I am reading this book, "Let Go" by Sheila Walsh, a Woman of Faith speaker, and it is wonderful. It's all about letting go and living in God's Grace. His amazing Grace. Breaking free of the shackles and living the life of freedom that God truly meant for us to live when He gave us the gift of Grace through the death and resurrection of Christ. This is my heart. This is my ministry. I'm not perfect at it...in fact most of the time I struggle with feeling like a failure. But, then I have Grace. We all do. The enemy wants to hold us back and lies to us about our progress and our value. God made us. That's our value. It is indisputable. So, why do we let it be disputed? By the enemy or anyone else? If God loves, values and accepts me...that should be enough. If God offers us Grace...shouldn't that be the least of what we offer each other? I want to. I want to love and live like Christ. I want to live it out. I want my life to reflect my faith so much that people see it just by looking and seeing God's light shining through the cracks of my brokenness. And when I'm not perfect at it or plain just messing it up...I still long for and need Grace.
I hope reading this excerpt from "Let Go" changes your heart. When I read this I thought, if I could put into words my heart...this would be it. And Ms. Walsh does it better than I ever could. It's long, but it is so worth it...
"She was sure her bag was heavier today than it was yesterday. Or perhaps, she reasoned, she was just worn it from everything going on in her life. She hadn't slept well the previous night and had awakened with such a headache. She poured coffee into a thermos and head out the door, catching a glimpse of her pale face in the glass. As she stepped outside, the insistent ringing of the phone dragged her back inside her apartment.
'We missed you last night,' a voice said with a definite edge.
'Yes, I'm sorry. I got home late and was so tired, and I hadn't taken the dog for a walk in two days. And I'm not...'
'Oh, we understood,' the voice cut in. 'It's just so easy to get into bad habits. Remember, the believer who tries to stand alone is easy prey for the enemy.'
'Yes, I know, but...'
'You missed the prayer meeting last week as well. It's not enough to pop in on Sunday mornings, you know,' the voice insisted, 'If you want to be a part of the body of Christ, you have to show up and do your part.'
'I'm actually finding it kind of hard to do my part right now.'
'And quite honestly, we feel that. Well, let's see if you can get a couple of early nights in so that you can be back to your best by Sunday.'
'I'll try, it's just that...'
'Good-bye now!'
'It's just that...I have chemotherapy on Wednesday nights now...'
But the voice was gone."
"We all long to be heard. We want to be seen as we really are, not as we at times appear to be. Like the woman in the story, we wish that life would slow down enough for us to be able to talk about what we're dealing with. I'm sure the person on the phone was well-intentioned, but good intentions can often leave us cold and alone.
Have you ever wished your friends, those in your small group, or even your spouse could hear behind what you're saying to what's really going on in your heart? Have you thought, 'Can't they see it in my eyes? Don't they know I'm sinking fast?'
Unfortunately, we live in a very fast-paced world, and all too often we find ourselves at the end of another without having connected to anyone in a meaningful way. Why is that? Is it because others don't want to listen or see our need? Or is it because we are unwilling to reveal that need? Or both?
Most often, I imagine, we don't tell others about our needs because we don't want to be thought less of. Have you ever felt misunderstood or judged by a Christian friend? If so, you know it's one of the most painful hurts the human soul can sustain. Perhaps you once you took a risk and told a friend of your struggles -- and instead of finding comfort, you experienced condemnation. Perhaps it happened at a time when your were already feeling vulnerable, and your friend's response made the pain all the more intense. Instead of feeling more known, you felt more alone. So you learned to just hold it in.
Human hearts are not rule-shaped, and when others try to squeeze us into their version of acceptability, it always causes wounds. We all long to be known, but because we fear others' reactions we have learned to guard ourselves [or, if you're like me, you don't learn that and just continue to share and get hurt!]. It is not always safe to be known. But, what if we're the ones causing the pain? What if we're not the judged but the judges?"
"I met her at a women's conference. I had been asked as a speaker to open and close a day filled with seminars and workshops. We bumped into each other in the corridor outside the main hall as we both tried to find our way to a particular room. As we walked together, we talked and discovered we had the most precious thing in common: we are both mothers of a boy. She's further down the road with her son, who is now out of high school. Christian will have turned twelve, God willing, by the time you read this book.
'I wish I had known what I know now when I was son was twelve,' she said.
'What would you have done differently?' I asked, hoping to pick up a few tips.
'I would have opened my eyes to the truth,' she said. 'I would have shaken myself out of denial.'
This was more than I'd seen coming, so I stopped walking and listened as she told me some of her son's story. It was a sad tale of drug and alcohol addiction. She adopted him when he was just a baby and had no idea he had a strong genetic predisposition to addiction. He gave his life to Christ as a young boy and had prayed over and over to be delivered, but the battles is fierce. He has been in and out of treatment programs wrestling with the demons that torment him.
I asked her what her greatest challenge or heartache has been, and her answer surprised me: she said it was watching how others in their church treated her son.
'If he had a brain tumor or cancer, they would be over with casseroles and flowers. But there are no flowers for my boy. People don't understand he is sick. They just think he is weak or a bum,' she said with tears in her eyes.
All she longed for was companionship and understanding on this terrible path she had to walk. Yet, at the time when she needed us - the church - the most, she felt our comfort the least.
I have to admit I had never thought of drug addiction or alcoholism that way. It's easy to put these struggles into the category of weakness or sin, but the reality is those whose brains are wired toward addiction go through tremendous pain if they try to break free. Everything within their bodies and brains craves the next hit the way a man lost in the desert craves water. And as if that isn't enough, those who battle addiction often feel the pain and isolation of our judgment.
As I thought over our conversation, I began to wonder how much alienation goes on in Christian circles - how many times Christians try to shove others into their version of perfection. I was uncomfortably aware that the answer was probably 'a lot.' It doesn't have to be the extremes of this type of abuse. It can be as simple of ridiculing different forms of worship. It can relate to what kind of school you send your children to or what rating of movie or video game you allow them to play."
"Jesus told his friends to go out into the world and share the gospel, not their opinions. It's what we do to one another with our words, our tone, and our body language that can make others feel isolated and judged. Have you felt that? Or have you, like me, been the one to dish it out? Did you feel justified in doing so?"
"I want us to look at what legalism does to our freedom in Christ and to our relationships to one another. As we saw in his letter to the church in Rome, Paul expressed the common cry of every believer who tried to live up to the standards of the law and fails miserably: 'What I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do...O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?' (Romans 7:15; 24) The interesting double standard, though, is that we still try to make others live up to what we cannot. That is legalism, and it is deadly. It is so easy to take the word of the law and miss the heart."
"When you break down the Ten Commandments, all God was asking us to do was to love Him and to love one another...A common thread throughout human history is our inability to live up to God's standards. But another thread can be traced: our desire to squeeze people into a mold of our making - to embrace a dead religion rather than a living truth. Both realities would leave us miserable...if it weren't for Christ. Moses gave us the Law from God, but Christ himself brought and embodied grace and truth to deliver us from ourselves and from the judgment of one another: 'For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ' (John 1:17).
The ground at the foot of the cross if even. There are no podiums for those who feel most worthy. There are no pits for those who feel that they don't belong. The only way to break free from this dead, stale religion is with the glorious gift of fresh-baked grace every morning for the rest of our lives!"
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