Sunday, March 24, 2013

I have not yet arrived...

Throwing down the grace gauntlet

You know how preachers always say they are tested on the thing that they are preaching on?  Well, I think I made a mistake, a big mistake.  Did I title this blog about grace, Lord?  I meant shoes.  And puppies.  Shoes and puppies and doughnuts.  Definitely not grace, Lord, so feel free to refrain from testing me on it.  Because guess what?  I am not good at doling out grace. 

Case in point:  I get home from HEB today and the first thing out of my mouth to Cam is
"You know who it's hard to give grace to?  Dumb people.  They make it really hard to give them grace."
I tried to return something I bought from HEB that broke within a couple of weeks of purchase.  I take it to the customer service.  I put in on the desk.  I say:
"I bought this several weeks ago. I don't have the box or receipt. It broke within the first couple of times I used it."
The girl behind the desk is so dead-behind-the-eyes that I wonder if her eyes are glass prosthetics.  I want to sway ever-so-subtly back and forth just to see if she can track with me her eyes.  She says:
"Do you have the box?"
Grit teeth.
 "I bought this several weeks ago. I don't have the box or receipt. It broke within the first couple of times I used it."
Blank stare from glass eye girl.
"Do you have the receipt?"
Lord, have mercy on me for the reaction my brain just had to this chick.
"I bought this several weeks ago (long pause, searching for eye contact) I don't have the box or receipt (longer pause, small hand motions) It broke within the first couple of times I used it." 
Guess what?  The stupid thing is still in my car.  No, I was not able to return it ;) 
In case you were wondering, I have not arrived.  I do not know how to live with grace.  And I think God may be getting a kick out of torturing me with this fact?  Throwing down the grace gauntlet, saying, "Here you go Amy!! You wanted to figure out how to live with grace, let me just help ya along here!!"

So, I have been pondering these last few days where my lack of grace comes from.  Why is it so hard to give grace? Why am I so hard on others, and why am I so hard on myself?  I think it comes from my propensity to judge everyone.  I judge everyone, including myself, and find them lacking.  Unworthy of grace.  I am the exact antithesis of what Christ calls me to be.

Okay, so why do I judge everyone?  Why do I feel the need to make myself like God and put everyone below me and judge them?  Well, that's easy.  It's because I'm insecure.  

Have you ever realized that we project the things we don't like in ourselves on to others?  If you take a good, hard look at some of the things that you dislike most in some of your colleagues, family, friends, etc, can you see that it's because deep down you dislike that in yourself?

Sigmund Freud first conceptualized psychological projection as a defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own negative attributes by ascribing them to objects or persons in the outside world instead. 

Yup.  Bingo.


Anatomy of a Starbucks conversation

Saturday I was waiting for my iced latte in Starbucks and I noticed a lady having a very animated conversation with some other women nearby, one going on and on about "how expensive Coca-Cola is."  With her Louis Vuittons on her head, her Manolo Blahniks on her feet, and Marc Jacobs everywhere between.  I thought, "This lady wouldn't know expensive if it smacked her in the face."

It roused this sharp criticism, this quick judgement from my very core.  But later that night at home, with just me and God to hear my thoughts, I knew why I had that reaction.  Because sometimes, I want fancy sunglasses.  Every-so-often, I consider highly overpriced pretty shoes.  (I don't actually buy them because they cost more than my car ;)  And now and then, I find myself drifting to the designer section with lust and envy in my heart.  

I hate it in her because I hate it in me.

Reverse racism

My husband and I suffer from something I call "reverse racism."  It isn't actually racism, so don't call the NAACP. What it is, is that we have an infinitely easier time loving and extending grace to people who don't look like us.  It's the privileged, American, moneyed people who deserve no grace in our eyes.  I mean, why should they? They've been given every thing else already, why do they deserve more?  Selfish.  Self-involved.  Unlike Jesus.

We hate it in them because we hate it in us.

I have been blessed in the past few years to minister with a prison ministry called Christ's Reconciliation And Rehabilitation Ministry, (CHARM for short.)  Although I don't have as hard of a time not judging the kind of people I found inside the prison walls, there was still a bit of what I thought was "righteous anger" at times toward those people.  For the things they did.  For the way their actions affected their children.  Putting myself up in God's place again, judging away.

It took just one day with them, with their stories to beg God for forgiveness.  Molested and sexually abused since their first memory.  Out on the streets by 9 years old.  Prostituted by 11 years old.  Emotionally and physically abused.  Treated like trash.  Forced to get abortions. Raped.  Their children, dead in their arms.  Newborns killed in drive-by shootings.  Lord, forgive me.  But, for the grace of God, there go I.

I think the only prescription for me is a good dose of humility, mixed with a shot of gratitude.  Stop 'making myself like the most high,' and feeling the need to judge others just to soothe my insecure soul.  Offering gratitude that God knows my thoughts and STILL loves me.  Gratitude that God knows my thoughts and STILL allows me to minister to others.  Humility to remember who I am, and gratitude that God is who he is.  And when true judgement comes, Jesus will grab my hand before the Father and say, "She's mine."  And that is the real root of grace.

And you know what? I hope with his other hand he grabs ol' Starbucks lady and glass-eyed-chick too.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Somethings I don't understand

I don't understand:

  •  math (in college when I worked a coffee shop, I was the only person who accidentally rang people up for a $5,342.00 cup of coffee)
  • why there aren't Cadbury egg versions of pumpkins, turkeys, Santas, Valentine's hearts, etc.
  • how the humans in my family create so much dust.  If dust is 90% dead skin cells, then we are all going to need skin grafts in  a couple months.  I swear, I dust the furniture in the morning, and there is an inch-deep of dust on the end table by the afternoon.  Mystifying.
  • God.  There I said it.  Feel free to un-follow my blog now.
Ok, especially God.  Especially since I watched "The Bible" on the History channel these last few nights.  

Looking forward to sitting down and getting some spiritual insight into some of the dramatic events of the Bible, at the end of each DVRed program I felt mainly one thing:  scared.  

Many times when I am confused the next emotion to follow closely behind is fear.  Anyone tracking with me?  If I don't understand something, I automatically decide it's terrifying.  It's one of my super-awesome coping mechanisms.  I used to feel like I was going to have a panic attack in the third grade when we had to do those 'Minute Math' things--the multiplication tables where you had to do as many as you could in one minute?  I think that was my first brush with dishonest academics.  I'm pretty sure I started copying off of Raymond Sanchez, not caring whether or not the answers were right (I'm thinking they weren't, sorry Raymond) but just trying to avoid the red badge of shame that would be painfully obvious if I carried my paper to the teacher with only 70% of the questions answered.

But, I digress.

So last night at the end of the show, at the end of the many violent and horrific scenes that were shown, my heart was frightened and burdened.  I started volleying questions up at God:  "Why?  Why were those people different than me?  Why was that violence part of your plan?  Was it part of your plan?  How can I trust you with me, with my kids, when that's what happened to those people's kids?"


I knew about the scenes that were shown.  I had of course read them in the Bible before last night.  But man, does seeing them acted out on TV just do a whole other thing for your brain. Seeing babies ripped out of mamas' hands and murdered when Herod was looking for the Christ child.  Seeing all of the Hebrew babies murdered while baby Moses was saved.  How do I reconcile this with the God that I know?  The God that loves me, that loves my children more than I do?  The same God that ordained the rescue of baby Jesus and baby Moses is the God that watched as I delivered my babies.  He's watching them right now as they sleep.

I then flashed back to a few days earlier when I sat amidst hundreds of tiny graves with a friend, mourning the loss of her precious child.  We were commemorating the six months that had passed since his body came into the world, but his spirit was already in Jesus' arms. I sat looking around:  baby boys, baby girls, twins.  All gone up to the father.  All leaving a gaping hole in their mom and dads' hearts and lives.  Behind me were two fresh graves; babies that had been buried mere days before.  Little stuffed animals, toy trucks, candles and flowers.  All sitting around tiny, tiny graves.

The questions to God continue.  See, it's not that I don't know if I can trust God.  I know that I can, I hold unswervingly to that fact.  But sometimes I just don't know why I can trust God.

I heard it said a while back that a hallmark of a mature faith is being able to handle doubts when they come your way.  Being able to hand them back over to God, waiting expectantly for his answers.  (That's not the same as demanding answers, see Job)  God can handle them, you know.  He's not surprised when we feel this way.  

So, I take hold of my doubts.  I take a deep breath, and I chunk them back up to God.  I say, "God, hit me with it.  Who are you really?  Why can I trust you?"  And, I hope, he smiles at my irreverence and says

  • Proverbs 3:5 : Trust in the Lord with all your hear, and lean not on your own understanding.
Um, okay God.  Fine, I won't lean on my own understanding.  But that was kinda passive-aggressive, you didn't really answer my question.
  • 1 Corinthians 1:25 :  For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.
So the title of this post was "Somethings I don't understand"....yeah that verbiage is present-tense.  I still don't understand but I have made my peace with it, because it comes down to this:  priorities.  Are your priorities to lose  your life, or to save it?  Are my priorities to preserve myself or to lose it all for the cause?  Because when your priorities totally line up with God's, that's when you really really understand what it is to trust God with everything.  Believe me, that is an endeavor worth striving for and I have only hit the tip the of the iceberg.  But God is patient, that's one of his best qualities in fact.  So I'll keep chunking questions up to heaven and he will keep revealing things to me, and we will keep doing this beautiful thing that he made me for, even if I don't understand it.

Giving God what he wants...


So, I'm not much of a blogger.  I have a few that I read--the holy grail of blogs, if you will.  You know: Jen Hatmaker, Ann Voskamp, the pros.  But recently God and I have been having such interesting conversations...conversations like--
God:  "Amy, give me that."
           Me:  "God, nope."
 God: "Amy.  Did I make you?  Do I know you better than you know yourself?  Do I know what will bring you joy to the very marrow of your bones?  Do I know how sincerely you want to follow me to the deepest places, but how scared you are to do so?'
Me:  "Yep."
God:  "Then give it to me."
Me:  (Sigh.) "Okay, fine God.  But I want it on these terms."
God laughed at me and hung up after that. Then he started leading me to document this journey, this journey of finally giving him what he wants--all of me.  Well that was a whole other conversation in itself.  I told him how I'm not the right person for this job, how I am so apt to say inappropriate things (at bible study no less), and how I am not interesting, and how people will think I am full of myself if I write a blog about nothing but what I think.  

Nevertheless, here I am writing a blog about who-knows-what?? 
Well, I guess we'll find out ;)