Taking off the bell

My best friend, Abby, who is pursuing God in the Ukraine this summer, said it perfectly: to grow, you have to be stretched. And does stretching feel good? After approximately 18 years of dancing, let me tell you the answer is not all that much! Sometimes it feels good but many more times it hurts!! You are forcing your body and limbs into places and positions it is not used to going and it is screaming at you, "What are you doing?!" But we dancers did it anyway because we knew the end results would be better for us. We'd be stronger and more flexible to be more capable of executing dance moves.

Our spiritual walk is just the same. In order to grow, God must lead us down paths that often feel unnatural, are painful, and are difficult to get to. Our physical muscles actually tear when we work out, that's what soreness is; so too do our spiritual muscles. To gain strength in and for our God, we have to be torn. What a conundrum: to be better Christians and closer to our Lord, we must experience that breakdown of something in us. We must experience trauma to a degree. This doesn't sit easy with our Western Culture image of the Christian life: warm a pew on Sunday, give your 10%, if you want to really experience His "blessing" get involved in children's ministry. Do this and you will have the American Dream... errr. Wait a second, somehow I missed the verse that promises a two story in the suburbs, a shiny new sedan (let's not get greedy, we are Christians afterall), and our hardest dilemma is deciding on what movie to see Friday night. What I read is verses like James 1:2-4

Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produce endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

Sound comfy? NO! Consider it joy WHEN, when not IF you encounter various trials. So difficulty, hardship, pain, experiences and people that are less than our definition of perfection, pretty sure this all falls under normal and should be expected happenings. Somehow this lesson escaped my notice for years.

I, until recently had lived under the wrongful assumption that if something didn't go as I figured it should, that automatically meant it bad, wrong, not of God, you name it. Time to recalibrate. God finally decided I was ready to be refined of this immature perspective. I realized that sometimes what God wants, has planned and is the right thing to do is like a tantalizing tight rope. Not too far to the left, not too far to the right, just there perfectly balanced in the middle. Sounds kind if like Goldilocks taste-testing the Three Bears porridge. God asks us to do a balancing act. Come be a Christian it's like running away to the Circus! Woohoo!

Also, for growing up in the Church, I had some funky views of God. I see now my whole life I've struggled with expecting the worst from God so to speak. If I wanted something automatically I assumed God was either not going to give it to me or make it really really hard and difficult to get to it. I always expected second best from Him or pain and torture basically (like Purgatory, I couldn't have the best because I had to pay for my wrong-doings... yea that whole grace thing hasn't penetrated yet). I failed to take to heart the verse I had read a million times: "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!" (Matt. 7:11) To make it even worse, though, I also thought if He was going to give me what I wanted it had to be perfect (aka on my terms... you all laughing with me?). I looked for the wondrous, amazing, mind-blowing, Jesus-level awesome to be answered in my prayers. Again I overlooked one of my favorite stories for the lesson it teaches that I so badly needed, 1 Kings 19:11

So He said, "Go forth and stand on the mountain before the Lord." And behold, the Lord was passing by! And a great strong wind was rending the mountains and breaking in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of a gentle blowing."

God does not often show up with fireworks or in this case a hurricane, earthquake or a holocaust but in a breeze. He is in the small. Just like how Jesus appeared on earth, nothing special, average, no flash or verve about Him (Is. 53:2). What He did and said was the frill. It only makes sense that He does this because of our flawed nature. If He came with bells and whistles, that's what we would focus on and miss whatever He was trying to teach us that just happened to have bells and whistles attached to it.

For too long, I've been expecting bells. What I didn't know was what looked like "frill-less" things in my life would bring about and grow in me the most beautiful peals from the bell He crafted in my heart and it's the most beautiful, frilly thing I've ever seen... because He built it.