He said, she said

Me: If you could be any animal, what would you be?
Daniel: No! I want to be a builder!
Me: But what if you could be an animal?
Daniel: I'd be trucks and builder.
Me: What's your favorite animal?
Daniel: Monkey and a giraffe.
Me: So if you could be an animal you'd be a monkey?
Daniel: No, I'd be a construction builder ... I'd be a monkey builder! I could climb up buildings!

The Kingdom

For days I thought of nothing but Amendment One. The only thing that really was a factor in my vote was separation of Church and State. Here’s the thing. I hold God’s law and the order God set about in creation as the highest law and the highest order - the highest of which stated by Jesus,"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." Yet I know my proper place in that law and order. I am to live in obedience and love. I am to plead for the blood of Jesus to cover my failure to obey his law in every minute and every breath of my live. I am to live in the joy of redemption and seek to bring that to others. That is all. I am not to champion the Law but Jesus who is the fulfillment of the law. When we look into the eyes of Jesus and read his words and life, we are faced with his perfection and the broken condition of our hearts.

Observing the political field and the role Christian leaders have played in it, it appears that they faultily believe that the United States of America is the Kingdom of God and it is their role to preserve the shred of morality that remains. It is clear in Romans that there is absolutely nothing redeeming about us. Note that this verse isn’t talking about those other sinners but about mankind - about all of us.

Romans 8: 28-32
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

We fight culture wars and do battle on sin forgetting that Jesus has already won the battle on the Cross. God’s Kingdom is ushered in by the Gospel of Jesus, by that smaller-than-a-mustard seed of faith he plants in our hearts. His Kingdom is here now, and yet it is coming. It is coming to a broken world, to a lost people, to the heartsick, broken and lonely. To those of us who’ve lived life shaking our fists at the sky in irreverent malice claiming our ways are better than God’s, claiming to be higher than God. It comes to us who in our own perceived enlightenment spit in the faces of those we find ignorant. It comes to our own hypocritical, judgmental, moral yet completely hateful hearts. It comes to those of us who call on the name of Jesus yet live every day still trying to earn our own salvation.

And when that Kingdom comes, we fall on our faces. There is no other recourse. We weep for those we’ve hated. We weep for the lost. We weep for the injustices done to ourselves and others. We weep for his sweet salvation, his precious pure life that exchanges itself for ours. And then the Lord says, “Pick up your mat and walk. I have told you, child, what is good; and what do I require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with with Me, your God?”

What are you looking at?

This morning at Costco, I did the most annoying thing a customer could possibly do by attempting to open a door next to the sample stand to get out a box of yogurt - and happened to knock over an empty travel mug... at least it was the most annoying thing ever based on the look the lady donning the blue apron and hair net and her comment that the sample is ALWAYS in the front, with some other lady making a snide remark that you could even see  that it was in the front, who then craned her neck to demonstrate how by peering through the door I was not supposed to open, you could see there was an access in front. Technically, no I couldn't see that, as I approached the yogurt from the back, and couldn't even tell that was what was on the stand. Pardon me for not knowing sample stand protocol.

It's interesting that snarly looks and comments could send my already overwhelmed self reeling, sputtering curt four and five letter words under my breath. Couldn't they cut me some slack? My boys had been whining all morning, and I'd been running interference between the two, and I just didn't have it in me to dodge the other patrons with their big a-- carts and equally sassy attitudes.

As I got into the Jeep (being fussed at by my two boys) I thought about how maybe I wasn't the first person to knock over her empty mug. Maybe it was empty because someone else had already knocked it over. Maybe when she put on that apron and hair net, she was equally overcome with the same self-loathing I was feeling at that moment as I tried for the nth time to ask my boys to stop licking the handle bar on the shopping cart. Maybe she was tired of being asked pithy questions - just like the well-meaning man who asked if they were selling kids as we waiting in the checkout line as a slew of strangers gawked at my kids as they giggled and pulled each other's hair.

I then tried to think of how God viewed her.

It is so easy to become simultaneously overcome with rage, embarrassment and depression just by a simple look from a stranger. It's almost natural to take those emotions and mentally cut down the offender to a size we can crush, but the thing is, in reacting in this way, we have given them or the situation all the power. I struggle to show people the same grace as Jesus has shown me, even if it is not asked for. It's all I can do. Otherwise, every disapproving look and snarky word would chip away at the person God created me to be until I was nothing but an angry, hurt woman hell-bent on proving my worth and yet completely defined by the judgements of others. We act out and live out who we truly believe ourselves to be. Showing grace isn't just southern charm, it's showing people Jesus.