took up the task to keep me from dancing.

But God was persistent. He kept showing me who He made me to be and encouraged me on in the process of becoming the real Bonnie….the one He created.

Shackles are painful. They leave bruises and cuts on your feet and ankles. They are heavy and impede your movement. It is very, very hard to dance while wearing shackles.
Dance shoes are light, comfortable, flexible and help you to dance well.

Over the years of my life, God has helped me break the shackles that kept me from dancing in praise to Him…it has been a long and painful process, but I can now wear the dance shoes that help me dance. Sometimes, Satan is successful in getting shackles back on me…but not for long. God loves the dance shoes and hates the shackles and helps me remove the painful shackles once again, but only if I seek His help to do this.

What are the shackles on your feet and ankles? Fear? Believing what people say and not the truth that God speaks to you? Holding on to something because you are afraid to step out in faith and trust that God will provide? Trying to manipulate things in the way that you think is right, not what God wants?

The list can go on and on. Your dance shoes are waiting for you. They are in God’s hands and He is holding them out for you. Do you want to dance in praise to Him?

Take the shackles off my feet so I can dance
I just wanna praise you!

For years you’ve probably thought that the Prayer Ministry Team that prays for us following Sunday morning worship services receives secret training that gives them direct access to God. Well, here is part of the secret: We ALL have direct access to God. There is nothing magical involved, but there is definitely something supernatural: God Himself.

And now, that training is secret no longer, but is available to all. Our first training will take place this April 28^th on Saturday from 9 to 1. The training is necessary to become part of the Ministry Team, but if you take the training, you are Not compelled to join that team. In fact, we would like everyone in the church to go through process.

What you’ll find when you take the training is that the “secret” does not involve particular phrases or formulas. The secret is opening yourself to the Spirit and accepting the authority and opportunity granted to us to communicate with God. This is probably the most direct and immediate way to experience the power and presence of the Holy Spirit in your life.

I spent too many years praying like this: “Oh Lord, if you have time and feel like it and it won’t be presuming too much and … Oh I just can’t ask, OK Lord?” This training will help you understand how to approach God and how to ask and petition him in accordance with his will. It will help you be still and listen to the Spirit as he teaches you how to pray and how to pray for one another.

What you have to bring is a willingness to be open to God and to be used by him. You have to be in the Word of God and willing to pray for yourself as well as for others. Come and find out what it’s about! If you miss the training this April, don’t despair: training will be repeated in a few months.

God has stretched me more than any other way by encouraging me to take emotional, relational risks. For me, trusting God for physical safety is so much easier than trusting Him in relationships. The two riskiest things I have ever done, by my standards, were to get married and to adopt a child. In both cases I was uniting myself for life with a stranger. This in my mind is a serious risk but has potential for great blessing! In Timothy Keller’s book, The Meaning of Marriage, he quotes Stanley Hauerwas:

“We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being (the enormous thing it is) means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is ..learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.”

I thought I knew my husband well (marriage tests indicated we did) when we married but must admit I was surprised. I went through various stages in our marriage of feeling rejected, angry and finally emotionally distant and indifferent. I definitely had a problem “learning how to love and care for the stranger.” God in His mercy finally and dramatically transformed our marriage for His glory.

When you marry, you at least have some knowledge of the person you marry but when you adopt, you are truly uniting with a stranger. Everything is an unknown in a closed adoption. We adopted our son when he was 10 days old. At the age of two he asked if he had come out of my tummy like our daughter. Just the fact that he asked that question at that age to me says he knew something was different for him. As he grew older he wanted to know why his birth mother rejected him. He was an angry and strong-willed child. In order to avoid responding to him in anger, my means of coping was to distance myself from him. God has dramatically used my relationship with my son to learn to love someone yet experience great pain in the relationship. That is the risk I fought against.

Loving those closest to me day in and day out conflicts with my self-centeredness. I want them to meet my needs, not the other way around. I have spent a lot of time distancing myself emotionally rather than staying engaged when I am hurt in relationships, but I am challenged by 1 Corinthians 13 to risk loving:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

At this stage of my life my heart’s desire is to love God and those people He has put in my life. This is what truly gives meaning and purpose to life on this earth and beyond. I am learning to appreciate the risk of wanting to love well. The challenge before me is to be like Sarah and “do good and do not fear anything that is frightening.” (1Peter 3b, ESV)

This pair of parables highlight the same truth from two different angles: A dedicated seeker will give everything he owns to possess the ultimate treasure.

You can almost imagine the stunned surprise of someone who has stumbled across buried treasure in a vacant plot of land. The treasure is perhaps worth more than he could earn in a lifetime. He quickly re-buries the loot and rushes to sell his stuff in order to buy the land so he will become the rightful owner of the hidden cache.

The second parable offers a different look at the same spiritual reality. In this story, a veteran jewel buyer barely able to contain his awe at the find of a single oversized, flawless pearl. The arc of this story is a carbon copy of the treasure-finder’s story. The jeweler sells his entire inventory in order to possess his once-in-a-lifetime discovery.

Jesus told these stories at the peak of his ministry, to crowds who were for the most part receptive to his words. They were ready to listen to whatever he had to say.

Or were they?

Jesus was telling them that they would need to trade everything they held dear in order to find their true treasure in his invisible kingdom. It’s as difficult for us today to comprehend as it was for Jesus’ first-century audience. In our culture of shattered promises and litigious hair-splitting, committing everything to possess the One Thing that matters more than anything else in the whole world seems impossible. Most of us naturally want to insure that a risk like that will pay off in the end.

One of our young adult sons recently visited Israel. He was surprised by the spiritual intensity he sensed as he traveled the land. The longings of pilgrims who’ve traveled there from around the world mix with the faith practices of those living in Israel. Even committed secularists in Israel can’t ignore the fact that they live in a place like no other on earth, where the hopes and prayers of three major religions converge.

Jesus well understood both our spiritual longings and our inability to commit to do what he was asking us to do in these parables – to fully pursue God.

So he did for us what we could not do for ourselves. He was born into the place and of the people who were chosen by God to proclaim his goodness to every tongue, tribe and nation. In Bethlehem, Israel 2,000 years ago, God himself came to find each one of us.

We are his treasure, his perfect pearl. He gave everything to possess us.

These parables, then, are a holy invitation to respond to what he has already done for us. As we join him in his mission, he empowers us by his Spirit to live as spiritual treasure hunters.

Who, then, are the buried treasures, the perfect pearls in your life?

I’m not sure I can answer that question in a simple way other than to say that I believe this is the path I am supposed to be on. For a long time, I thought my success and the financial blessings I was receiving were proof that I was already on the right path. But, I’m starting to realize that I believed this largely because I’ve had my fingers in my ears. Over the past 10 years, I have been told time and again that I have a way with kids. I received more recognition at work for training programs I put together than for anything else I accomplished. I found more satisfaction in helping a new employee from Korea practice his English than in the successful launch any cell phone I helped to design. My wife and others have repeatedly suggested I have a gift for teaching. When I stop and look back, the Lord’s prompting to reconsider my path has been evident for a long, long time.

Even with this perspective, there are days where I am scared to death that I’m making the biggest mistake of my life. To be honest, I can count on two fingers the number of times in my life that I felt God was clearly speaking to me about something – and this isn’t one of those times. Much to my frustration, that just hasn’t been how the Lord interacts with me. He’s far more subtle whereas I tend to look for more obvious indications like big flashing neon signs.

So, why do I think this is the right path? Two big reasons. First, I have peace – inexplicable peace given the amount of change and the number of things that could go wrong. Because there is peace, I am better able to hear Him speak in that still, small voice. Proverbs 16:7 tells us that “when a man’s ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.” So, I find great confidence in the peace I have been experiencing. Second, for the first time in a long time, I have joy. As I look through scripture, I notice that joy is almost exclusively used to describe what it is like to be in the Lord’s presence. So again, I find great comfort in the joy that I have found on this new path.

The decision to trade the world’s versions of “comfort” and “success” for peace and joy that comes from the Lord should be a no-brainer. I am saddened that it took me so long to discover this, but the Lord is patient and He has led me to it at last.

First, the country’s economic struggle weighs on nearly everyone’s mind, appears on the front page of every newspaper, and often is a matter of conversation. Unemployment has risen to 23% and at moments, I could feel a sense of discouragement hanging over Madrid. Lines for the national lottery stretch fifty people long and my friends said they had never seen so many panhandlers, street performers, and creative sales schemes to make a few extra euros. The crisis also revealed the lack of confidence in the political system. One Spanish man waved and said, “We were very terrible before the elections and we are just slightly less terrible now.”

The dismal economic outlook brought to light the lack of realistic, spiritual hope. Secularism has flourished in the post-Franco world of Spain. Dark shadows from history can cast a long, ugly shadow over the Bible, the church, and authority and have inculcated a settled disinterest in spiritual things. One young person from an evangelical church told me that the greatest challenge was that “people just don’t care about God.”

I could see that pessimism increasingly brings with it the “eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” mentality. The less realistic hope we have, the more demanding the need is for material comforts and constant fiestas. I was struck walking through a neighborhood during a weekend evening. The streets were crowded with people and on the street corners, I saw several older people standing and calling out something. At first glance they looked like street preachers. Getting closer, I saw they were just saying one word, “Cerveza!” and trying to make some extra money illegally selling cheap beer to drink in the streets. Walking past, I realized they were street preachers. But the “hope” they offered was fleeting and empty.

My time in Europe gave me a perspective on our situation here in the States. We also are suffering from economic hard times and often feel the same challenge of living in a culture that does not show much interest in God or his kingdom. It dawned on me that one of the greatest weapons we have is Easter. Easter is the reason we can have realistic, honest hope. Christ is raised. Since he is, we are free not to live with a “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die” attitude. Instead, we can love, suffer and work, for tomorrow we live.

What do I do about a God that wants all of me? Every believer that has said “Yes…” to a relationship with the Lord has had to face this question. When we first gave ourselves to the Lord, first asked Jesus into our hearts, first became a Christian, a Believer – however we express that initial coming into a saving relationship with Him – we probably sincerely thought we gave Him our “all”. And perhaps some of us did. But for many of us, we probably didn’t know what we were getting into when we opened the door of our hearts to the living God. Our concept of how big “all” is was, most likely, too small…

When God first knocked on the door of our lives, offering His gracious gift of Himself and the eternal life and salvation that came bundled with it, we considered His offer. When we decided that we wanted in, we eagerly opened the door and said, “Yes, come in, please, and make yourself at home.” We meant it sincerely. We fully expected Him to come into that house that is our heart and make Himself at home. We expected He might want to sit in our favorite chair, help Himself to the food in the refrigerator, even take our favorite snacks in the pantry. He might want to sit with us, maybe watch a movie together, join us in our day-to-day life. And it was O.K. with us. We had said “Yes…”. But then came the day when we found Him in the basement, going through the boxes of junk from our life before Him, sorting through our stuff that we really didn’t want to see the light of day (or, at least, not when He was around). Suddenly, He didn’t look like a polite house guest any more. Another day, we find Him in the attic, getting ready to do major renovations to the top floor, planning to knock down walls, raise roof beams, enlarge our space. Had we really agreed to this when we first invited Him into our lives? Who did He think He was? God? Oh…right…

Deuteronomy 6:5 says “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” The word “all” is in that one short verse three times. Part of loving God means acknowledging that He will make loving demands on us, the invading of His desires for us in all areas of our lives. When we let Him go through the embarrassing junk in our basements, we find that He both heals the wounds of our past and rids us of stuff that has been weighing us down for years, preventing us from experiencing His freedom. When we stand with Him in His enlarging renovation projects for our hearts, He shows us how small our “all” has been, how big and marvelous His “all” can be for us. And, then, we grow in our trust of Him, in our willingness to let Him have more and more access to who we are. We grow in our willingness to give over the parts of us that we foolishly cling to because we think we can, because it’s part of our fallen nature to do so. We grow in our desire to want more of Him as we simultaneously want to give Him more of ourselves.

And the good news for us is the growing part. Thank God that He is not an “all or nothing” God! He understands we are fallen flesh and allows us to grow in our understanding of what He means by wanting all of ourselves. His gracious mercy and patience prods us, always firmly, often gently (but sometimes not!), in the direction of a deeper relationship with Him. In 1 Thessalonians 4:1 (the subheading in the ESV wonderfully titled “A Life Pleasing to God”) we are encouraged with this:

Finally, then, brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more.

John the Baptist, in speaking of Jesus in John 3:30 says:

He must increase, but I must decrease.

More and more…increasing and decreasing. Both these phrases speak of an incremental process. We can grow in both our desire and ability to give ourselves to God. We can be honest before Him, confess our small definition of “all”, ask for the increase of His life in us, the decrease of our own view of things. The “yes” we initially spoke in our relationship with God can be an ongoing “yes”. Yes, Lord, I want to give You more and more of me. Yes, Lord, I want You to increase, while I decrease. Yes, Lord, I want You to have all of me…

More recently, my wife Amy and I went car shopping. Our current vehicles can only accommodate two car seats, and with baby boy Caldwell soon to arrive, we’d need something bigger. (Of course, adding child #3 to my already overloaded juggling act was not making me feel any better on this subject!) What I was surprised by is that both car salesmen we talked to at two different dealerships told us about how they had to work a second part-time job on top of their full-time salesman jobs just to pay the bills. Now, maybe that’s a standard salesman line used to build sympathy and thereby sales . But it seems to be the line I am hearing from more and more people. I hear moms talk about how in one day they might have to be a short-order cook, a chauffeur, a mother, a nurse to sick kids, a friend, a wife, a co-worker, an accountant for the family finances, run a laundromat, and so much more. How does anyone keep their head on straight ?

Certainly the Scriptures are no stranger to this phenomenon. The Apostle Paul supported himself as a tentmaker on the side, so that he could devote full-time energy to planting churches across the Mediterranean. But I pity myself with the thought that “yeah, but Paul wasn’t married – no home, no family to tie him down; it’s easy enough to do what he did without screaming toddlers in tow”. Paul at least partly agrees with me when he says, “I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs–how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world–how he can please his wife–and his interests are divided” (1 Cor. 7.32-34a). That used to feel like a challenge from Paul—to prove to him that the married man can accomplish as much as the unmarried man. It also felt like he was saying the married man doesn’t love God as much. But what if Paul was speaking through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; what if *gulp*, he was right?

Now I think the married people in our church certainly love God as much as the unmarried; I think what Paul is talking about is priorities. The Scriptures are clear that God comes first. Period. Jesus was unequivocal on the matter: “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Mt. 10.37). So everybody, regardless of their life situation, has to have God at the top of the priority list. From there, things diverge a bit depending on your life situation. Paul knew that for him, it could be as simple as 1) Honor and love God; 2) Work hard towards his calling of bringing the Gospel across the known world; 3) Work hard as a tentmaker to support #2 going more smoothly (he did not want to be a financial burden to the young churches he was helping plant; see 2 Thess. 3.7-9). I envy the simplicity of Paul’s arrangement.

But really, most people’s situations simplify a ton once you get the priorities in their proper order. My freshman year at public high school, I was like so many other teenagers just trying to fit in; “go with the flow” was certainly my mantra. But showing up for that first soccer practice, the head coach stunned me with his bold assertion: “You need to get your priorities right on this team: God first, then family, then school, then soccer; in that order”. Looking back, he was a rare breed in a high-school world full of teachers, parents, students, and coaches all with mixed-up priorities. And oddly enough, placing sports last in that list, he produced better players and teams than any of the many other coaches that school saw over the years.

That one piece of simple advice was powerful; if only I had followed it more! I look back with regret that in college, with my father in the hospital for cancer treatment, that I stayed at school to focus on my studies, instead of coming home even for a short while. Family was supposed to be ahead of school. Or often having stayed up late playing video games, I was too tired for devotions in the morning, or even to make it to my first class. God and school were certainly supposed to be ahead of video games! Over time I’ve learned to give things their more proper due.

So back to my original situation: by learning to clarify my priorities, it helped keep things from spiraling out of control trying to juggle two jobs, school, and family, among other things. We knew school came after family in the priority list; but one class alone was taking up 15 hours a week of the little time we had to spend together as a family. So after much discussion, we set a limit on the number of hours I could spend on that class, and whatever grade resulted would just have to be ok. The grade I got wasn’t the one I wanted, but it was the one my family needed at that time. And then we made the even harder decision that school would need to take a hiatus given what our family needed for awhile. And we made other hard decisions to cut back on other things (birthday parties, baby showers, outings with friends, and yes—even all those wonderful church events) based on their standing in the priority list. We found one day a week to make a Sabbath day where we could focus on priorities #1 and #2 — God and family, and something else better be really pressing to invade that time.

Now every person and every family has to work out their own priorities. Jobs, school, hobbies, friends, showering (I should apologize to my church family that personal hygiene found a new low spot on my priority list after having twins!), chores, bills, etc. can all play out a bit differently. And some families are able, even called, to handle more than others. When I think of the sacrifices that military families, or presidential families make, it is staggering. But God designed the Body of Christ to be made up of very different parts, with different abilities to juggle different tasks. Paul says to the Corinthian church, “those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor” (1 Cor. 12.22-23). Just because that other person seems to perfectly execute 20 things doesn’t mean you can, or even should!

So I say to us all, let’s keep God priority #1. To the married, I say as Paul does to you, that it is normal and right that your spouse and family divide your attention; so keep them as priority #2. And from there, pray for wisdom to order your life, and make the hard choices that need to be made. It can be so very freeing to give each task its proper respect.

My mother has a nursing background and taught prenatal and parenting classes in the states for many years, with that she has been able to connect with Romanian parents, helping them through issues. We met a few couples she disciples and shared our story with them. She has also connected with a local Calvary Chapel in Bucharest over Christmas to prepare and serve a traditional Romanian meal called Sarmale (a pork and rice filled pickled cabbage roll [an acquired taste]) to the homeless along with singing traditional Romanian Christmas carols. We helped out this year by making these 500+ Sarmale and got the chance to hand them out right before Christmas. The process of handing out and singing took place in a few abandoned buildings where heat was sparse and above an open sewer where many families lived just under our feet. We saw people literally coming up out of the sewers to

share in the meal.