the grace to follow

Rolling onward.

Awakened, my mind seeks deep into the definition of commitment this morning.

“Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.”
Proverbs 16:3

Commit: in Hebrew galal, or to roll away.

How else can I comprehend this call to action? Because rolling away takes movement, and I refuse to treat verbs as nouns. Roll away your work to the Lord. I gather all the work of my life, pressed together into a single globular boulder… and I can hear the rumble as it rolls forward quickly.

All this time and life and work are too heavy of a grace-load for me to even carry. So with heavy things we gather strength and push hard. God Himself is the source of all momentum; the true rolling is praying. I watch the Church, our lives combined, merge into an ocean – waves rolling themselves onward towards rest on the shores of Heaven. This body of water is power defined, and I love it.

Commitment becomes so much about removal. To roll life towards the Lord, I must roll it away from all else.

When an object experiences the rolling motion, the point of object in contact with the surface is instantaneously at rest and is the axis of rotation. Thus, the center of mass of the object moves with speed and the point farthest from the point of contact moves with twice that speed. So the heavier an object, the faster its momentum…

I cannot deny that the more I open my eyes to recognize all that is around me, to accept it as blessing from God, to comprehend my life as fuller, heavier… the faster my life rolls towards the Lord when I let God take control. 

“Commit your way to the Lord; trust in Him, and he will act:
He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn,
the justice of your cause like the noonday sun.”
Psalm 37:5-6

John 17.

my human soul so surely loves, yet I choose One love before and above all else:

to know, delight and dwell in the one true God.

is this not the sacrifice that i yearn for? to be brought into so much wholeness that my flesh burns? to choose what i love most amidst so much that i love also? and the Lord refines the motives of my heart as I turn to Him; and in His jealousy He always reminds me, “no other gods.” i am thankful even for the building of habits which choose nothing else. 

blessings.

just gonna go ahead and be thankful for this view that i enjoyed every morning for the past semester.  

now i’m home,

and still happy about all this beauty everywhere. 

“The illusion that life in a fallen world is really not too bad must be shattered. When even the best parts of life are exposed as pathetic counterfeits of how things should be, the reality drives us to a level of distress that threatens to utterly undo us. But it’s when we’re on the brink of personal collapse that we’re best able to shift the direction of our soul from self-protection to trusting love. The more deeply we enter into the reality that life without God is sheer desolation, the more fully we can turn toward Him…

The richest love grows in the soil of an unbearable disappointment with life. When we realize life can’t give us what we want, we can better give up our foolish demand that it do so and get on with the noble task of loving as we should. We will no longer need to demand protection from further disappointment. The deepest change will occur in the life of a bold realist who clings to God with a passion only his realistic appraisal of life can generate.

Until we recognize with tears how determined we are to move away from pain and how that determination reflects our blasphemous decision to preserve our own life, we will not be able to identify the subtle ways in which our relational style violates love for others by keeping us safe… We repent by radically shifting our motivation and direction from self-preservation to trust on the basis of the belief that Christ has given and is preserving out life. The fruit of repentance is a changed style of relating that replaces self-protective maneuvering with loving involvement.”

- Larry Crab

I am thankful for women who let Christ shine.

At 4 am we are still up - seated in my bed just talking. She is my friend who helps me learn myself fully through the telling of stories. She asks questions which answer questions:

“Your favorite thing about nature?” I see God the way I understand a tree. I see beauty and life while marveling in the knowledge of unseen and complex roots. I cherish God’s holiness, justice, mercy, or his abundance of gifts in the same manner that I cherish a single leaf or the way each branch grows unique and perfect: separately beautiful characteristics, yet always part of a bigger picture which my mind fails to handle all at once. 

“Your favorite animal?” I wait for a husband with the heart of an otter. Who swims diligently towards his goals yet is willing to slow down and float silently with the current. A man who likes to play - a gentle initiator of adventures. Who embraces friendship and leads others towards the fullness of a life lived in the recognition of mercy and grace.  

“Your favorite color?” I am green. The color which speaks of wholeness - that is what I am: full of Christ, content in Him, seeking to share this wholeness with those around me. Green is alive and made healthy. Just as a field of grass accepts the dew each morning with a smile, I rejoice in being awakened each moment by glory. 

God has blessed me with women who set examples of what letting Christ’s fullness shine through means. Women who make it a habit to pull out Christ’s goodness in their sisters among them. Women who help me look so forward to studying God’s Word at 6 am on Monday mornings, who submit to the Spirit and apply Biblical lessons to their lives daily.

May this Monday morning bless you as God’s Spirit in you yearns to bless others.