Story of my life

Im just going to put myself out there on this one. What better, safer, place to do that then the internet right? haha Maybe not so much but I just really feel the need to get real on this one.

This morning I came home from work really tired and it was rainy and I had to go to a silly inservice meeting for work in like an hour and still needed to shower but i just wanted to steal a few minutes of comfort and curled up on my bed and closed my eyes. My thoughts wandered to a Facebook status I "liked" the night before (oh world). The quote was, "If you want to know where your heart is, pay attention to where your mind goes when it wanders."(thanks Christina) This stuck in my head because my mind has been wandering in a not so productive, same direction for a good long time now. It usually lands somewhere between wishing my life was similar to how it was about 2 years ago and wishing/ missing somebody to be really really close with. Preferably of the male variety, preferably for forever. Which typically leads me to know in my mind that my heart is really just still longing for intimacy with my maker, the lover of my soul. But sometimes the thoughts just linger on that gift that God sometimes gives of a human companion, the gift he also sometimes takes away.

As my mind drifted, my eyes wandered to a really awesome painting I have in my room. Its very colorful and is just a simple scene of two people, a guy and a girl, walking next to each other down a lit path. The really special friend who picked it out for me told me it was a story, or had a story in it or to it. I don't remember if I ever actually heard the story that he saw in it but since then i think I've put my own words to the painting and named the characters and always knew it was about us and what our time together was all about.
 Anyway, this looking all lasted maybe like two minutes, just long enough to remember just how much I miss that story and enter a conversation with God about it. I just kinda said it my heart, "It stinks that this story had to end. Its like stopping a movie in the middle without ever seeing the ending, or having to put a really good book down because you have to go to school or work or something, and then coming home and going to pick it up again because you've been waiting all day but finding its not there anymore. Or just writing a story but never finishing. It doesn't feel right, it has never felt right every time I had a little picture in my mind of life with someone, a whole epic tale of how things were and how we could walk into the unknown future together, every time those different pictures have come to an end before even hitting the climax.

I don't know if anyones tracking with me haha (sometimes it'd be nice to just say things simply just like they are without little metaphors and roundabouts ) Im just talking about relationships. Every relationship is different and they start from somewhere different and lead into little moments and shared interests and words. They take on a shape and become a certain way and then that person means something to you in a special way because of the unique combination of you and him and the time of life and the place and the situation together. Relationships become stories. Not just between guys and girls but just normal friendships too. Your interactions together with another person paint a picture and write a story. We are relational people and these stories come to mean more to us than anything else in life.  Sometimes one story will weave itself in and out of my entire life. Sometimes one story will only live for a season. And sometimes stories will end. Or they don't end and they just fizzle out or disappear or get all fuzzy and unclear until they don't even seem quite real. And thats the feeling I'm addressing right now. A broken, kind of lost story. Missing a resolution I guess.

Maybe I have it a little wrong. Maybe each life is like a story and relationships are more like chapters in that story..the story of my life, or your life. And maybe some chapters end as they transition nicely into a new chapter, or maybe the transition is a little rough but that just adds some twists and turns in the story and they are soon resolved as a new chapter begins with new characters and a slightly new direction. Right now though, I feel like a chapter has ended but without a complete resolution and a new chapter has begun but seems to just be going and I can't seem to get a grasp on its direction or its story or even its characters. The continuation I had in mind and even the ending seem to have become quite unrealistic, leaving me pretty clueless and just asking, where the heck is this story going? I feel a little lost in my own story.
Sometime around that thought is when I realized that it was never really my story to write or to own. Maybe it has never been all about me and maybe these relationships or times in life that I get stuck on are pictures of a greater story that I am a part of whether I realize it or not. A story that God has been writing since the beginning of time. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit have been sharing a story of love and closeness with each other for all of eternity and then they decided to create a place where they could share their love and creativity so they created characters to enter the story. God wrote a new chapter in His story, He wrote mankind into the story of God. Each person would be an irreplaceable character in relating to his creator and lover and sharing the story with others. Each person would have their own story and it would be about relationship with the Father and have different chapters along the journey of sharing that relationship and love with different people and places and purposes that would come in and out of life.

Looking up at the painting again I remember that even that story, or that chapter, was focused on walking towards and with the author of life. And maybe that's why it was still hanging on my wall, not to make me sad and stuck but to remind me that even if the characters have changed and the location and time shifted, this story is still headed in one direction. The path is still lit and it still leads to the way everlasting, to know God and make him known along the way. The blank pages I see ahead, and even presently, don't have to be scary if I am not the one in charge of filling them alone. In fact I think there is already a new chapter in the heart of God that is ready to be written, that is being written, and I am invited to discover our story in the same moments as He puts it down.
When people ask me what I think I'm doing or where I'm heading I get nervous and rack my brain for an answer that just doesn't seem to be there. But actually I know what this story is about and I even know the end, as John Thurlow puts it, "I know the end of the story, Ill come up from the wilderness, leaning on my Beloved. " I don't know why the end of one chapter and the beginning of another seems so crazy blurry and unclear this time around, I don't know why that confusion and restlessness has been around so long, and why its so hard to fight against and to find my footing and steady my gaze and my heart again. But I do know the end, I do know that at the edge of this wilderness ill come up and ill be leaning on my Beloved. I know that He is my light and my salvation, He is the strength of my life. He is the author and finisher of my faith. And I know if anyone can pick up this story and finish what has been started, it's Him.

Maybe to lean my heart into His and extend my faith into Him and put all of my hope and trust in Him is to surrender the blank white pages to His ideas and His love. And to believe that the tale that unfolds there will bring all the desires of my heart for closeness and wholeness to completion as I just delight in His wisdom and truth and goodness and beauty.

Show me your glory

Have you ever seen Soul Surfer or Blue Like Jazz the movie, or any movie that has christian themes and tackles the great challenge of trying to reenact a moment when God is speaking and revealing his truth in the middle of a youth group gathering or someone sharing about a missions trip or a church service or something. I gotta hand it to those directors because to create that scene without making it look cheesy or cliche has to be a daunting task. Because honestly it probably looks that cheesy in real life too, but when God speaks all you remember from the moment is not the guy playing guitar in front of a bunch of people sipping coffee or standing with their hands in their pockets tapping their foot, its the fact that somehow in the middle of that pathetic picture, heaven was broken open and you heard from God. It's something you are convinced of inside where there is an explosion of revelation but can no way make someone understand if they just view the outside picture. And thus we have these cheesy recounts where the leader speaks the perfect words and the girl answers the question and has some kind of epiphany or someone starts crying, in an effort to display what is happening inside. Because when God takes the program with the guitar and the worship songs and the teaching and the overhead projector and the old floorboards and comes and inhabits his people it just can't quite be caught on camera.
Im not sure if I'm getting the thought across but anyway, lately every now and then I have these moments where I'm sitting at bible study or standing during worship at the core or wherever and I just kinda feel like I'm in a movie. And like people watching it must think its pretty cheesy. Like maybe its a movie about me discovering who Jesus really is and what it means to really follow him. So you see this journey of me encountering him  through all different situations with different people or in different places. But since you can't see inside my heart, or hear his voice in my spirit it just looks like a bunch of little services or churchy things. Sometimes when I get these little glimpses of what it must look like from the outside I feel tempted to just write it off as cheesy too, and tell everyone to go home cause they don't really believe that what they are saying or singing or hearing is real. Its just a lame christian movie with bad acting trying to get everyone to believe some moral truth that will make the world a better place. ( a little harsh i suppose but i don't know, it can feel like that sometimes) I could almost do it too, if it weren't for the power I know is working in me and through me and them.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

It's foolishness. To wrap your life around one thing, an invisible God who speaks through your spirit and is wrapped in mystery.  Who you can't capture on a screen or fully describe with words or create an image for. Where the best we can do is compare him to things we know; like, He looks like light and sounds like water and is like a lion but also a lamb. You can try to explain what he has done and how you know him but it sounds like foolishness to anyone who doesn't have eyes to see inside or ears to hear in the quiet or a heart to understand that which surpasses knowledge.

Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men...But God has chosen the foolish things of this world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, 
that no flesh should glory in his presence. 

Maybe this little christian world we have pieced together (I imagine like in a big city how there are little areas like china town or little italy etc...picture little christian town, or little hipster town) with our lingo and our t shirts and coffee shop conversation; our bible studies and worship nights can look a little foolish. While we figure out what it looks like to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and souls and minds and strength, it can look pretty cliche, sound a little weak, seem like not much of anything real. All this if it weren't for Him.

But of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God-and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption- that, as it is written, "He who glories, let him glory in the Lord." 
1 Corinthians 1

Without him we have NOTHING. Nothing to boast about, nothing new to offer the world except another group to be a part of, or another place to maybe fit in, another mold to belong to. Without him its just a lifestyle to try out and see if it "works for me like it did for him". It's just a book, just a song, just a retreat, just a cheesy movie.
Maybe this sheds some light on the conversation Moses and God have in Exodus 33. The people were being really ridiculas, basically telling God with their actions that they didn't want anything to do with Him anymore. But God isn't going to go back on his promise so He tells them that they should just keep going to the promise land without Him. Moses' response is pretty intense. He says,
If Your presence does not go with us, do not bring us down from here. 
For how then will it be known that Your people and I have found grace in your sight, except you go with us? So we shall be separate, Your people and I, from all the people who are upon the face of the earth.
He recognized that without God, without His presence inhabiting every move they made, the people would be just like any other people. They would have their ways and little customs but they wouldn't be true, they wouldn't be set apart from any other nation with their ways and beliefs. It is the same with us. Our reading and singing and studying and getting together and dressing alike and thinking alike and
all the other things we do would be just the same as any other group of people you can think of with similar ways as each other. We would have no grounds to say that our way is the way of true life.
But God is with us. He is in us and we are in Him. We are in Christ Jesus so our wisdom isn't just what everyone calls smart, its actually Gods wisdom, and our goodness isn't just what people know as good, its His righteousness. This thing we do, this life we live has weight, it is loaded with the only true God and His glory.
I wish I knew how to describe glory. Maybe its just the opposite of what I was describing earlier. I said how I can sometimes see it all from an outside point of view, and it just looks like religion, it looks empty and even a little cheesy, foolish. There is no glory in practices and ideas and things. They have no weight until they are inhabited. From the inside, I know it is all about the God who is God. Words are failing me right now. Its the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings, the One. the only One. And this adds weight. It makes everything alive because He inhabits it. He inhabits the praises of His people, inhabits our prayers and our disciplines. And then He even inhabits our driving and our working and our sleeping and our eating and our thinking and any kind of doing that we do.
He inhabits our being and He makes everything glorious. Full of eternal glory. Now everything has weight (that is the only word I can think of and its driving me crazy haha) breathing isn't just breathing anymore, it contains God.
God answered Moses and agreed to go with them, because "you have found grace in my sight and I know you by name"
And then Moses takes everything a giant leap forward and asks,
"Please show me your glory."

He is saying, okay this is great, you're coming with us, you will be with us and you will set us apart with your presence, but I want to know what that is like. Who are you? What is your glory? what kind of weight do you bear? You are the only God and that alone makes you worthy and having extreme importance, but what are you like?
This is my question as well. Because my lifestyle is not attractive to the world, it isn't even attractive to me without his presence. I don't want the promised land without Him. He is my promise. Eternal life, to know Him, to be with him. So now its just to discover what He is like.

When I finish a movie there is a lingering feeling that stays with me for the next few hours. Sometimes thats a feeling of dead brain cells and disgust that just needs to wear off as soon as possible. And other times its that I'm stuck in the fantasy world I was just observing and need some time to readjust myself to reality, or its that something about what I just watched was impactful. Something just touched a desire deep inside of me, and freed me to believe that maybe, just maybe it's possible. That "it" I believe  is truth, beauty, and/or goodness. When a story reveals some bit of truth that is just true in that deep place in my heart (and yours) I can believe for a minute that there is one accurate description of reality and maybe there is freedom there. Or when I experience just a piece of real beauty, art in its truest awe provoking form, I'm free to believe that beauty is not something we just strive for and labor over, it's refreshing and full of rest. When I witness a story that is good, and speaks of goodness; I dare to believe that good does exist and it is attainable.
These movies reveal God. He is true, and beautiful and good.

It's really hard to capture real God in a movie. And I think some directors do a great job and other directors don't even realize it but they are producing a story that reflects Gods truth beauty or goodness. My hope is that the story or movie of my life, or the life of my church or the life of my community or the life of my family; would contain God. "The desire of my heart is for the renown of Your name." I want to observe life, observe the world and people and see Him. And I want others to be able to observe me and my life and see Him.

If I have found grace in your sight, please show me Your glory.

Stream of Songs

Be of good faith all you children
for we go from glory to glory
its the curving line of the story
Holy Spirit moving and soaring
in and out of conversation
opening secret doors closed long ago
No one knows where He came from or where He is
going, like the wind He
just keeps blowing
through the caverns of my soul
and yours, and his and hers
until we are all holding hands tight
surrounded , each the others eye witness
beholding every mustard seed moment and
locking faith eyes with our brother, our sister
Until one gives way into aimless empty,
sometimes its me, sometimes its him, or its her
almost lost into the blur of useless treasures,
blinded and deaf to glories cry,
“be holy, be holy, be holy”
What God, what does that even mean?
where is holy in the life inbetween...
I already try to be perfect and pristine,
Oh just to be clean.
I miss you, am I missing New?
by only wanting to return to the old me and you
Sometimes the only way to return is to go
where the winds will take you
to let go of all you cannot hold onto
So close I could touch you, yet so far
she said, “its like the stars”
Hanging heavy over our wonder-filled faces
His face smiling as we tie up our laces
and run run away from him
we end up running right into Him
run till your legs hurt , unto the real truth:
youre my daughter, my son, run baby run.
Have we hit another wall
in an empty room painted in my dream
the words “fall on your knees”
Youre forgiven, youre free
I am the One who redeems
not with silver, not with gold, i dont collect dust or mold
My blood spilled never grows old
it never fails when youre legs are shot and your head is spinning
when your heart is breaking
im still winning and the more you believe it
your life will surely show it
I lean over the balcony of heaven searching to and fro
looking for a heart that glows with a passion for my name
I come to fan that flame
the one burning inside you and you and you
each with your own special hue
I seek you out to share my heart
lets go back to the start.
Back to where walking with me was the only reality
When the world was a canvas for my love
and your heart was just the audience and then medium
through which I expressed my
truth, beauty, and goodness, my heart enlarged
spilling over into the vessel we have together emptied for my presence..I write my name in love upon your heart

this love,

it never fails, 

it never gives up,
it never runs out on you
So wont you let Me love you more?
wont You let me love You more.